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Episode 185 | The Most Important Part of My Recruiting Strategy

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WITH MAUREEN WERRBACH

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  • Episode 185 | The Most Important Part of My Recruiting Strategy 00:00

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Hey Group Practice listeners!In this episode I’m going to be talking all about the most important part of my recruiting strategy.

In this episode I cover:

  • What has made the biggest difference in my recruiting strategy
  • What a a recruiting and onboarding team lead manages
  • How having a a recruiting and onboarding team lead benefits the practice

This episode is sponsored by TherapyNotes. TherapyNotes is an EHR software that helps behavioral health professionals manage their practice with confidence and efficiency. I use TherapyNotes in my own group practice and love its amazing support team, billing features, and scheduling capabilities. It serves us well as a large group practice owner.

Do you ever wish for a financial therapist who could relieve you from the last few months’ bookkeeping, talk you off the edge when you’re running into issues with Quickbooks, or help you work through a profit plan for growth? GreenOak Accounting does just that! GreenOak Accounting is an accounting firm that specializes in working with group practices. Their value goes WAY beyond bookkeeping; they can help you get on track for financial success. Schedule a free consultation by going to http://greenoakaccounting.com/tgpe

Transcript:

Maureen Werrbach

Hey everyone, today I’m going to be talking about my favorite or most important part of my recruiting strategy. So this is a personal opinion piece. And it’s going to be more relevant to more established and larger group practices, just because what is most important to me when it comes to onboarding and recruiting has shifted as my business has grown. So for some of the startup or smaller group practices, this might not feel as relevant because it’s something that’s become important as my group practice grew larger.

So I find that the most important part of our recruiting and interviewing strategy is having a recruiting and onboarding team lead; someone who’s actually in charge of that. And obviously, when we’re smaller group practices, we typically as the group practice owner are the person that’s doing the recruiting and the onboarding. And then when we get to this, like mid size level, we might have our clinical director or supervisor, whoever we choose to bring first into leadership, they might play a role, or take a hand in the recruiting and onboarding process. But you typically are still the lead. And that supervisor or that clinical director often has other things that are part of their job description, right? Doing supervision or managing the clinical team.

And what I found was when I made the jump a handful of years ago to bringing in a recruiting and onboarding team lead, whose sole focus in that role was to come up with recruiting strategies, test to those recruiting strategies, make sure that they are seeking out candidates that are in line with our missions and value, mission and values, doing those initial interviews, and then handing them off to our supervisors, and then also really holding their hand through our 90 Day onboarding process. We found that our staff that were hired, were in a space to be more successful and more in line with what we needed over when I was doing that myself. Because I was doing as all of you guys know, everything, right? We are running the business, we might be seeing clients, we’re maybe supervising or working with our leadership team, on top of trying to ensure that the business is stable and healthy. And when we have so many pieces, or tasks or things that we have to do, we can’t do all the things thoroughly and perfectly. And so, for me the best thing that I did, and the thing that I find to be the most helpful or important part of our recruiting and onboarding, was bringing on a recruiting and onboarding team lead.

Some of the things that our person does is that they collaborate with our leadership team to make sure that they know what their hiring goals are for the year. They collaborate with our HR person to make sure that our job descriptions for all of the positions in our organization are up to date, and accurate. They advertise for open positions, make sure that they’re recruiting talent that actually aligns with their mission and values. And they make sure that the candidates that they’re that are coming in, that they’re giving those really quality interviews, making recommendations related to hiring to our supervisors, because our supervisors do second interviews.

And so this person really plays a pivotal role in ensuring that our supervisors don’t get any interviewees, unless the recruiting and onboarding lead has done the initial interview and feels like they’re a good fit. By the time it goes to our supervisors that person who’s being interviewed has already been screened, and is a good fit according to kind of the elements that that person our recruiting person is looking at. And then our supervisors are then looking at the clinical and workplace culture pieces.

Our recruiting and onboarding team lead is collaborating with our clinical director, our supervisors, our Director of Client Experience, who is our head of the administrative team, to make sure that they can improve our overall client and employee experience. They’re also identifying areas that need improvement when it comes to recruiting and they’re the ones in charge of initiating those improvement measures. They forecast employee needs right. As a group practice grows, you know that there’s turnover happens. Feels like it happens more quickly because the more people you have, even if you have a 5% turnover, you’re still going to have a handful of people leaving every year. And so this person is forecasting, not only our growth strategy and how many new clinicians we need, but also is making sure that they’re aware of kind of the forecast of that year when it comes to just replacing those clinicians who also leave there, making sure that they’re facilitating the new hiring, onboarding process and orientation activities, training them in those first 90 days during the probationary period, making sure that they are setting them up for success. And also making sure that all the employment paperwork is processed, and that they’re paneled with any insurance companies that we accept.

They’re introducing those new hires to team members, and making sure that those new hires are acclimated to our workplace environment and helping them build a sense of belonging. And they’re making independent decisions regarding the management of the clinical team.
So during those first 90 days, our onboarding person is also their supervisor, their site supervisor. After those first 90 days, the clinician gets handed off to the site supervisor, because then they’re fully trained and acclimated. But in those first 90 days, they’re not only onboarding but they’re also providing that supervision, ensuring that their notes are well done, that they’re completing their notes in a timely fashion, that they’re playing a healthy role in the workplace culture of our group practice.

And so we have a 90 day onboarding system that she built that ensures that she’s screening week by week, for those first 12 weeks, things that are really important to us. So like notes, timeliness and quality, how many intakes? And are they getting each week and how many of those intakes are actually rescheduling to a follow up appointment? They’re looking at the administrative parts that our clinicians have to engage in. They’re looking at retention rate, they’re looking at the culture, that they’re how they’re contributing to the culture of our business, are they engaged in any of our practice culture, building activities, are they communicating through email or whatever methods that we communicate with our team in a timely manner.

And then they’re also doing self reports, making sure that the clinician is able to self report each week, how they’re feeling, what their struggles have been, all the positives and negatives in a self report, as well as an onboarding report, where they’re just writing up, you know, how they feel that that person is acclimating to our workplace. And it gives us a really robust sense of where that person is at at the end of those first 90 days.

So to me, the onboarding and recruiting team lead is our most valuable and important part of our recruiting strategy, because it’s intentional. And this role has the actual time to not only do this work, but also do some strategy with themselves around how to better the recruiting process and how to look at best practices and best places to look for potential candidates. And these are all things that take a lot of time that tend to be sort of put on the backburner when we as group practice owners are doing the recruiting, or when we’re kind of adding this piece to an existing person’s role like a clinical director or supervisor who has other things that they’re supposed to be doing.

I hope this was really helpful for those of you that don’t yet have an onboarding and recruiting team lead or whatever similar title you have, think about what are the biggest struggles that you’re having when it comes to recruiting and onboarding new clinicians. And it’s probably very likely related to the inability to find candidates or finding candidates but not having enough time to effectively train and onboard them. Probably 90% of the issues that you’re having in your recruiting strategy, relate back to the fact that you don’t have someone dedicated to doing the recruiting and interviewing and onboarding for you. And so it might be time to do that. Alright, see you next week!

Thanks For Listening

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Resources

Here are the resources and guides we recommend based on this episode

Recruiting & Hiring Your Ideal Therapist

Whether you’re a seasoned or a new group practice owner, one thing we all have in common is the overwhelming, sometimes painful process of recruiting, interviewing and hiring of therapists.

* I am an affiliate for some of the businesses I recommend. These are companies that I use in my own group practice, and make recommendations based off of my experience with them. When you use some of these companies through my links, I receive compensation, which helps me continue to offer great free information on my podcast, blog, Facebook group, and website.

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Meet your host

Maureen

Maureen Werrbach is a psychotherapist, group practice owner and group practice coach. Learn more about her coaching services here:

About

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The podcast is structured so that you get practice building tips in small doses, where an episode can be listened to (and a group practice building lesson can be learned) in a single car ride.

Episodes are structured into categories: coaching sessions where I coach a group practice owner on a specific topic, tips of the day by yours truly, real talk where you get to be a fly on the wall while an established group practice owner and I talk about the highs and lows of ownership, and trainings done by experts in the field.

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* The content of this post is intended to serve as general advice and information. It is not to be taken as legal advice and may not account for all rules and regulations in every jurisdiction. For legal advice, please contact an attorney.

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