Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual interviews have emerged as the sole method of evaluating applicants for plastic and reconstructive surgery residency positions.

While virtual interviews confer several advantages, including decreased costs associated with travel, there have been concerns regarding the ability of faculty to assess applicants’ interpersonal skills, determine their “fit” within a program, and ultimately, determine their rank for the “match.”

Given these considerations, residency programs may mitigate such uncertainties by choosing applicants who have an established relationship with them, whether through research endeavors or clinical experiences.

To quantify this phenomenon, we determined the percentage of applicants who matched into their respective home or “research year” programs and hypothesized that residencies would tend to select those affiliated with their own institutions given the aforementioned limitations of virtual interviews.

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