What to do if your preferred job is the second one? This is a dilemma which many people face when applying at consultant interviews.
The authorities (trusts, GMC) have been very careful to remain very vague on the topic, preferring to leave it to both candidates or trusts to judge the matter on individual merits.
This is where one must differentiate the legal position from the moral position i.e. what you are entitled to do versus what would annoy people the most.
Legally, there is nothing that stops you from accepting a job from Trust A and then a week later, on receiving an offer from Trust B, resign from Trust A before you have even started your new job.
However there are other factors coming into play:
- The GMC has issued further guidance saying that as far as they were concerned this was a matter of patient safety. In other words, if you are announcing the day before you are supposed to start a job that you are no longer willing to accept the post, this will mean that patient care will suffer through lack of coverage, it may take time to get locums, etc, and you could potentially get into serious trouble. You could argue of course that the job is not meant to be starting until much later (3 to 6 months) but if you are in a specialty where recruiting people is difficult then you may still get into trouble.
- You will annoy greatly a number of people in your specialty and if they are influential this may well work against you, particularly if your name starts circulating with a trouble-maker tag attached to it.
- If you pull out of a job after the recruiting trust has rejected all other candidates, then they may well have to readvertise and this may also affect your reputation since, essentially, they will have wasted their time and money because of you.
So there is no strict yes/no answer but one which very much depends on the people involved, the type of jobs you are applying for, your own attitude towards your career, and most importantly, the likelihood that you could actually be successful at the second interview.
In such situation, most people I know have pulled out of Trust A to have a good go at Trust B and not risk the wrath of the establishment. Other candidates have been honest with Trust A, hoping they would be understanding and that way there would be no issue. Having said that, if I were Trust A, I would not give the job to the candidate unless this was a locum job.
The only easy option is when you have two interviews within one or two days of each other. You would simply switch your phone off and not accept the first job until you had the results of the second one, but anything longer than one day is too long to wait.
Want to discuss any individual circumstances? Why not join one of our consultant interview courses? Courses are run several times per week in London.
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