About
Founder-led physician search built for clarity and follow-through
Meridian is a small firm by design. Every search is handled by the same person who takes the brief, identifies candidates, and sees the placement through. That's not a constraint — it's the model.
Why Meridian exists
The problem with how physician search usually works
Most physician recruitment operates through large firms where search coordinators, recruiters, and account managers each own a fragment of the process. Employers receive a stream of candidates who have been pre-screened against a checklist rather than genuinely evaluated for fit. Physicians are contacted by volume rather than by relevance.
The result is long time-to-fill, high falloff rates, and a recruitment experience that neither side finds satisfying. The industry median for physician time-to-fill is 118 days — in psychiatry, often longer.
Meridian was built to offer something different: a lean practice where relationships aren't handed off, where the person you speak with at the start is the same person closing the placement, and where the focus stays narrow enough to actually know the territory.
How the firm works
Structure and scope
Meridian is a boutique, founder-operated physician search practice. We work on a candidate-specific introduction or engaged-contingency basis depending on the employer and search complexity. We do not charge physicians a fee — ever.
Our focus is outpatient psychiatry and behavioral health physician placement. We do not attempt to cover every specialty or every geography. Staying narrow means knowing this market well enough to be genuinely useful — not just present.
We are Texas-rooted, with the ability to support searches in other states depending on the role and the employer relationship.
Operating principles
What we hold to
Specificity over volume
We do not believe that sending more candidates produces better outcomes. We present fewer candidates who have been evaluated more carefully. Every physician presented to an employer has been screened for fit, not just availability.
Discretion as a baseline
Physician careers are sensitive. We do not share a physician's profile or submit their name to an employer without their explicit knowledge and approval. Employer search details are treated confidentially and not shared beyond what the search requires.
Responsiveness that matches the stakes
Searches stall when recruiters go quiet. We communicate consistently with both sides of a search — not just at the beginning and the end. If something changes or a placement falls through, you hear it from us directly and quickly.
Mutual fit, not placement at any cost
A placement that doesn't hold is not a successful placement. We decline searches we are not well-positioned to complete, and we do not advocate for a candidate who is a poor fit for a role — even if it would generate a fee.
Straightforward communication
We say what we think — about candidate fit, about a search's feasibility, about compensation benchmarks. If a search brief has structural problems, we say so. Plain language is not a style preference; it's how trust gets built.
Founder
Boris Dayma
Boris Dayma is the founder and sole operator of Meridian Physician Search. His background spans engineering, research, and software, including building and operating products used at scale. Across those environments, the recurring work was the same: understand complex systems quickly, ask better questions, and build processes that hold up under real conditions.
Meridian was built around the view that physician search works better when it is narrow, prepared, and handled directly. Outpatient psychiatry and behavioral health are markets where fit is genuinely complex, generic outreach is quickly ignored, and both employers and physicians benefit from a lower-noise, higher-context process.
Meridian is Texas-rooted. Boris handles searches directly and works with a simple operating standard: fewer introductions, better context, and no candidate submitted without explicit approval.
Work with Meridian
Employer searches and physician inquiries are handled directly and confidentially.