Empower Your Applicants: Why Residency Programs Need to up Their Website Game

We want it to be easy.We use the internet on a daily basis to search for information.We rejoice when the first website gives us clear access to what we seek; we become increasingly frustrated if we go in circles from one site to another without finding what we need.Imagine what it must be like for a final-year medical student trying to research residency programs.The format and the information that program websites contain is highly variable and often out of date.Program descriptions on the CaRMS website contain detailed text but are not easily searchable.Many students remain unaware of additional resources found on the CanPrePP website.It must be a very timeconsuming process indeed!It has long been acknowledged that applying to residency is an extremely stressful process.1,2 Statistics about the number of available positions or student satisfaction with match results do not account for the time and effort that went into making choices and setting rank lists.The CaRMS match moved to virtual interviews in 2021 and visiting electives only resumed to a very limited extent in the fall of 2022, with full capacity not expected until the fall of 2023. 3 These changes resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic made it even harder for applicants to learn about programs and make choices; they increasingly rely more on virtual resources to gather information.4 Residency program websites can serve as an important source of information for students 5 and have been shown to influence applicants rank lists.6 However, the study by Tsai and colleagues in this issue of the Journal 7 confirms that wide variation exists in how programs use websites to showcase their strengths, curriculum, and resources.At a broad level, US program websites were found to be more comprehensive than Canadian websites.Some of this can be explained by the fact that Canadian resident salaries, vacation policies, and insurance plans are province-dependent, while benefits in the USA can be department-and institution-specific. Canadian programs may expect applicants to look elsewhere for this information as well as information on selection criteria, application process, and application dates.Tsai and colleagues adapted their assessment tool from prior studies.Although it includes a broad range of criteria, most items are "all or none," either present or absent on a given website.For example, the "neighbourhood" criterion was fulfilled if the website included at least one detail of the surrounding neighborhood, while

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