Have You Adapted Your Recruitment Strategy to the New Generation Yet?
Eric Smith, founder and CEO of TalentCare, joins Paul to discuss recruiting Gen Z and millennial staff in PT and ABA, from fast candidate engagement and career sites to employer branding and reviews.
Full transcript
Generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Paul Martin's Crucial Conversations. I'm Paul Martin, founder and president of Martin Healthcare Advisors. And today's episode is called Recruiting the Current Generation Tactics and Musthaves. And I'll tell you, this is an episode that will both serve ABA as well as physical therapy practices. As you all know, recruiting and retention of young people, younger people has become a major challenge in both industries. And we have joining us today an absolute top thought leader in recruiting and retention, Eric Smith. Eric, welcome.
Thank you, Paul. It's great to be here. So, Eric is the founder and president of and CEO of Talentcare. And for those of you who are not familiar with Talentcare is a branding, data, and HR tech firm that focuses on helping companies hire and retain better. And I know all of you out there are struggling with this right now. So, the timing could not be better. So, Eric, let's jump in. Let's do it. All right. All right. So, Eric, what are some of the and you know, generally I think we know, but I I'd love to get your insights here.
What are some of the key differences that you've observed in job preferences, and expectations of the millennials compared to some of the previous generations like us? I have [clears throat] no idea what you're talking about, Paul. Look, I think you can boil it down to two. One is, Gen Z's and millennials, and the data tells us this, expect an engaged employer. Engaged in a way that maybe previous generations didn't expect. Previous generations might just have been happy to get an interview or get a job. The current generations expect engagement specifically with them but also an engaging story about why they exist, demonstrating the why and so forth.
So that engagement in that can be everything from reaching out on Indeed and responding to reviews on Indeed and the way that you articulate an employer brand, that engagement is really important to them. They're going to skip right past the companies that don't tell a story and aren't engaging. So, that's the first thing I would say. And the second thing I would say is it's the way you engage them, right? They they will not respond to phone calls and voicemails. They will not respond to emails, but they do expect everything to be done on a smartphone and they expect to be texted to.
So the candidate and the new hire of today is expecting the right kind of technology approach as well as that engagement. Yeah. And you know it's something that I feel as though as business owners we oftent times blame it on them. And when you put it that simply, which is engage them, it's something that everybody really wants, but it's engaging them in the way in which they have been brought up and have learned how to engage. So it's meeting them, you know, in their room as opposed to having them try to meet us in our room, which is why aren't you answering my phone call?
Why aren't you answering my, you know, I left a voicemail. You know, I have, you know, a Gen Z and a millennial and both of them say, "We don't listen to voicemails." Yeah. So, I'm hearing you loud and clear there. No, they won't. I can remember when we started the company 11 years ago and probably in year two we had a client and we were working with them on they were a dermatology company actually and so they needed lots of front desk people and mas and so forth and we couldn't convince that client even nine years ago that they should be texting candidates and they were determined to continue to email and to leave voicemails and of course they struggle because of it.
Absolutely. Absolutely. So specific to physical therapy and ABA, how can business owners in those two industries use technology to improve their overall recruitment process and attract younger candidates, which is what we need in our businesses today? Yeah, it's a really good question. There are depending on the size of the organization of the ABA or physical therapy organization we find that many of them the smaller ones the small to medium size are really far too dependent on Indeed. And if you kind of poll people business owners CEOs and so forth and you ask them where should I get my candidates where do you get your candidates they'll tell you it's I'm beholden to Indeed.
Indeed is my is my main funnel. And in fact, some people are making the mistake of letting Indeed be the primary way to capture applicant flow and then assess that applicant flow and bring them through to hire. The problem with that is that you get singlethreaded on Indeed, number one, and number two, it's not a compelling experience. So that same Gen Z and millennial candidate that we just talked about, that expect an engaged employer also expects a an elegant candidate process, right? So when you think about the technology platform, think about what you're asking the candidate to do to apply for a job.
And I always encourage people to just go out and apply for your own job. If you're if in your if you're in the ABA space, go out and apply for a job for your own company as an as a BT and see what that looks like. Right? And if it's asking you to go over here and then come over here, or if it's asking you to fill out a form and expect someone to email you later, like these are not satisfactory and sort of real time, candidate experiences that the Gen Z and the millennial expect.
And so, that's the way I would think about technology. I wouldn't think about it just as technology per se, but think about the full applicant experience. What questions are you asking them to answer? And when in the process are you asking them to answer that? And is it all easily done on a smartphone? So to us the technology is really another way of saying what does the candidate experience feel like? And so are there a number of other platforms or I guess for you guys do you guys build a platform specific to a PT or an AB ABA business that they can utilize as opposed to you know everything just goes out and everything is on Indeed.
Yeah. The two main things that you must have really to be competing for talent in today's space in the PT space, the ABA space and others. First is a career site. So don't let Indeed be your window to all candidates. Build a career site on your own domain, not on your ATS's domain, on your own domain that tells the story of why you should work for this ABA company versus any other thing that an 18-year-old BT candidate could take. And make it high search engine optimized so that you're so that when people Google search, which is the way most searches are done, not on Indeed, people go on and say Indianapolis BT jobs or Indianapolis caregiver jobs or Indianapolis healthcare jobs, you'll rise to the top of that list, right?
So, high SEO career site that tells your story is a key portion of your applicant, I'm sorry, of your technology platform. The other is an applicant tracking system and that needs to be frictionless for the applicant and easy for the hiring manager. You will get hires if you find if you find one that is frictionless for the applicant. That means don't ask them to upload a resume in the first 30 seconds of the applicant process because it's hard to upload a resume off of a smartphone.
And don't ask them to do a big login process. Make it easy for them and let and get them into the text mode quickly in terms of of the applicant process. So, and then for the hiring manager, these are the people, these are the people out in the clinics, out in the locations, or out in the field who are making those hires of BTS or PT assistants or PTs, whatever. And, you know, you just can't make it hard. They're not professional recruiters, so don't make it hard for them to process a candidate.
Those are the we think the two most important things when you when picking an ATS. Yeah. And I think as you say the more simple the faster it will get back to the candidate. As well as you know as you said those who are out are not experts at this but they can be taught to immediately get something back immediately respond which is what applicants are looking for. So yeah, you know, read reading a book and the guy ended up getting into bad stuff, but early in his career, it's called The Hank Show.
This guy Hank Asher, he would write proposals. He was a painter, and he did government jobs, he did large construction jobs. Before he got out of the driveway, he would have somebody in the car that generated a proposal after he talked and it would get to them before he would leave the driveway or the building of where he was. So, that was many years ago, but now I think the same holds true for some of the younger people in our in our job pool [snorts] completely.
I mean, you know, engaging candidates. So, all of this candidate experience that I'm talking about, facilitates being able to engage candidates quickly. And if you can't engage an applicant who applies within the first two hours, then you're you've missed the best candidates. And we know this from the data, right? It's part of what we do with our clients all the time is coaching. First of all, our team is engaging for some of our clients, but coaching the field on how to do that. Because it's not, you know, they think, "Oh, well, I'll get to it.
I'll get I'll log on later and I'll, you know, I'll see what's there and so forth." That's not how the world works, right? The candidate is thinking, "I'm applying. I want immediate gratification. I'll [clears throat] find the first five that look good and I'm just going to go down that path." And if you're not one of those, you've lost them. Yeah. Yeah. Great stuff. Great stuff. So, now let's kind of look at the businesses. What can small to medium-size businesses take to build or what steps can they take to build a strong employer brand that resonates with the generations we're talking about the millennials and the gen z's you know we sometimes people will ask us like what are the two most important things that you can do to get recruiting success and there's 20 of them right there's 50 of them whatever but the two most important things the most critical things for us as we talk about it are candidate engagement which I just mentioned and then building an employer brand telling your story that gets back to the you know people expect an engaged employer and so forth so an employer brand let's first talk about what an employer brand is or particularly what it isn't right an employer brand is the compelling authentic reason to work and stay at that company versus going somewhere else and it's differentiating from your competition.
So, and that's your competition for talent, right? So, if you're hiring BTS in the ABA space, you're competing with restaurants and Walmart and other BT companies, right? You just are. And so, you need to understand that because you're telling a story against those folks, right? That's the competition. So, that's what an employer brand is. And it comes from the people, right? It comes from the employees. So it does not come from the own the investors. It does not come from the executive team. It does not come from the founder and I'm saying that as you know as one of those right it comes from the employees.
So I'll talk about how we see the best way to build them in a second but I but it comes from now let's talk about what an employer brand isn't. It is not your values and you know kind of principles of the business and it's not a statement of your culture. It's not your brand to the market. It's not any of those things. It's not your mission. What it is is speaking directly to the candidates in you language. So it's you perspective BT or you perspective PT assistant you will experience this when you work here and you will be supported by your team like this and you will benefit in these ways.
You will benefit in these way. That's an employer brand. This is not an employer brand. We are a great company backed by a super private equity firm and has a really inspirational founder and we serve children. Right? Those are all true. Not an employer brand. Right? Because that same generation, the generations that we started talking about at the beginning that we're continuing to talk about, they expect an engaged employer that can tell a story to them. And so that's what an employer brand is. So how do you get there?
How do you how do you build that you story that's authentic? As I mentioned, it's got to come from the people. So it's a mix of focus groups, actually talking to people and letting them riff, if you will, and kind of talk about what it's like. Number one. Number two, surveys, all staff surveys, really giving you some data behind your the way that you do it, some interviews, and then a detailed analysis of your competition for talent. And that might be the Walmart down the street, or it might be another, you know, PT firm, but it's it's a it's an analysis of what they're saying about themselves on social media, on their career site, on Indeed and Glass Door.
And that's how you build out those pillars. And at the end of that whole process, you need a nice crisp statement that really does speak the truth about what it's like to work there. Three pillars that sort of, you know, tell the story that people can self- select into, right? They should be able to look at those pillars and say, "Oo gosh, finally someone that talks about physical therapy the way I think it should be practiced." Or they'll say, "Those people aren't for me. That's not my You want them to self- select in or out.
That's how you get engaged in candidates that will stay you know they'll do the interview, they'll get hired and they'll stay with you longer. So that's also a selection an opportunity to have a true selection process which means that if I speak in you to you what this is going to mean to you and I'm speaking truthfully about my company and what it's going to mean to you and that doesn't resonate well with you, you're going to go look for another position. And that's positive. That that that's a positive step.
No more time wasted. [clears throat] And next candidate and next candidate. The dirty little secret about employer brands if they're done right is that it's as much a retention tool as it is an attraction tool. Yeah. Sure. As you say. Yeah. You know, we talked a lot about responding quickly and that seems to be a mainstay in getting some of the best talent out there. You know, are there other processes that can be put in place to accomplish that? And I think what you said earlier is quickly means two hours.
Is is that what you're sticking to? Walk me through again a little bit about this fast response. Yeah. You can't benchmark or manage a response time or a process like that without data. So the first thing in order to do this is not just to ask your hiring managers and recruiters to do it quickly please but to actually have the data and review it on a daily and weekly basis. Right? So you must have the data that tells you when a candidate applies how quickly does someone pick them up and move them to the next phase which might be qualified and then how quickly then does it take on average to get it to the next phase which might be an interview and so forth.
So all of those statuses, all those stages in the process have to be measured in terms of days. We measure it down to the second. Literally down to the second just because our system does it that way. Sure. But we're measuring things in hours, right? So if I if I were to take a few of those examples just as benchmarks for you and for the for the audience here. So when someone hits someone's desk, either a recruiter has a new applicant or a hiring manager has a new presentation to them, you know, a candidate that they should be assessing, someone needs to assess those people in the first two hours.
It's within the business day and in two hours. And we hold people to that all the time. We hold our own team to that all the time. The next phase is usually to assess them and then move them into interviewing and then start to schedule the interview. So you know that might take a little longer, but these candidates for these kinds of roles that are of these generations, you need to be doing this stuff within a week. So assessing, doing an interview, getting them an offer, all of that should happen within five business days in our view.
Generally speaking, not so much for a PT, not so much for a BCBA, but for all the other roles that sit inside those kinds of companies, you need to be moving like that. Because that's where the A players are. Now, you can move more slowly and you'll miss the A players and you'll get the B and C players and you get to assess those and it's kind of a choice. But you can't do any of that stuff unless you have the data, which takes us back to applicant tracking system.
If you don't have an applicant tracking system that will allow you to track that data stage to stage, those time differences, then you'll never be a you'll never know if you're best practice and you probably won't get there. Yeah. And in these businesses, there's so many other metrics that are being tracked, right? Getting patients in you know how many visits per week, how many visits per FTE per day etc. So we can't we can't manage and treat these patients without effectively recruiting. So to effectively obviously and obviously track that as well makes so much sense.
Well think about it this way Paul sorry to interrupt. Oh, but on the ABA side as an example, I mean the ABA business is essentially an unlimited demand business. You almost don't need marketing and most of our clients don't really have much of a marketing. They don't need it. What they need is capacity. They need net BT capacity to be increasing, right? Well, if that's the number one thing that allows one to serve more families, serve more children, and by the way, increase revenue and evida, then you probably should be measuring that as hard as you might measure other kinds of marketing metrics.
And so, you know, we've been sticklers for that for a decade. And it's just it's the if done right, it's the it makes things so much easier, right? If you if you can measure, you can see to go, well, there's my problem right there. I get people I've got a hundred people stuck in interviewing. But if you can't see that, then you don't know what's wrong and all you end up doing is spending more money on Indeed because you think I need more candidates, right? It's it's really it just changes the world.
And it's, as you say, it's measuring and managing like businesses do on the clinical side and sometimes traditionally on the marketing side, but it's moving all of that discipline to the to the recruiting side. Yeah. And the stress that brings to business owners knowing that they have, you know, a line at the door of, you know, many potential clients that they just can't serve has got to be overwhelming. And I was very impressed there that revenue in EBITDA sound like a true investment banker there. Well, a lot of some of our clients have investors and so we hear that a lot.
Absolutely. Sounded good. Sounded good. So you know, I'm going to challenge any Gen Z or millennial that's out there watching this today. You've probably already gone to a website and you've looked up Martin Healthcare Advisors, you've looked up Talentcare, you've looked up Paul Martin, Eric Smith. How do PT physical therapy and ABA clinics manage their online reputation as far as Google reviews, etc. To make sure that they're attracting top talent. Well, in the world of recruiting and the people side of the world, the employee side of the world, the two main places to manage reputation are actually Indeed and Glass Door, Yelp, medical board, specialty, you know, kind of venues, Google, those are generally more clinical and patient side.
And most of your clients and our clients do a really good job of managing that because that's app that's flow of demand, right? It's more customers coming in and so forth. So people generally get that. We're astounded at how many people don't really manage their their Indeed scores, right? So so one thing you talked about challenges. I think that's right. Anyone that's listening, anyone that's working at either one of these kinds of companies should go to your Indeed page as an example. And if you're if you're first of all, you need to have one.
Sometimes people don't even have one, but you need to have one. You need to have your jobs posted on it. If you don't, that means that you're either having to spend too much money or your ATS isn't connected. But then look at the reputation piece. Look at those scores. Gen Z's and millennials will go People don't buy a vacuum cleaner without looking at scores nowadays, right? They're going to go look at those two places no matter where they find your job to see is this a good place to work.
And if you're not between 35 and 43 as your average score, as a starting point, then you're not getting the best candidates. If you're in the twos, you're definitely not getting the best candidates. Believe it or not, if you're too high, if this is not Uber or anything like that, if you're 48, people don't believe it. So, they also don't get as many applicants, strangely. If you're in 35 to 43, that's where you want to be. And so managing get giving your employees the opportunity to leave reviews and then responding to those reviews which is allowed of course just like on Google allowed in the platform is really important.
Goes right back to the very first conversation that we had today about engagement. That's the number one first way you can show engagement to the candidates, the Gen Z and millennial candidates, is responding to the reviews and caring enough to respond to the reviews that have been left for your company. Sure. Sure. So, so it's real and it's strong. So not way too high, but certainly not too low. And I'm sure that there's a volume as well, making sure that there's a volume that has gone into that to make that score.
Yeah, definitely. So, we've talked a lot about attracting talent. What are some of the long-term strategies once we've attracted, once we've hired that we can retain younger employees for years and years to come? Well, gosh, how long do you have, right? Here are a few things that people maybe don't always think about. A lot of people will kind of silo these various things. So, this is recruiting and recruiting happens to all the way up until the point where I get someone to sign an offer letter and then we move into this thing called onboarding and we do that thing and that might be in different systems and it's cluji and it might be paper and that thing and then we move them into a thing called training.
Think about a BT in the ABA space, right? They that's an 18-year-old that gets 40 hours of online usually online coursework and then they can they can be a BT in most states right if that if that process feels like hiring stop onboarding stop training stop and then finally I get to get a you know to make some money and serve some families that's a very bad experience and as you undoubtedly know the drop rate through that process can be sometimes 75%. 75% we've seen this insights.
75% of the people who off sign an offer letter actually show up for the first day of billable work, right? And so, yes, there's some long-term retention and long-term engagement. And yes, we've talked about how brand can help with retention, but we like to focus on the really practical, and that's knitting together that candidate experience gets back to candidate experience. So, I'm a candidate. I'm going through the process. I'm inside a system that allows me now after I've signed my offer letter inside the [clears throat] same system to begin my training, an easy link to my training and then I can go and do my onboarding stuff.
So, make it easy so they don't just drift off and say, "That's too hard. They're coming at me from different directions. I'm getting emails and texts and all sorts of different things." Make it easy. Make that candidate experience elegant because the difference between you know losing 75% and losing only 25% in the first after you spent all that effort to get someone to sign is magic right and so the other thing I would say is a lot of people get way too bogged down in the what I call crank the handle recruiting piece and they're not allowing themselves to spend enough time on engagement and all those sorts of things you know engagement surveys and then following up on the engage engagement surveys and actually checking in with employees and doing the training and giving them leadership training.
They never get there because all they're doing is just I got to get more BTS. I got to get more BTAS. I got Right. And so be creative about the way you do that through partnerships. You know the using data to make the process easier and then again focus on that candidate experience so that you can get a much higher percentage of the people you just worked really hard to recruit to stay and then to start to build. Sure. Sure. Yeah. You know, it seems as though younger employees appreciate again that simple but immediate onboarding training.
And then, you know, we've also found that checking in on them, you know, especially month one, month two, month three, maybe month six, month, you know, just making sure things are okay and they're doing well. That again as you said that engagement helps to build employee retention as well as you know as we talked about before you know that brand that employer brand. Absolutely. Yeah Eric this has been absolutely awesome. And Lorraine did not boost you up more than she needed to because you have been absolutely awesome and have given our audience today some phenomenal information.
Well, thank you. You know, it's great to be with you, Paul. Just a lovely conversation and anytime. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, any of you out there that have questions for anything that we talked about today, click below and let's talk and have a great rest of your day.
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