[ALISON PIDGEON]: I’m excited to introduce to you our sponsor for this week, which is All Call Technologies, the phone system I use in my own group practice. So let’s talk about phones for a second, specifically, your business phone number. Making all of your staff accessible through one central number is key to growing your business. One number for your clients to call and reach whomever they want, All Call Technologies is the company we use to accomplish this. My phone system is totally virtual, in the cloud, and I don’t have any special app. It uses my regular cell phone service to receive calls. So when I or any of my staff make calls out from our voicemail boxes, it shows my business number as the caller ID to the person we call, keeping our cell phone numbers private and my business number in front of our clients.
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Welcome to the Grow a Group Practice podcast. I am Alison Pidgeon, your host. Today, I am doing a solo episode all about my best tips for hiring the right fit clinician for your practice. And I want to preface this by saying, this is actually a webinar that we have given in our Group Practice Boss community. So if you’re not familiar with Group Practice Boss, that is a membership community that Whitney Owens and I created for established group practice owners. So you have to have at least two clinicians and yourself working in the practice to be included in this membership community, because we want people who aren’t brand new. We do have another program for people who are brand new to group practice called Group Practice Launch. But we can talk about that another time. So Group Practice Boss is a space where we have group practice owners supporting each other in a Facebook group community, as well as doing live events.
And then we have a teachable platform full of resources. Everything we do gets recorded and uploaded into there. So if anybody misses a webinar, they can watch the replay. So every month we have a different theme and the month of February was all about hiring. That was actually one of the most requested topics that we got from our group practice bosses, we call them. So every week we have a different webinar where we really drill down into like a very specific topic related to the bigger topic, which for February, like I said, was hiring. So I created this kind of five tips to help people start to think about how they can refine their hiring process. And I think this is so important because obviously you’re running a service based business. And so if you don’t have excellent clinicians, it can really make or break your whole business.
It can mean that they’re, if they’re not the right fit or they’re not good clinicians, they’re giving not the best services to your clients and then also they may be making your life miserable if you just sort of can’t get along in the sense of just your working relationships. So this is so important to get right and what I find is a lot of people make mistakes with the hiring process and people end up like figuring out in the first like month or two, they’re not a good fit and then they quit. Or, you as the practice owner, have to end up terminating them because again, they’re not competent or there’s some big red flag that happens that makes you realize like, “Oh wow, this isn’t going to work.” So in order to really make sure you’re vetting that person and really seeing that you are in the hiring process that you’re seeing really what you’re going to get.
I have these five tips for you. So I’m going to go over the five tips and then we’re going to kind of talk in more detail about each of them. And tip number one is, establish multiple steps in the hiring process. Tip number two is, read The Ideal Team Player book by Patrick Lencioni. Tip number three is, look for red flags during the hiring process. Tip number four is, formulate a list of interview questions that cover all the bases and tip number five is, use your business values as a filter. So before we dive into each of these tips, I should also say that one thing that kind of is an additional layer over all of these tips is that you need to think about who you are as a boss, what you want in your practice, the type of clinician who you’re going to get along really well with and kind of what is going to work for you, and what’s not going to work for you.
So I’ll give you an example. So in my practice, I have very independent seasoned clinicians who don’t need a lot of clinical oversight from me because that’s the way I like it. I don’t want somebody who’s so new that they’re going to be asking a question every five minutes, or needs a lot of handholding because that’s just not a passion of mine. I know there’s lots of therapists who want to mold kind of newer therapists or interns and things like that. And that is amazing because obviously we need that in our profession. I just know that’s not my strength or my passion and so I have made a very clear decision to not have very new therapists or interns in my practice. And so that’s something also that you’re going to have to think through. I think a lot of people end up hiring, for example, again, with the interns, like, “Oh, I feel obligated that I need to like give back to the profession. So I’m going to take on this intern, even though I really have no interest at all in teaching or being a mentor to this therapist.”
And so, I guess I would just encourage you to really be honest with yourself. If that’s not your thing, it’s not your thing because you started this practice so you could make it what you wanted it to be. And so I think that’s the beauty like we really need to lean into what is our strength and what is our passion and really follow that because obviously everybody is different. And so there’s enough people in the world that there’s all kinds of different things that are going to be provided in a business setting. But, you know you’re going to do your best work if you’re focusing on what you want to focus on.
So all that being said, let’s dive in to the five tips. So tip number one is establish multiple steps in the hiring process. So what I see practice owners do is they maybe put an ad out, they get some resumes, they schedule an interview, they have one interview with this person and they’re like, “Oh, they seem really nice. I want to hire them,” but they haven’t done enough of the legwork and the vetting to really see if this person’s going to be a good fit. So if you have done interviews like that in the past, what I would recommend doing is really think about having multiple steps or kind of multiple hoops that the person has to jump through. Because I really think that you’re going to see the person’s true colors if the interview process is a little bit more lengthy and there’s kind of different things that they have to do or kind of show to you that will really help you to see what kind of employee they’re going to be or therapists are going to be.
So I’ll give you some examples. So in my hiring process, I say, run an ad on indeed.com, then I get cover letters and resumes. Actually also have them fill out an application because my HR person told me that I need to have them fill out an application just to show I’m putting everybody through the same exact process, like I’m not discriminating. So you would be amazed at seeing how many people can’t follow directions. Like they don’t submit the cover letter or they forget the application or whatever. We’re going to talk about red flags in a minute, but that is one of those things that I would really pay attention to. Like even in the application process, did they pay attention to the directions? You know, do they seem detail oriented? Did they miss details? Pay attention to that.
And then I have an initial phone screening. So I really lay out from the beginning kind of what I think the deal breakers might be for people. So for example, when I was hiring contractors, I would say, “This is a contract position. There’s no benefits. Is that going to work for you or do you need health insurance and stuff like that?” Because I didn’t want to get all the way to the end of an interview and then find out like, oh, they really need benefits and I just wasted their time and my time when we could have had that conversation initially in the first five minutes, then I do an interview. I would recommend multiple interviews and you can do this in a number of different ways. So I now have a Chief Operations Officer in the practice and she’s going to do the initial interview and if she likes them, then I’m doing the second interview. I’ve also had other people who were like in leadership positions, like if I couldn’t decide about hiring somebody, I would have them do the second interview to help me decide. So definitely think of at least giving two interviews.
Something else you could do is have them work on a case conceptualization. So give them like details of a fake client and just say like, “How would you treat them? What modality would you use? What treatment goals would you set for them?” That kind of thing and see what they give to you. Something else I do as well as I always check three professional references and what I’m looking for when I talk to those references, I want to hear that they’re telling me consistent things with what I heard from the person in the interview. So if the person in the interview is like, “Oh yeah, I’m super detailed and organized. I always get my notes done on time,” and I talked to one of the references and the references like, “Oh, well she was really scattered and she was always getting in trouble for not having her notes done on time.”
Obviously that’s a very different story and so that is a red flag to me. And then I would also recommend doing a background check, so you can decide how to do this. You can do a criminal background check, you can just look up their license and see if anything has ever been reported, that kind of thing. So, as you can see, I’ve kind of laid out that there’s many, many steps to this hiring process and I think that you’re definitely going to see the person’s true colors come out and you’re going to see how invested they are in actually getting the job. I’m amazed at like the amount of people we said come back for a second interview and they just don’t show up. I would say that happens more with administrative assistants, but yeah, they, I mean basically when they don’t show up, it’s like, okay, well this, you helped me make my decision. Because obviously you don’t care enough about this job to show up for a second interview so that’s good. You’re weeding people out that way. So, that is tip number one.
And then tip number two is read The Ideal Team Player book and that is by Patrick Lencioni. And a lot of times people ask me if they’re reading the right book because it’s written like a novel, but it’s actually a business book. And so he tells a story about how this company is looking for the right candidate and they put this person through kind of this hiring process to figure out if they are humble, hungry, and smart. So even if you don’t read the book, as long as you understand these basic concepts, it will be helpful to you. So basically what he’s saying when he talks about humble, hungry, and smart is humble means somebody who’s kind of the opposite of a narcissist, like you don’t think you’re the greatest thing ever. I have seen some narcissistic therapists. So that’s definitely something to keep an eye out for.
Hungry means somebody who’s like willing to go the extra mile, like they’re staying on top of their schedule, making sure it’s full they’re reaching out for additional opportunities, they want to get additional trainings. They’re not somebody who’s just like complacent and just, “Oh, I’m just going to do the bare minimum and call it a day.” And then the smart part actually means like emotionally smart, like interpersonal relationships with your coworkers kind of thing or interpersonal relationships obviously with like clients or customers. They have to have good conflict resolution skills, good communication skills, be appropriately assertive.
I’m always amazed at the number of therapists who you would think have excellent communication skills and would know how to be assertive and resolve conflict either avoid it or end up becoming very passive aggressive. So that’s something I definitely ask about in the hiring process. Like if they’ve ever had a conflict with a coworker, well, of course everyone’s had a conflict with a coworker but, when they have had one, like how they’ve handled it. So that will definitely make your life much easier if you have somebody who can appropriately handle conflict, because things come up in the workplace and obviously we had to figure out a way to work it out. So if you haven’t read that book, I recommend it. Like I said, if you don’t want to read, you’re not a big book person, that’s fine as long as you kind of understand, you’re looking for somebody who is humble, hungry and smart, not just one or not just two out of the three, but all three.
So tip number three, I kind of alluded to this earlier but tip number three is look for red flags during the hiring process. So what I mean by this is when I was talking about tip number one, you’re establishing those multiple steps. You’re really going to see how the person reacts during the hiring process. And if I have learned anything from being a therapist, is that people are consistent. If they act that way during the hiring process, they’re going to act that way once they’re hired and they’re working for you. So I’ll give you some examples. If a candidate is very slow to respond that’s usually a red flag to me. Like if I ask you to fill out a job application that should take you 15 minutes and it takes you three weeks to get it back to me, that’s a red flag to me. Like you either don’t care that much about the job or you’re so kind of disorganized and overwhelmed. You can’t take 15 minutes to fill something out, that should be pretty straightforward.
Something else that’s a red flag is if they overshare in the interview. I’m always paying attention to boundaries. Do therapists have good boundaries? One of the things that I feel like you can’t teach is good judgment around boundaries, like you either sort of have it or you don’t. And so if they’re telling me all of this stuff about their personal life and you know, obviously in like a first formal interview, like depending on what they’re sharing is probably not super appropriate. So that makes me think like, “Oh, maybe they’re going to have poor boundaries with clients.”
Something else that’s a red flag is that they seem desperate to get out of their current work situation. So like they don’t care where they go they’re just so miserable in their job they just want to get out. Like, I want somebody to come work for me because they see kind of what we’re doing and they want to be a part of it not just like, oh, I just need to go somewhere else. If they haven’t ever worked in one place for very long, or if there’s like big gaps in their resume, like, “Oh, I was out of work for a year,” and maybe they don’t have a really clear explanation about why if they were just like six months here, a year there and like that’s their resume. That to me is an indication that maybe they don’t have good interpersonal communication skills and maybe they either were going to get fired or they just sort of couldn’t get along until they ended up quitting, can’t follow the directions to submit their application.
That makes me think they’re not very detail oriented. And then something else I ask about is if they ever foresee themselves opening their own practice. If they’re like, “Yeah, six months from now, I’d love to go start my own practice.” That’s a deal breaker for me because I don’t want a whole bunch of turnover. So if somebody said, “Oh yeah, in five years, I want to open my own practice.” Well, that’s a different story but if somebody is like looking to come work for you and in a short amount of time leave to start their own thing, that’s very expensive for your practice obviously to build up somebody’s caseload and then typically they leave and they take all their people with them. So that’s something that I tend to not, tends to be a red flag for me. I don’t hire people who want to start their own practice in a short amount of time. So that was tip number three.
And now we’re going to move on to tip number four, which is formulate a list of interview questions that cover all the bases. So, if you think about the broad categories of questions I ask, and obviously we can think of a zillion interview questions, right? But think about these kind of broader categories that you want to cover in the interview. So obviously, you want to ask about clinical skills and fit for the niche of the practice. Like I said, you want to ask about boundaries and good clinical judgments. You want to ask about organization, time management skills. I asked them about how they resonate with the values of the practice, which we’re going to talk about in the next tip. And then I asked them about future career plans.
So here’s some examples of questions that go into some of those categories. So one is what is your process for getting your progress notes done? So what I want to hear from somebody is like, “Oh yeah, I get them done right when the session is over or, oh yeah, I don’t leave for the day until my notes are done.” Obviously I don’t want to hear like, “Oh, well, I get them done by the end of the week.” And even if it’s five days from the session, like that’s not okay. Another question, a client calls in between sessions and wants to chat, is not having a crisis. How do you respond? So this is a boundary question I want to hear, like they would ideally empathize with the client, but then also set the boundary. Like this is not really appropriate to have a chat on the phone in between sessions. And then as a follow-up question, I’ll ask like, is it easier or hard for you to set boundaries with clients? Usually anybody who’s been in the field for any length of time, says, “Oh, it’s fine for me to set boundaries.” When you’re a really green therapist, maybe you don’t realize how important it is, but you learn that pretty quickly.
Something else I’ll ask is like, “Did you see the website? What’s your impression of the practice?” Again, I want to see that they’re really interested in coming to work for my practice, not just going to work anywhere. And what I want to hear is like, “Oh yeah, I looked all through your website. I thought it was so cool that there’s so many therapists with so many specialties and I liked that you catered to women.” Obviously it’s they spent time looking through the website.
Then the last question I have as an example is tell me about a time you had a conflict with a coworker and what happened. So again, this is, comes back to like the interpersonal communication, interpersonal effectiveness skills. I actually just interviewed, it was an administrative assistant recently who said, they’ve never had a conflict with anyone at work which you and I both know, that’s not true. Of course you’ve had a conflict with somebody at work. So yeah, that to me was a red flag. But anyway, so obviously you can take those categories and like I said, make up your own questions about what’s most important to you, but I feel like the biggest mistake I see practice owners make is that they just ask about the clinical skills and, kind of forget about all the other stuff.
And so that is my recommendation to you that of course clinical skills are important but there’s a whole lot of other categories that are also important that we need to know how they’re going to function. Like you could have the most amazing therapist ever who does amazing clinical work, but if they don’t get their notes done on time and you’re constantly chasing them down to get their notes done, like that’s going to make your life miserable. Like nobody wants that as a group practice owner. So that’s why you have to ask that question.
And so, let’s move on to tip number five. This is probably my favorite one and it is use your business values as a filter. So one of the things I always recommend to my consulting clients who are starting their group practice is to write down their mission, their vision, and their values. And why that is so important is because it is going to help you to make business decisions and hiring decisions because those values and the mission and the vision will act as a filter. So I remember early on in the beginnings of my group practice like an opportunity would come along and I’d be like, “Oh, wow, that’s cool. What if I sort of went off in this direction and did this thing, or added this other service to the practice or something like that?” But then you get too far from what was your original mission and what are your values and is this consistent with those values? And so once I wrote those things down and then it was really easy for me, as opportunities came along, even if it seemed really cool or really fun, I could look at my values and say, you know what, this isn’t consistent with my values and so it’s just easy to say no. So just something to think about, if you haven’t done that, I definitely would suggest that you do.
And so, I’ll give you a couple examples of my, some of my business values. I think I have seven or eight of them, but I have two examples here for you. So the first one is open and honest communication. So communicating in a way that is open, honest, and transparent. We value direct communication as a way to solve problems before they grow bigger and allow everyone involved to feel they are having genuine relationships. So if you have a value, you also have to think about how are you actually like living out this value or demonstrating it. And so we have lots of structured time where we do communicate with the staff. And it is definitely a two way street in terms of like constructive feedback. So I can give the staff constructive feedback as much as they can give me constructive feedback. And I actually asked them for it. It’s not just sort of like, “Oh yeah, if there’s something you don’t like, let me know.” It’s like literally every single month we’re sitting down with them and saying, “What’s not going well, what am I not doing as your boss that you think I should be doing for you?” And so that is how we’re really laying that out for the staff.
And so when I’m hiring, I’m actually saying that to the candidate, I’m handing them the list of values and saying, what do you think about these values? Does this resonate with you? Is this sound like the kind of culture that you would want to work in? Because the more clear you can be about your values and what you stand for and really how those things are demonstrated as part of the work culture, the better you’re going to be able to attract the right people and you’re going to repel the wrong people. So again, I’ll give you an example. I had somebody interview and explained how I’m really looking for people who can be independent and don’t necessarily need a lot of handholding. And in the beginning of the practice, I only had one office and so I wasn’t ever there when one of my contractors was working.
And so I said, “You know what, that’d be okay with you, that you would be here all alone by yourself?” And I think she hadn’t really thought about it before and she just said, “You know what? I don’t think so. I think I’m a newer therapist and I think I just don’t really feel comfortable being here by myself and not having like somebody else.” Like I could just sort of pop in between sessions and like ask a quick question or something. And so that was actually really good that we had that conversation because we figured out that it wasn’t the right fit for her. And so, she was able to move on and find a job that was a better fit for her. But that’s just an example of being really upfront and honest in the hiring process about kind of what you’re looking for, what your work environment is really like.
And so I’ll give you one more example of one of the values that we have. So the second example I have is continual improvement, innovation and continuous improvement is the key to survival. We will constantly monitor our processes and improve areas which could be made more efficient or provide a more valuable service to our clients. So what that means is like, I didn’t just set up the practice and was like, okay, it’s good running pretty well, great. We don’t need to change a thing. Like I change things all the time as we get bigger, we have to do things differently because the volume has increased or I learn about something that makes patient care better or make something more efficient.
So for example, right now we’re switching payroll companies because I wasn’t happy with the old payroll company and so that is just a change that all my staff kind of has to obviously go through. And, I like to be upfront about, things here are going to change and obviously I want to make things better and that means that we’re not just going to do the same old thing year in and year out. Like we’re going to be changing things. And is that something that’s going cause you a lot of anxiety or is that going to be okay? Are you going to be able to roll with those changes? So again, just being transparent about this is how it is here and if that’s not a fit for you, that’s fine and, if it is great and now you know what it’s like. So those are just two examples.
I put that as step number five, because I really think it’s probably the most important that you really have a clear idea of that because it’ll be amazing once you start incorporating that into your hiring process, how much that will help you to really hire the right fit people. So I’m just going to kind of recap the five tips; tip number one, establish multiple steps in the hiring process. Tip number two, read The Ideal Team Player book by Patrick Lencioni. Tip number three, look for red flags during the hiring process. Tip number four, formulate a list of interview questions that cover all the bases and tip number five, use your business values as a filter.
So I hope that was helpful for you today. I did want to mention, obviously I talked a lot about Group Practice Boss at the beginning of the podcast, we started that community back in October and it has been so fun. Whitney Owens and I just really enjoy interacting with everybody and the group is super engaged and we always have a lot of people show up to the webinars and ask great questions. And obviously this was one of the webinars that we did during our month and we were talking about hiring. So if this sounds like the kind of community that you would be a part of, we actually decided just to open the group up to whomever is interested at any time that they want to join. So we were kind of structuring it.
Like there were times when like the doors were open and you could join and then like the rest of the time you couldn’t join you had to wait until the next kind of doors open. And we decided recently to kind of do away with that because we were getting requests on a pretty regular basis for people to join. So the doors are open anytime you want to join. The URL is practiceofthepractice.com/grouppracticeboss. So you can check out our page, there’s a link to pay through there. We would love to have you in the group as long as you’re an established group practice owner. Like I said, if you have never started a group practice or you’re just in the very beginning stages, definitely check out our other program which is called Group Practice Launch. But for anybody who’s established, Group Practice Boss has just been awesome and yeah, so we hope to see you there and I will talk to you later.
Thank you so much to our podcast sponsor today, All Call Technologies, the phone system I use in my own group practice. It is a HIPAA-compliant virtual phone system for mental health group practices of any size. If you’re interested in learning more about what they offer, visit allcalltechnologies.com or call them at (877) 659-4999.
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This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. This is given with the understanding that neither the host, Practice of the Practice, or the guests are providing legal, mental health, or other professional information. If you need a professional, you should find one.