What Residents Actually Say About Interview Training

I asked eight residents to grade me. The number that mattered was the one from before we started.

This one is written for program leadership rather than for candidates.

I was invited to Glasgow, Kentucky to teach a room of residents how to interview for their first physician job. Afterward I handed out a feedback form, because I wanted to know whether a session like this is actually worth a program's protected time.

Eight residents filled it out. Every one of them rated the content five out of five. Eight of eight said they would recommend it to other residents. Eight of eight said they found something they could actually use.

Those numbers are good, and they are also the least interesting thing on the form.

There is a preview of exactly what I cover in a program session — see the GME didactic preview — live, virtual, or on demand, and it costs the program nothing.

"These are smart, capable physicians who think they're bad at this. That's who is in the room."

THE NUMBER FROM BEFORE WE STARTED

At the top of the session, before I taught anything, I asked them to rate their own interview skills.

The average was 3.25 out of five. Most of them placed themselves at average or below.

That is worth sitting with. These are matched, training, capable physicians who will be hired by somebody within the next year or two — and most of them walked in believing they were not good at the single conversation that decides where they practice.

They are not bad at it. Nobody ever taught them. There is no rotation for this. A resident can complete an entire training program having never once practiced the conversation out loud with somebody who has sat on the hiring side — which is the gap You Won't Get Feedback When You Don't Get the Physician Job Offer is about.

WHAT THEY TOOK AWAY WASN'T WHAT I EXPECTED

I asked what they were taking away. Five of them wrote something down. Three of those five wrote about enthusiasm.

One of them wrote this: "Being naturally enthusiastic is okay."

Okay. That is somebody who had been holding it back — who believed that being visibly excited about a job would make them look unserious.

I had spent most of the session on preparation, which is the meat of it. The thing three of them carried out of the room was permission. That tells you something about what residents are actually anxious about, and it is not technique.

THE TV TURNED ITSELF OFF. THEN MY LAPTOP DIED.

During the presentation their TV kept shutting itself off. Repeatedly. Then my laptop died — while it was plugged in.

We ended up laughing about it. I kept the conversation going and we got through the whole thing. The feedback still came back five out of five from every person in the room.

I mention it because it turned out to be the most useful teaching moment of the day, and I had not planned it. You cannot prepare your way out of everything. Something will go wrong in an interview — the slides won't load, somebody walks in late, an hour gets cut to twenty minutes. Being ready to stay calm when that happens is not separate from preparing. It is the preparation. And how a candidate handles it is often the thing the room actually remembers.

THE QUESTION I WASN'T READY FOR

Here is the part I did not plan for, and the most useful thing I learned.

The questions they asked afterward were not about anything I had taught. They wanted to know how to find the job in the first place — when you don't have a recruiter, when the job isn't in your city, and when the whole process actually starts.

I had been teaching people how to handle the interview. They were a step behind that, trying to work out how to get one.

If you run a program, that is probably the most actionable thing on this page. Your residents may need the step before the one you think they need.

If you are weighing whether to add something like this, answer these five in writing first:

1. If I asked my residents to rate their own interview skills today, what would the average be?

2. Where in our curriculum does a resident practice this conversation out loud, with feedback?

3. Do our residents know how to find a job, or only how to interview for one they were handed?

4. Who on our faculty has sat on the hiring side of a physician search?

5. What would we want eight of our residents to say on a feedback form afterward?

Eight out of eight is a small sample and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But 3.25 out of five, self-reported, before anybody taught them anything — that number I would expect to hold at almost any program in the country.

There are two questions you will be asked in every physician interview, three mistakes that quietly take you out of the running, and three things the interviewer needs to believe about you before they make an offer. I walk through all of it in the free ME · THEM · US webinar. Come to the live session and the full prep guide is included, or take the same material as a short video series and watch it between cases — either way it costs nothing, and you leave with the framework rather than a list of tips.

DR Advisors · Physician's Trusted Advisor · Part of the Programs & Didactics Series

Related reading: You Won't Get Feedback When You Don't Get the Physician Job Offer | Your Attending Is Giving You Bad Physician Interview Advice | ME · THEM · US: The Physician Interview Framework That Wins Offers and Builds Careers