Hiring Tips for Your Pediatric Private Practice

When you’re looking at hiring people, you can’t always hire the perfect person right away.  If you can hire the perfect person, it saves you from having to deal with a terrible teammate. In order to not have a terrible teammate, you’ve got to hire correctly. 

The first thing to know is that you’ve got to have a volume of people coming in so you have choices. If you’re desperate for a teammate, whether it’s an administrative person or therapist, and you have one resumé, you’re going to be more inclined to say, “Well, we can train them up. It’ll be different at our company than her last company. We can make her happy.” That’s because you need someone on the job. 

I know, it’s easier said than done. I can sit here and say, “Hey, just choose from the 20 speech therapists that you have applying,” or whatever the difficulty is for you. The key is that you’ve got to have a volume of people applying.

How do we get that volume of applicants? It’s easier to get volume when hiring for administrative staff. When it comes to any kind of administrative hiring, you absolutely can embrace having the volume. When it comes to therapists, I think it’s different for every region. In Ohio, it’s hard for us to find the volume of speech therapists. It’s easy for us to find PTs, but I know out in the Jersey area, they have trouble finding PTs. For admin staff, it should be easy.

Using Social Media When Hiring Administrative Staff

Let’s start talking about hiring administrative staff. First and foremost, you need to grow your Facebook pages, your Instagram pages. You need to grow your social media, not only with parents of children, but with therapists. 

Every time you have a student that’s on an internship, have them join your Facebook page. It’s part of our onboarding process. We have a checklist they follow. They actually do a scavenger hunt. We make it really fun. Part of the scavenger hunt is that they have to join our Facebook page and they have to join our Instagram page. We have multiple pages now, and they have to join them. 

The reason why we do that is because through the years, every therapist connection you make, or even admin connection you make, they’re usually not going to unfollow you once they leave your company. If they do, you probably don’t want them anyway. But that’s what helps grow your Facebook pages.

They’re going to like, comment, and share. You train up your current team to like, comment, and share with their friends, and that gets more people following. If you can, take pictures of the children that you see (obviously, with all the HIPAA permissions signed), and share successes. Tag the parents if you can. They’re going to share those posts and then their friends are going to see them and follow you. The more children you can share (with permissions), that will increase your followers as well. 

Delegate Building Your Social Media Audience

Here’s a few key points on delegating this responsibility:

• Assign someone other than you to be in charge of increasing this audience. It is totally important on so many levels to grow your social media. 
• If you don’t have social media, now is a great time to start. 
• Set targets. Let’s get to 25 followers, let’s get to 50, let’s get to 100. 
• Set targets and go after them, but put somebody else instead of you in charge of that. 
• You need to monitor it.

Back to hiring—ask the people who are following you to have their friends and family who are prospective hires email you directly. Give them your email address and tell them what you’re looking for. Be specific. I don’t know if I’d share the pay. If they want more information, they can email you. But use social media for sure.

What I’m describing is a series of ways of output, because the more output you do, the more input you get. I’m a big queen of checklists. Have a checklist for yourself on how to get output to acquire a new teammate. Always post on social media and keep posting. You can say, “Oh, we’re always growing.” You don’t have to say, “Well, we lost teammates.” 

Networking to Bring in More Applicants

There’s so many ways you can network with universities. Obviously, network with OT, PT, and speech programs that are near you, the ones that you take students from. It’s an exchange—I’m taking your students, I need you to help me bring new staff here.

You want to take as many students as you can, and you want to hire your students. Try to take those third-year students or the ones in their last year if you can. These are the ones you want to hire if possible. Give them a fabulous experience and hire them. You don’t have to really train them up. They’re trained during their internship when most of them were unpaid.

Definitely send flyers to your university. Make sure you have the contact names of everybody at all the universities. If you don’t, put somebody else in charge of gathering those. What are all the universities that are near to you and who’s the contact person for each of those programs? Put together a nice colorful flier with some fun staff pictures, send it off to the universities. You want to have a list of email addresses ready, so when you’re ready to send off that email, it’s easy.

The Key to Finding Time to Recruit Good Staff

If you find that you’re the one in charge of hiring, you’re probably not putting enough output there because you just don’t have time. Block out some time in your week for recruitment, because you’re losing money if you don’t. Block out time in your week and either lock that office door or don’t come into the office yet, and spend that time on recruiting. If you don’t, you’re never going to let yourself take the time to hire.

If you find that you’re constantly asking, “Why can’t I find the right staff?,” go back and look at the work you’ve put in on recruitment. You’ll see it’s because you haven’t spent enough time on this task. Confront that for yourself and be the CEO and say, “I have to give time to this. It’s causing me stress. It’s affecting our ability to grow and be profitable, and it’s important.” It’s important to you, so set that time aside.

Do you need help recruiting, training, and retaining staff? Visit our Lemonade Library to review past webinars and build skills for hiring, marketing and much, much more! 

About Diane Crecelius

Diane Crecelius is a physical therapist and founder of a multi-million-dollar, multi-location practice with well over 3,000 visits per week and 200 staff! In the past several years, Diane has worked tirelessly to support the Peds-A-Palooza group and the success of Private Practice Owners. Diane has presented at nearly every Peds-A-Palooza live and virtual conference since the first sold-out conference in 2018. Her extensive knowledge derives from her decades in practice and from being trained and consulted by Survival Strategies, Inc. She uses this training to help Private Practice Owners learn how to thrive and expand while keeping their stress low.