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Is it getting harder for anyone to get jobs now with all the people applying for them. How does

Posted By: MT on 2006-09-11
In Reply to:

this seem to be going for most MTs looking for jobs.  What seems to be the one factor that gets MTs a job before all the other 100 or so looking for the same job and what are the most desired qualities today that companies are looking for.


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I wish people would just stop applying for these low paying jobs!
That would force them to pay better or do it themselves. When I did QA for 3 years I was paid $20 an hour in addition to a line rate of 4 cents a line. I often ended up typing part of the report because there were so many errors. I would never work for 3 cents a line doing anything! Just my 2 cents...
Applying for jobs
Do you tell them how much money you want? Sometimes if you do that they do NOT respond -- you may be asking too much. I have applied for five jobs and have heard from all five.
I have been applying for jobs

and I would certainly like to know the name of this employer!  I never want to work there.


I absolutely would contact the labor board in the state you live and then notify your supervisor of your intent. 


I would type an e-mail to your sup and copy yourself that says your complete side of the story, just like you explained here, and then ask for an explanation as to how they are withholding lines from your paycheck.


Keep all correspondances!!!!!!  Also, trying and print the IM if you can!


Just finished applying to 35 different jobs
I am so fed up with my current company that I just can't take it anymore! I decided to spend the time I normally would be working to applying to any jobs.

This is the best site to find EVERY transcription company whether they are hiring or not the list is endless and I just copy and paste my resume on the site if they didn't have testing. This is the site http://www.tiptopwebsite.com/websites/index2.php?username=mtjobfind&page=1.

I found it in archives here and it's such a great tool!

I did my best today and put myself out there, I once thought to just get out of MT but I think I'm going to just go all in as I just work when I feel, pretty much PT but now I'm going in headfirst full-time, really going to make the most of this education I paid for, why not!

So here's hoping javascript:editor_insertHTML('text','');
Advice needed on applying for jobs due to quit
I had hoped I would not be in the process of looking for another job but here I am.  My question is this.  I left my last job of 3 years as I lost my father about a month ago whose health began declining on Thanksgiving.  My employer was well aware of this as a doctor's excuse to excuse my absence was unacceptable and our doctor had to fill out the FMLA paperwork which still ended up not being good enough.  Go figure.  I called my supervisor the morning that I found my father and told her what had happened and I could not work.  She said that was fine and went on to explain that the company gives three day bereavement pay which honestly was the furthest thing from my mind.  She then asked me if I thought I needed 3 days off and had I not been in shock, I probably would have let her have it.  Hello, this was my dad not my dog.  How heartless can you be?  She said with work volumes (which by the way, they were telling other girls to flex their shift due to low work volume) they could not have me out three days.  I was soo upset after her asking me that that I sent an email to human resources and the head of the company and boy was I reamed out by human resources for doing this as she said it was none of the head of the company's business.  Why not?  It is one of his employees who said this.  In sending my resume and filling out applications, when they ask why I left this heartless company, what do I say?  Am i being unreasonable and maybe should have stayed with this company?  I'm questioning myself alot lately but still not sleeping well.  I have filed for unemployment.  I live in Pennsylvania and I pray that I get it because we have a 9 month old daughter and we need the income.  I know if I have to appeal it, I will not hesitate.   Forgive me for rambling, maybe I just needed to vent, I don't know.  Just needed an opinion or advice.  feel free to e-mail me.
Medware's test hold people back from applying.
.
They got rid of people who WERE doing their jobs too.
I was there and had a lot of friends there. My QA lead was let go. Several of the MTs I mentored were let go. Some of the other QA were let go.
At least they seem to be happy with their jobs, which is more than i can say for most of the people
x
Maybe it's because they post jobs and never respond to people.
Has anyone actually had them respond to a resume?
If HL people know they are going to be losing their jobs, why are they still doing work for them?
:+
Forever, people had 2 jobs, not just MTs. And great
This is what i mean by you pilot your life, your life shouldnt just be floating you thru life.  Over the course of about 2 years, I have made conscious effort to make my life work for me. Figured out what platforms I like, what type accts.  What kind of equipment works best for me, how to efficiently handle docs and files.  In word based platform, I am Speedy Gonzales as far as how I get in and out, how I process docs. Still spend same amount of time on actual edit and type, those you can only do so fast and be correct but all other aspects, I am fast. You find your fit, which is not a one size fits all.  But, working 2 jobs is not the territory of onlyl the MT world. My dad did it while my mom also worked as RN. 
In all fairness, the American people need jobs.
This post and the post about your as successful as you allow yourself to be (with near 10% unemployment, 15% unemployment in my town) should be read with a grain of salt.

American businesses are in it for profit, no secret there. But lets not feel guilty about them sending us into the unemployment line and critizing their decisions is just nonsense.

The poster is trying to make us feel happy for MDI and bad for us for not having a parade with balloons for the decision. ::eye roll::

Canada has added jobs and when I read this along with Canada's leadership not allowing the country to become a patsy to predator lending, and this is what you should be saying about your country and not do what you have to do business community - I'll be fine without a job. lol
I think people will try it and just wont be able to do it with other jobs and family things. nm
:
Any service that offshores has US QA people. We're the ones stupid enough to take these jobs
and clean up their mess!
Awesome, it's so nice to hear from people who like their jobs and are positive.nm
xxx
There are so many hits on the job board for jobs that I wonder if people are qualified that respond
or just send in a resume if they are not.  Would be interesting to hear from some of these companies what type of response they are getting. 
How do people cherry pick on accounts? You mean like supervisors assigning jobs?
I did not know you could do that, but is that what you mean? I need to know because I will not work for that.
It's harder to get your own accounts
Most guys don't have a choice but to work for nationals in this business or own their own business.  Would like some input into how guys work at making that much money in MT.  Thanks.
I was doing VR, too. For me, the work is just harder to come by.
I work second shift, and it used to be early evening the OPs would start coming in. I could really roll on those, but they have all but disappeared. I now only get handful per shift and mostly EGDs or I&Ds. I also worked Fridays and Saturdays, which were great for work, but even those days are depleted now.

I think now I just am bummed out thinking I worked my butt off to get to the 5 to 6-year mark where I could apply with the better companies, and there just is no work. My daughter is almost done with her transcription course, and it is scary to me that she has to work for 3 cpl but even scarier that I might have to pretty soon :(


Seems like they are just making their job harder.
They should be taking the time to do the job correct the first time. How is rushing through going to help them in the long run? The reports are just going to come back for corrections, which is then going to take them longer to fix in the end then just editing them properly the first time through. I understand not wanting to get pay docked, but it seems they are only making things worse for themselves in the end.
Working harder for less pay.........
to achieve the same figure on one's paycheck is circular reasoning.

As has been stated before here, it is a pretty sure bet that the clients are being charged the same for their reports whether an MT physically transcribes it or whether a speech engine translates it and an MT cleans it up. That being the case, with the MT being paid even less for speech recognition, the middle man (management) is making way more money off the MTs back and will continue to make more as the MT is pushed to turn out more production.

As for adapting to more coming technilogical changes, you'd better prepare to adapt yourself to another line of work because the MT field will become obsolete as we know it even today. There will be fewer MT positions needed as speech recognition becomes more and more proficient at creating a medical document that is within acceptable limits.
Work Smarter, Not Harder...
Exactly! Go to work for a company that pays for ALL of your work, not just what is reflected in your typed reports. What about time spent looking up physicians out of a data base of 50,000! Trying to figure out what in God's name the doc is saying when pronouncing some foreigner's name, and wasting 10 minutes doing so...with no pay! ALL of my expertise is worth compensation, not just what they see on the final report. How many times do you type an entire report, just to hear at the end, Erase this, I'll redictate! No credit! What a waste of time and I deserve to be paid for the work I did, even though the DOCTOR screwed up and screwed me out of earning my pay for those lines! What a bunch of BS!!!
I must agree with you. Seems harder the older you get.sm
When I was in my 20s, sure I could do 1800+ a day, but it's a different story now that I'm in my 40s. Sore wrist and fingers. Forearms tight and painful.
IT SUCKS!!

PS: Chinamom, sorry, I didn't mean to reply by email. Clicked the wrong thing by mistake. I must be getting old!!
Yes, for some reason Bayscribe does seem harder (sm)

Harder to make your lines, that is.  The only time that Bayscribe will not add demographics (or autopopulated info) to your character count is if you mark the report as a No Report.  Otherwise, on all reports, including the ones marked Incomplete Report, it will count all the demographic info too.


They say that Bayscribe is Word-based, but personally, I haven't seen much simularity at all between Word and Bayscribe.  I do know that when I switched from using Word to using the Bayscribe platform, my average lines-per-hour production dropped somewhere around 25%.


So yes, with Bayscribe, I do find myself working longer hours in order to make the same line counts that I used to make.  I'm not really sure what the answer is, but I don't think that it's the accounts.


Sometimes the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
Lots of these big MTSO co's are in bed with AHDI, and I have a hunch the whole kit-n-kaboodle of 'em are ridin' for a fall. Or a public hangin'.
Even if some of them aren't harder to manipulate,
it's just assumed that they are. I've found that the few guys I worked with on-site in the past WERE fairly woman-like in their willingness to be manipulated and taken advantage of. Which is probably why they got into, and stuck with, MT in the first place. Those guys who won't stand for that sort of thing never got into MT at all. Which is probably about 99.999% of them.

The benefits to the MTSO for having at-home MTs is not only the savings of NOT having to run, maintain, insure, heat, cool, and clean a brick-and-mortar building for their workers, but more importantly, the physical and social ISOLATION of those workers by basically chaining them to their desks at home. The isolation makes it far easier for us to be lied to, intimidated, cheated and overworked because NO ONE ELSE SEES IT HAPPENING.

The internet, and forums like this one, have broken us out of that isolation to some degree, but obviously not enough of a degree for change to happen. It's likely that for every MT that knows of this, or other MT forums, there are 10 who don't.

Further compounding the trouble those of us who DO use online forums to communicate with each other have, is the fact that we all know the MTSO suits cruise these boards, and we have to be careful about what we say, and to not reveal our identities, or else we'd most likely find our little selves fired.

So to date, medical transcription, and the sweatshop conditions it's done under, is the healthcare industry's best-kept 'dirty little secret'.
Anyone else going from DQS to ExText and noticing lines are harder to get? (sm)

Both accounts are about the same difficulty, just find ExText more cumbersome and where I used to do 1200 lines in 6 hours on DQS I now take every bit of 8 hours and sometimes that doesn't do it. Am i just getting slow to learn new things or has anyone else noticed this same thing?


Definitely harder and I've given it a lot of time. I'm thinking about
nm
You have it all wrong. I work SMARTER, not harder.

I will take on any acct. After months of getting used to it, I see what I am making an hour. If it is worth the work required to do that acct, great. If it isnt, I ask to be taken off acct and so far, have never been refused. Sometimes takes little while for them to get another MT for acct but have never been refused. Company is not working for the prestige, loyalty to an acct, or ME for that matter, or for the good of mankind. Why should I? I am in this for the money, just like the company. I am very much a pro, which is probably why companies would rather have me on another acct, than to quit giving me work all together. They know many companies are always looking for a good MT.   Like other posters, I dont understand why someone would work below their worth. There are too many companies out there to try. I have tried several, staying with the ones where I could make good money.


Acute care is quite a bit harder than clinic.
Definitely. Never a good idea to lie. You won't find anyone at most big companies to ask beginner questions to, on ops or otherwise.
I, too, went from MQ to TT, and line counts are much harder to get at TT with Dictaphone ExText.

I have always been called *firey fingers*, so know it is not me, as I am very fast and accurate on the keyboard.  Line count continually gets harder to achieve.  I know it depends on how the company has Dictaphone set the line count parameters -- whether to pay headers, footers, spaces, demos, normals, expanders, etc.


Also speech recognition using ExSpeech at TT is so cumbersome and awful.  Really made good money and line count with DQS speech editing.  Just must my opinion.  Other comments would be interesting.


The requirement is 50% participation. It is actually harder for a larger company sm
than a small company if they are national to get good rates. Once in, they will have it easy after that. I dealt with it personally for another company and it was a nightmare. Insurance is crazy and once national, it is harder to get the insurance. They should have gone with BC/BS when smaller but chose Unicare for some reason. Now they are regretting it.
Burnout...wanted to work smarter, not harder.

It seemed like I was sitting at my desk for 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, just trying to pull the bare minimum.  I had to hop around from one hospitals operating system to another and to another constantly...and if you've ever had the pleasure of doing that, you know that lines don't come easy that way because you spend all your time waiting for things to load and what not.  There just wasn't enough work to stay on one account all the time, the way I think it should be, so instead of becoming an angry and bitter employee, I left.


They really did try to make me happy, but all they could offer were more hours, or more accounts, and like I told them, I simply wanted to work my 8 hours and make a decent living.  Had a really hard time doing that over the winter.  I think they overhired but I never asked that question head on.  It was a great company when they first started out, but then got really big really fast.  Great benefits though, if you can make the lines.


If I needed to get my foot in the door, I'd work for them, get the experience, and move on.  It's that kind of place.  But during a moonlighting gig I tasted freedom, more money due to a more efficient way to work, and better overall work environment, surrounded by people who truly loved their jobs, and when I was happy to log on for THAT job, and got sick to my stomach when I had to log on at DVHP, well that's when I knew it was time to be on my way.



Sometimes you get spelling and abbrvns over the phone, typing later on. Bone up on your harder
s
Cherrypicking is when you work from a pool of jobs and being able to reject the worst jobs to those
,
It is much harder on the wrist to constanly use the mouse to jump around the report to edit, rather
x
I agree that it is an easy platform, but compared to other platforms I have used, lines are harder
to get, probably counted or weighted differently.
Monster Jobs and Career Builder usually have a few path jobs. nm
s
Don't think any do except for those in-house jobs. Some QA jobs are paid hourly. nm
s
They didn't take our jobs, QT gave them our jobs. The account is now
back in the hands of US MTs, or will be in just a couple of weeks.  
Are MTs that are looking for jobs finding good jobs right now with everyone looking or is it
getting more difficult to find a good job.  I am most interested in jobs for experienced MTs with more than 10 years service.  I wonder if it is better to put a resume on or just keeping applying or what is the best way to go about this.
Easy tests versus harder tests...
Having passed both and offered jobs at both, which company would you likely go for?  They both have the same basic benefits and line rates.  Would I be assuming that the harder testing will mean that the dictation is more difficult?  Any opinions on this would be greatly appreciated!
Have you tried applying for

unemployment compensation while looking for a job?  It might help to alleviate some of the pressure if you have bills to pay and might prevent you from accepting the wrong job out of desperation.


Good luck to you. 


Try applying elsewhere. I have 8 yrs exp. and most
/
thanks, I was considering applying
:-)
Are you applying
to MD-IT?  All I know is I also am looking for info on this company, as they my clinic has outsourced all of our in-house transcription to them.  I have an opportunity to work for them, transcribing the same physicians/therapists that I do now.  However, they seem to not be too forthcoming with information.  I am a little leary to sign on with them, having been in-house for 14 years.  It is a little scary to me.  I do not want to sign on and then miss the opportunity for unemployment/COBRA for a while and just take a break and move on.  I don't know what to do here.  Many sleepless nights I'll tell ya that much.
Why are you considering applying to OSI?
?
Won't be applying there.

Why do companies even allow this? It only allows the lazy MTs to make more money, leaving the MTs that will actually do all types of work by all kinds of dictators to struggle to make their line counts.  This is why I am currently looking for a new job.  I am tired of the cherrypickers on my account who refuse to work the ESL docs.  You know what?  I don't like them any more than you do, but I still do it.  Why?  Because it is my job!  


Sorry, just makes me so angry! 


applying
I think you might have better luck sending resumes to companies who are NOT posting ads on the Job Seekers board. Looking at the number of hits their ads are getting those companies are probably already getting flooded with resumes.
Applying MT
Because they know we seasoned MTs won't just settle. Too bad we can't organize all MTs to not settle.
applying MT
I believe that transcription companies and owners do not want to pay for real transcription quality and are willing to hire the ones that will accept the 0.3 cents for QA and the 0.7 and up to 0.825 per cpl. Where is the real appreciation for the excellent transcriptionists? It seems that Transcriptionist is viewed more as a money maker.