Virtual Interviews: Challenges and Opportunities for Pulmonary Disease and Critical Care Medicine Fellowship Programs

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic brought profound change to the medical education system, and residency and fellowship recruitment was not spared. Many of the activities required for recruitment of new fellows (e.g., airline travel and face-to-face meetings) were not able to be safely done. The rapid shift to all-virtual interviewing brought logistical challenges but, as the season concluded, called into question the value and validity of prior protocols. Our institutions (University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center and MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio) designed surveys to collect both applicants' and interviewers' perspectives on the virtual interview process for the 2020-2021 recruitment season to identify the challenges virtual interviews may bring to the current paradigm and what that may mean for the value of the traditional in-person model. Our results show that the absence of certain aspects of in-person interviews (e.g., travel costs and time required off-service) were welcome changes to both applicants and interviewers. However, there were new challenges identified, such as lack of formal training for virtual interviews and a shift in applicants' attention to fellowship program websites. We discuss how these observations could inform best practices for programs and applicants in the future.