Physician hiring, rebuilt
Reach the physicians your current channels miss.
Built by physicians, Ikigai is a dynamic physician marketplace—recovering candidates other channels lose, showing you why physicians pass, and helping your team turn limited offer flexibility into better hires.
Hospitalist search
6 activeMarketplace signal: Qualified physician interest is strongest when schedule and decision-making flexibility are clearly communicated.
The status quo is expensive
Your vacancy keeps costing money after the search fee is paid.
Traditional channels optimize for outreach volume. Hospital leaders are left carrying the real costs: months of vacancy, missed revenue, coverage strain, and the downstream risk of a poor-fit hire.
Per-placement external recruiter fees before accounting for vacancy drag or replacement risk.
Searches can stretch across planning cycles while physicians ignore cold third-party outreach.
Illustrative vacancy cost while patient demand, service capacity, and team morale take the hit.
Ikigai replaces guesswork with signals your team can act on.
The differentiator
How Ikigai redefines recruitment
Anonymous browsing unlocks the massive majority
Physicians can evaluate opportunities without exposing their identity. Details unlock only after mutual interest, opening access to passive candidates traditional channels rarely reach.
Actionable analytics improve your recruitment offering
See how candidates respond, where interest breaks down, and what your team can improve—from the role profile to the structure of the opportunity.
Match with candidates otherwise lost
Ikigai can surface renewed potential after initial interest fades, giving your team another path to qualified candidates who would otherwise disappear from the pipeline.
How it works
From opening to mutual interest in three clear steps.
Post your opening
Build a structured role profile with the terms physicians actually use to evaluate fit. Your support team helps optimize it.
Receive qualified matches
See direct interest, recovered candidates, and reverse-filtered physicians whose requirements you’re already meeting.
Connect on mutual interest
Identity and contact details unlock only when both sides are ready—so each conversation starts with a credible signal.
The founders
Built by physicians who’ve lived the problem
Ikigai began with our own frustrating experiences navigating the physician job search. When we spoke with other physicians, we heard the same concerns again and again—and discovered that hospitals were facing the other side of the same problem.
Co-founder
Bliss Chang, MD
Bliss is a practicing cardiologist. He earned his MD from Harvard Medical School and completed his fellowship training at Cleveland Clinic.
Co-founder
Nicholas Kwok, MD
Nicholas is a practicing hospitalist. He earned his MD from Harvard Medical School and completed his residency training at Cedars-Sinai.
Founding partner pilot
Help build the hiring channel you wish already existed.
We are inviting a limited group of hospital partners to shape Ikigai around real constraints and the workflows your team already uses.
Founding-partner pricing lock-in
Secure early-partner economics as the platform grows.
Direct access to the founding team
Work with the people building Ikigai, not a layered support queue.
Hands-on launch support
We help translate your opening into a clear, physician-relevant opportunity.
Shape the analytics layer
Founding partners help determine which insights will be most useful before that layer is built.