With a global shortage of doctors, at a time when New Zealand medical graduates are burdened with an average $100,000 student loan, MedRecruit is quickly filling a vacuum linking up areas desperate for doctors with those wanting to rid themselves of debt.
The concept works in tandem with MedRecruit emphasising lifestyle/career decisions for others.
Since its inception as an online doctor recruitment company, MedRecruit has grown from having 97 doctors from around the world on its books in 2006, to now assisting about 2000 doctors per year into locum and permanent positions around the globe.
Managing director Dr Sam Hazledine forecasts turnover for the 2010-11 financial year to be around $20 million, with a new agency due to open on the Gold Coast in the new year, boosting overall staffing levels to 22 across the company.
Dr Hazledine (32), originally from New Plymouth, was a junior doctor who graduated in 2003 from the University of Otago and had practised emergency department medicine for three years, until he started MedRecruit in October 2006.
Dr Hazledine's wife, communications manager Claire Hazledine (32), of Dunedin, has an extensive background in media and communications, having also graduated from Otago university with a BA and gained a post-graduate diploma in journalism at Massey University.
Mrs Hazledine has recently stepped back from daily operations in MedRecruit, as the couple now have a 4-month-old baby.
MedRecruit carries vacancies online, where doctors use the search engine to have up-to-the-minute information on vacancies which interest them, ranging from short- and long-term medical placements, for doctors from New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland and other countries, specifically catering to both lifestyle and career needs.
MedRecruit either finds permanent placements for doctors with hospitals which hire them direct, or MedRecruit hires out locums to hospitals, which are then invoiced for the work.
While it was envisioned that MedRecruit would be largely an online business, Dr Hazledine said it had transpired that it was the follow-up phone calls to the online inquiries and application which made the difference.
"Business was generated online, but we found talking on the phone was better in helping decide what each person was looking for ... we could then personalise each applicant," he said.
The all-important "back-end work" includes MedRecruit assisting with travel and accommodation arrangements, medical registration and visas.
In Australia, which has grown from 3% of MedRecruit business to 70%, it is not "Outback" doctor shortages driving demand, as has been the case in decades past, but the serious shortages of doctors in metropolitan and urban areas.
GPs can, as locums, earn $A5000-$7000 per week on average and, in extreme cases, $10,000, while a specialist consultant could earn as much as $2500-$3000 per day, or around $100 an hour.
"[New Zealand] student loans are a big ball and chain.
"A lot [of graduates] want to bang out that loan and get on with their lives," Dr Hazledine said.
Because locum rates in New Zealand had been capped during the past year, Dr Hazledine said there had subsequently "been an exodus to Australia" of younger doctors.
However, he noted with the influx of Eastern European doctors to the United Kingdom in recent years, UK-based doctors were now looking more closely at New Zealand for positions and it, alongside Australia, was considered a "hot-spot" destination when lifestyle choices were being made.
At the Westpac Queenstown Business Excellence Awards 2010, MedRecruit's trifecta was in winning the medium-sized business award, the young entrepreneur award, given to Dr Hazledine, and it beat international businesses such as AJ Hackett Bungy and SkyCity Casino, to win the supreme award.
Dr Hazledine said at the time doctors deserved to be looked after and he attributes MedRecruit's massive business growth to the positive experiences and holistic success doctors are having working with the recruitment agency.
"Business is very much a team game.
"Four years on, we now have an entire team at MedRecruit which shares this vision and passion.
It is because of our quality team we are able to have such a big impact," Dr Hazledine said at the time of the gala awards at the Skyline Restaurant in Queenstown.
Queenstown Chamber of Commerce chief executive Ann Lockhart described MedRecruit as an "incredible business" which won the Supreme Award because of the impressive results it was delivering.
"Sam and his team have built a phenomenally successful business in a very short period of time," she said in a post-award statement.
MedRecruit also demonstrated that entrepreneurs with the right mindset could successfully create businesses with large international impact, and they could do it from Queenstown, Ms Lockhart said.
Dr Hazledine said that after initially starting MedRecruit in Wellington, he and Claire decided they wanted to combine work and lifestyle choices themselves.
He said despite popular opinion that Queenstown's workforce was too transient to easily set up a new business, he found MedRecruit was in a niche market, offering a small number of professionals the opportunity of full-time work.
Similarly, he has decided not to set up the Australian office in Sydney, but instead go to the Gold Coast where there is, relatively, only a small number of recruitment agencies.
MedRecruit will open a six-person office early in 2011.
MedRecruit has garnered several major awards during the past four years of operation.
The Deloitte Fast 50 companies, which ranks the top 50 businesses in New Zealand according to their growth during the past three years, was announced in late October.
Featuring in the index for the second consecutive year, Med-Recruit's 265% growth ranked it 31st; the fastest-growing business services company in the Dunedin and lower South Island area.
A month later, in mid-November, MedRecruit won the three awards at the Westpac Queenstown Business Excellence Awards 2010.
In 2008 Dr Hazledine was a finalist in the Ernst and Young entrepreneur of the year awards.
Dr Hazledine, who in 2003 was the New Zealand freeski champion and competed at a world level in extreme skiing, also later won the Conway-Petrie Marketing award and was a finalist in the Action International entrepreneur of the year.
Dr Hazledine said the private company, which does not have outside investors, had been reinvesting millions of dollars annually into its growth.
IT software development alone was soaking up "hundreds of thousands of dollars".
MedRecruit's customised online "platform" incorporated vacancy advertising and placements, sales, marketing, time-sheets and invoicing, and soon hoped to offer a "world first" in carrying references, Dr Hazledine said.
He understood, by comparison to MedRecruit's success, that in the US a similar recruitment agency would be staffed by 40 to 50 employees, to achieve the same outcome as MedRecruit's 16 staff.
The highs in starting up the business have included his "obsession for making it work" and overcoming his initial lack of business experience; awards won along the way, and now having a large and growing team of "like-minded" staff.
"They are now driving forward growth and building a management team ... because I realised I had become the bottleneck for all information," Dr Hazledine said.
Lows during the past four years included initial marketing mistakes he had made, such as contacting some clients by mail through their employer at the time; constant travel away from home and loss of his own lifestyle when working "15 hours a day, seven days a week".
In the year ahead, Dr Hazledine said MedRecruit would "put out feelers" into starting operations in the United States, Europe and Asia, but emphasised that each area had its own needs and requirements.
He said the MedRecruit online model could cope with any future growth by being "scaled up" to suit the volume.
Also in the pipeline is starting a separate MedRecruit-type company, specifically for the nursing sector.
