Practice & business · Essay
Two classified ads, and a profession still hiring like it's 1998
I laughed out loud at the classifieds in a trade newsletter this month. The laugh faded when I realized nobody else seemed to find them strange. An ad asking a surgeon to fax a résumé in 2026 ran without comment, beside another offering a department chair less than the typical podiatrist earns. Somewhere along the way, our profession decided this was normal.
The two ads ran together on September 18, in the same issue that remembered Lowell Weil Sr. One was a college of podiatric medicine seeking a full-time chair for its Department of Podiatric Medicine and Surgery. The other was a Connecticut practice seeking an associate. Read side by side, they say more about where podiatry is headed than most of what we publish on purpose.
Academic
Full-time department chair
Lead faculty, drive academic excellence, oversee clinical experiences. "Generous benefits."
$120K to $140K
Private practice
Associate, Connecticut
Owner will stay for transition. Full privileges available.
Fax résumé to apply
Start with the chair. The posted range sits below the $160,300 median wage the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports for all podiatrists, and well under half the $368,421 median total compensation in the ACFAS 2025 survey of board-certified fellows. The person asked to lead the department that trains our surgeons would earn less than the typical podiatrist in the country. The ad may not show the whole package, and many faculty add clinical income on top of a base. But the headline number is the first thing a candidate sees, and it tells the most accomplished people in our field that teaching is a financial sacrifice.
$120–140Kposted range for a department chair
$160,300BLS median wage, all podiatrists, May 2025
$368,421ACFAS 2025 median total compensation, board-certified fellows
752 / 519applicants for first-year seats, 2025–26
Now the associate ad. The frustrating part is that it describes a good job. An owner who stays through the transition and full hospital privileges are exactly what a new graduate should be looking for. That opportunity is sitting behind a machine most residents have never touched, with no pay range, no email and no link. In SHRM's research, 82% of workers said they were more likely to apply when a posting shows a pay range. This one asks candidates to find a fax machine first.
None of this would matter much if talent were plentiful. It isn't. AACPM counted 752 applicants for the 519 students who started podiatric medical school in fall 2025, across eleven colleges. We are a small profession competing with every other path a bright pre-med student could take, and every public signal we send either says modern surgical specialty or says something else. Job posts are public signals. So is what we pay the people who teach.
The fix is not expensive. It is a pay range, a named contact, an email address, and three honest sentences about call, privileges and what partnership actually looks like. For academic posts, it is a range that tells the truth about the whole package, and a profession willing to say out loud that educators are worth paying.
A profession attracts the talent its job posts deserve.
What a 2026 podiatry job post includes
PayA base range, the bonus or productivity formula, and whether there is a guarantee in year one.
PracticeHospital and ASC privileges, call frequency and whether call is paid, and the surgical case mix.
PathThe partnership or buy-in track in plain terms, including timeline and how the price is set.
ApplyA named person, an email address or link, and a date you will respond by.