Internal Medicine Recruitment in the Age of Social Media: Strategies to Target Residency Applicants

Applicants in the 2020-2021 residency interview cycle were unable to attend in-person meetings or visit prospective sites of future training. Instead, they relied on printed or digital media for information. Over the past few years, many graduate medical education programs have increased the use of social media to disseminate information to attract and retain faculty, staff, and trainees. Previous studies have quantified the relative presence of social media in residency programs, but there has been limited work on the assessment of social media platforms that applicants use to evaluate internal medicine programs. To more effectively target residency applicants through social media, we sought to understand the use of social media in general and specifically in the residency application process of an incoming intern class recruited during the 2020-2021 interview season. We administered an anonymous survey after matching to a single institution’s 2021 class of 40 internal medicine interns in both categorical and preliminary tracks. The group surveyed came from US medical schools (MD and DO degrees) and international programs. The group surveyed comprised 66% women and 16.7% underrepresented groups as defined by Association of American Medical Colleges guidelines. Our data found that the internal medicine residency applicants mostly used hospital websites and Instagram to evaluate programs. Twitter, which is often assumed to be highly used in academic circles, was rarely used. Our work suggests that a better understanding of the use of digital resources by applicants can allow programs to reach residency applicants in a meaningful way.