Recommended Guidelines

Below are the 2024-2025 residency recruitment guidelines at-a-glance, established by the AOA’s CORD/Academics Committee. For rationale and comprehensive recommendation details, please read the complete 2024-2025 Residency Recruitment Guidelines

2024-2025 Guidelines At-A-Glance

AOA/CORD recommends:

• Programs include information about their programs in ORIN® to serve as a repository for accurate and transparent residency program information.
• A limit of 4 medical student rotations, inclusive of all rotations (home and away).
• Programs participate in Universal Interview Offer Day on Monday, November 18, 12:00pm ET, according to the published guidelines.
• Both applicants and programs opt-in to Preference Signaling as part of the AAMC ERAS participation agreement.
  • Each applicant will be allotted 30 signals
  • Applicants should signal their home programs as well as programs where they may have completed a sub-internship, if those programs are among their preferred programs.
  • Applicants with no geographic preference should indicate “no geographic preference” in lieu of leaving that field blank.
• Programs should carefully consider eliminating the requirement for a Chair letter as part of the holistic review, recognizing that applicants are from differing types of institutions.
• Virtual or In-Person Interviews
  • Programs should make their own individual decisions about whether to host virtual or in-person interviews for the 2024-2025 cycle.
  • Programs should not offer hybrid interviewing (i.e. some interviews held virtually and some in-person within the same program’s match cycle) for the main applicant pool (non-home students and non-rotators).
  • If a program chooses to conduct in-person interviews, a virtual format should only be considered for interviewing home students or those who have done an in-person rotation.
  • Programs should publish their decision to proceed with virtual or in-person interviews on the program’s website and in the program’s profile in ORIN®.
• Programs encourage all applicants/recommendation writers to use the eSLOR.

Below are the 2023-2024 residency recruitment guidelines at-a-glance, established by the AOA’s CORD/Academics Committee. For rationale and comprehensive recommendation details, please read the complete AOA/CORD 2023-2024 Residency Recruitment Recommended Guidelines.

2023-2024 Guidelines At-A-Glance

AOA/CORD recommends:

• Programs include information about their programs in ORIN® to serve as a repository for accurate and transparent residency program information.
• No limitations/restrictions for medical student away rotations.
• Programs participate in Universal Interview Offer Day on Monday, November 13, 12:00pm ET, according to the published guidelines.
• Both applicants and programs opt-in to Preference Signaling as part of the AAMC ERAS participation agreement.
  • Each applicant will be allotted 30 signals
  • Applicants should signal their home programs as well as programs where they may have completed a sub-internship, if those programs are among their preferred programs.
  • Applicants with no geographic preference should indicate “no geographic preference” in lieu of leaving that field blank.
• Virtual or In-Person Interviews
  • Programs should make their own individual decisions about whether to host virtual or in-person interviews for the 2023-2024 cycle.
  • Programs should not offer hybrid interviewing (i.e. some interviews held virtually and some in-person within the same program’s match cycle) for the main applicant pool (non-home students and non-rotators).
  • If a program chooses to conduct in-person interviews, a virtual format should only be considered for interviewing home students or those who have done an in-person rotation.
  • Programs should publish their decision to proceed with virtual or in-person interviews on the program’s website and in the program’s profile in ORIN®.
• Programs encourage all applicants/recommendation writers to use the eSLOR.

AOA/CORD leadership clarified NRMP Codes of Conduct and Match Participation Agreement, especially regarding in-person and virtual interviews.

Letter sent to CORD Affiliates on September 26, 2022

For the 2022-2023 cycle, the AOA CAC formed nine workgroups in January 2022 to address several topics related to residency recruitment. Each workgroup was tasked with:
• Helping to understand how the COPA UME-GME Recommendations affect our specialty
• Understanding the opinions of CORD members as related to the working-groups topic
• Creating consensus statement / recommendations for Orthopaedic Surgery
• Aiding in efforts to contribute our voice to the national conversation on the topic

AOA/CORD 2022-2023 Residency Recruitment Recommended Guidelines

The American Orthopaedic Association’s CORD/Academics Committee leadership distributed a twoquestion poll to all CORD-member orthopaedic surgery residency programs on August 26, 2022. Click below to see the results.

Virtual or In-Person Interviews – Poll Results – September 2, 2022

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