Hospital jobs on the Internet

Your next job is waiting for you at http://www.bmj.com/bmj/

Older readers of the journal turn first to the obituary pages to check whether they are still alive; younger readers turn to the classified supplements to find their next job. While the obituary pages have been discussed at the highest levels (two editorials,1 2 a “how to do it,”3 and 10 letters to the editor having been published on the topic already this year4), the classified supplements have been quietly minding their own business, which has been expanding apace. This year the hospital doctor and general practice supplements will carry about 60000 recruitment advertisements and 2500 advertisements for educational courses.

From this week, in response to readers' requests, we are adding all hospital jobs to the information that is available from the BMJ's site on the Internet.5 A menu lists the various medical and surgical specialties and, within each specialty, jobs at each grade. Vacancies for registrars in, say, orthopaedic surgery are merely four mouse clicks away from the BMJ's home page. At this stage the advertisements that will appear will be the same as those in the weekly journal and will be updated each week by the day of publication of the paper copy of the journal.

We hope to augment this basic service by adding general practice posts (once we have solved the technical problems of breaking up the GP classification into usable sections) and posts in academic and public health medicine. We envisage providing the BMA's guidelines on grades, salaries, training, removal expenses, and overseas employment. Extracts from our “how to do it” series (such as how to prepare a curriculum vitae and how to be interviewed6) could also be included. We hope that readers will suggest other ways in which the service should develop (as they have done with the editorial content of our home pages).

Speed will be one of the greatest benefits of advertising jobs on the Internet, allowing overseas readers to read job advertisements before the closing date for applications. We hope that very soon electronic delivery will allow us to publish the electronic supplement earlier in the week--a huge advance for readers and advertisers alike.

We are aware that many readers remain mystified by talk of home pages and the like. Detailed guidance is already available from the recent article in the ABC of Medical Computing devoted to the Internet,7 and next month we begin a short series devoted to the topic. A regular column will follow.