012: How to Land Your Next Remote Position

Discover how doctors can unlock remote opportunities not through endless job applications but through meaningful conversations and strategic networking. This episode explores practical frameworks to expand your professional network and create flexible, high-income remote roles.

Key points:

• Why most physicians start with job boards and why that approach often limits success
• The power of conversations over applications to find remote work opportunities
• How to systematically build a list of 100 key contacts from your entire life and training
• The difference between warming up your network and cold outreach, and how to do both effectively
• The importance of niche clarity in outreach messages for higher referral rates
• Practical tips for quick, targeted outreach that takes only minutes per message
• How to leverage industry spaces, associations, conferences, and adjacent practitioners for visibility
• The role of recruiters in your strategy and when to go directly to decision-makers
• Results-driven stories demonstrating the speed and scale of this approach

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Doctors who successfully build remote income have one thing in common. And it's not that they applied to more job boards. It's that they started more conversations. Today I'm going to show you exactly how that works, who to talk to, and in what order. This is the episode I wish someone had handed me when I was trying to figure out how to get out of the hospital and ultimately out of the country. And if you're ready to stop figuring it out alone and actually build your remote income with support, I do one-on-one Freedom Calls where we map out your specific path. The link is in the show notes. Let's get into it. You're listening to Doctors Abroad, the podcast for doctors who want to build remote income and create location independence. I'm Dr. Christine Goins, founder of Nomad MD. I've exceeded my hospital income while working part-time and living abroad. And on this show, we break down how to make hospital income optional. Let's get started. Today we're talking about strategies. Specifically, where do remote opportunities actually come from? Because I hear this question very often, and I think that most physicians are looking in the wrong places. If your answer to that question right now is job boards, then this episode is definitely for you. Let's start here because I think it's where most physicians begin. And it's also where a lot of us will get stuck because we've been trained that when we want something in medicine, we apply, we submit, we go through a formal process. That's how residency worked. That's how fellowship worked. Hell, that's how most hospital jobs work. You see a posting, you apply, someone evaluates you, and either you get it or you don't. So when we start thinking about remote work, the first instinct is where do I apply? Where's the job board? Where are the listings? And there are remote physician job boards. They exist, telemedicine platforms, locums agencies. And I'm not by any means going to tell you to ignore them entirely. I actually do give my clients a list of remote positions at companies within their specialty and niche, if that's the type of work that they're looking for. But here is what I know from five years of doing this and from working with physicians who are doing it successfully. The most interesting and aligned opportunities, the direct remote contracts, the consulting agreements, the flexible roles with high income and maximum autonomy almost never show up on a job board. They come from conversations. The physician who landed a contract with a health tech company, she got it because a former colleague mentioned her name. The internist doing hospital administration remotely, she got her first position because of a doctor she trained with 15 years prior. The hospitalist who now does remote ICU from another country, her first contract came through someone she met at a conference. None of these came from an application. All of them came from a relationship that was already there or was waiting to be activated. So the framework I want to give to you today is built on one simple premise: conversations over applications. And the tool that actually makes this work is what I call the 100 people path. And here's what I want you to do. Not someday, I want you to actually do this. If you're in a safe place to either break out a note on your phone or write this down, I want you to think about your entire life from the time you were born until today and build a list of 100 people. Now, I know what you're thinking, I don't know anyone who can help me with this. I hear that all the time. And every single time we actually go through this exercise, the list gets to 100 faster than people ever expect. And here's how we build it. Start with the people closest to you, your immediate family, then your extended family, cousins, aunts, uncles, people you haven't spoken to in years, childhood friends, friends from high school, friends from college, if you've moved, and many of us have. Think about the people from every place that you've lived, the state you grew up in, the city you trained in, the country you came from, if you're an international physician. Every neighborhood, every city, every chapter of your life has people in it. And most doctors stop here and say, okay, but these are just personal contacts. They can't help me secure a remote medical opportunity. But that is not how this works. You're not looking for people who already have a contract to hand you. Those would be great too. But you're also looking for people who know people. You're looking for surface area. Your college roommate spouse works in health tech. Your cousin's neighbor is a healthcare attorney. Your childhood friend now works in insurance. These connections exist inside your personal network right now. You just haven't mapped them. Now I want you to go through your entire medical training systematically. Who did you go to med school with? Not just the people you were close to, everyone, your classmates, your study partners, the people in your small groups, who are your attendings, your program directors, your supervisors at every level of training. Who did you train alongside? Your co-residents, your co-fellows, where are they now? Because physicians scatter. Someone you trained with is now a medical director somewhere else. Someone is running a practice, someone is consulting, someone is at a company you've never heard of that is looking for exactly what you offer. And don't forget the people you have trained. If you've been an attending, a supervisor, a mentor, your trainees are out in the world doing things and the relationships run in both directions. Now go through every job you've ever had. Every hospital, every practice, every locums assignment, every committee you've sat on, every project you contributed to. Who were your colleagues at each of those jobs? Who were the administrators you worked with, the nurses, the care coordinators, the social workers, the people in operations you collaborated with? Healthcare, as we know, is not just physicians. The people who move into industry, into health tech, into consulting often come from clinical backgrounds or have clinical networks. Have you been part of any professional associations, any medical societies, any interest groups or committees within your specialty? Those memberships have people in them who are connected to opportunities you don't know about yet. Have you been to conferences, every conference you have attended? Who did you meet? Who did you sit next to? Who did you have dinner with? Who did you exchange cards with and then never follow up with? This is where the list starts to feel real. And if you go through all of this honestly, you will get to 100 people. I've never had a physician do this exercise correctly and not reach that number. And now here's where the conversations over applications framework really kicks in. You're not sending these 100 people a cold pitch, right? You're not asking them to hire you. You are starting conversations. You are reaching out, you're reconnecting. And in those conversations, you are letting people know naturally, specifically, and clearly what direction you're moving in and what you are looking for. Many physicians dramatically underestimate how willing people are to make a connection or pass along a name when they know exactly what you're looking for. But they can only do that if they know. And most of your network has absolutely no idea that you are building towards something outside the hospital because you haven't told them. The 100 people path is how you fix that. So the 100 people list gets you started, but remote opportunities also come from people you don't know yet. And there's a way to approach that strategically too. This is different from cold emailing strangers randomly. This is identifying specific people, specific companies, specific organizations that are doing work adjacent to your expertise and reaching out with intention. A physician who wants to do remote medical evaluations for a legal firm doesn't need to wait for that legal firm to post a job. She can identify firms in her state that do forensic work, find the right contact, and reach out directly with a clear, specific message about what she offers and what she's looking for. That is a conversation starter, not an application. The difference is in how you frame it. You're not saying I'm looking for a job. You're saying I have this background. I've been thinking about how it intersects with what you're doing, and I would love to have a conversation. That framing changes everything about how you're received. Different remote income paths have different ecosystems. And if you want to find opportunities in a particular space, you need to be in that space, even minimally. If you want to work with health tech companies, be in the spaces where health tech people are. LinkedIn is obvious, but underused by most of us, right? Specific conferences, industry groups, publications, and newsletters that those communities read. If you want consulting work with legal teams, be where healthcare attorneys are. If you want to consult for pharmaceutical or biotech or AI companies, know where those conversations happen. If you want to build a telemedicine practice, understand where your patient population is actually looking. Because the truth is you don't need to be everywhere. You only need to be somewhere specific, visible enough in that space to be findable when the opportunity that you want arises. One of the most underrated ways remote opportunities find physicians is through other practitioners who are adjacent to what you do. If you're an internist and you build relationships with health coaches, registered dietitians, physical therapists, or functional medicine practitioners, you become part of their referral ecosystem. They mention you when someone in their network asks if they know a physician who does remote or telemedicine work. The people they're already serving are often the same people looking for you and what you offer. So think about who is already working with the patients or clients or organizations that you want to reach and build relationships there. Collaboration accelerates visibility faster than building a platform from scratch. And I want to mention this because it is a real channel, just with the right expectations. Healthcare recruiters and staffing agencies can also be useful, particularly for telemedicine platforms and locum style remote work. They already have relationships with the companies and platforms that are hiring. So if you're clear about what you want, specialty, schedule, compensation range, niche, remote only, a good recruiter can surface options you wouldn't find on your own. The limitation is that recruiters work best for roles that already exist and are already posted. So the more creative, more autonomous, more lucrative direct contract opportunities are not going to usually come through a recruiter. Those come through relationship-based channels that we are currently talking about. So use recruiters as one lane, but not your only lane. When you reach out to someone, whether it's a person you know from training or even a more cold contact at a specific company, i.e., someone you don't know yet, but is in that ecosystem that you want to be a part of, the clarity of what you offer determines whether the conversation goes anywhere, right? A physician who says, I'm a hospitalist looking for remote work will get a different response than a physician who says, I'm a hospitalist with a background in addiction medicine. And I've been thinking about how that intersects with employee assistance programs and corporate wellness. Right? The second physician is easier to refer, easier to place, easier to say yes to, because the person on the other end of that conversation can immediately think of two or three people they know who would want to talk to her. Niche positioning is not limiting yourself, it's making yourself placeable. The clearer you are about what you do and who you do it for, the more efficiently your network can go to work for you. You don't need to have it perfectly figured out before you start having conversations, but you do need to know enough to give people something to work with. So let me make this more concrete and address the thing I know that many of you are already thinking. A hundred people sounds like a lot. And reaching out to a hundred people sounds like a part-time job on top of the full-time job that is already consuming you. So let me tell you what this actually looks like in practice. I have literally timed my clients doing this. And once they know their positioning and have a template, it takes three minutes or less to tailor and send one email. Three minutes, which means 30 emails takes 90 minutes. Most of my clients complete their entire outreach in less than a month, whether in 90-minute sessions weekly or across three 30-minute sessions a week, however it works best for their schedule. But that's it. That is the whole-time commitment to this entire process. And here is something else you do not need all 100 contacts to respond. You don't even need all 100 contacts to work. One warm contact, someone I already knew, and that was it. One cold but aligned email to a clinic that I actually wanted to work with got me a fully remote contract. Two emails. And I've had a client start making 15K remote months from a single text message to someone she wanted to work with within her industry, within her specialty. She was not afraid to say what she wanted. They could have said no, they could have said they're busy with other obligations, or that they simply were not interested. And if they had, she would have moved on to the next person on her list. Right. Instead, that one text changed the flexibility of her income and her location. And let me tell you how far it can go. I have received referrals from my dad's college friend who happened to be talking to doctors at his backyard barbecue during the summer. That is how wide this net actually is when you start to activate it. So, how do we make this simple? First, the framework gives you two types of outreach: warm contacts with people you know, and cold but aligned contacts. Right? Cold are people that you don't know yet, but you want to know. The message for each is different, but we help you build both so that you're not staring at a blank screen trying to figure out what to say. Second, the messaging isn't open-ended, right? You're not sending a vague, let's catch up and hoping that something emerges from 50 floating conversations. You are reaching out with a specific, clear ask that makes it easy for someone to either connect you to the right person or say, not right now. Specific asks get specific responses. And the ones who can't help you now, they have your name and they know what you're looking for. I have gotten opportunities months later from someone who simply remembered what I said I did and what I said I wanted. Third, this works regardless of what you are building, whether you want a direct remote contract, clients for a consulting or a coaching offer, or patients and referral connections for a telemedicine practice. The framework is exactly the same. The conversations just get pointed in different directions. The biggest fear I hear is what if it gets back to my current employer? Here's the worst thing that can happen. People actually find out what it is that you want. And if they can't help you right now, you are in their mind for when they can. And that is not a risk. That's exactly the outcome that you're working towards. Results from this do not take years. My clients see results in less than 30 days from using this approach because opportunities move fast when the right person hears the right thing at the right time. And you've done the work to make sure that they do hear it. So there you have it conversations over applications, the 100 people path, starting with who you already know and expanding from there in a way that is strategic. The reason I wanted to do this episode is because I think as physicians, many of us are waiting. Waiting for the healthcare industry to change for the better, waiting for a process to move forward into their dream career that feels more like applying to residency, a formal channel, a clear application. And that's just not how most of the best remote opportunities work. They come from someone knowing your name at the right moment. And that only happens if you've been putting your name in the right spaces, having the right conversations and with enough clarity that people know what to do with it. So if today's episode is landing, but you are still working through the visibility piece, the question of how much you actually need to put yourself out there, go back to episode 11. I don't want to market myself. Do I have to? That episode and this one are designed to work together. Episode 11 is the why. This episode is the how. Thanks for listening to Doctors Abroad. If this episode was helpful, share it with a colleague who's been thinking about building more freedom and flexibility in medicine. And if you're ready to make hospital income optional, book a one-to-one freedom consultation at thenomadmd.com. I'll see you in the next episode.