Six Strategies That Can Actually Keep Your Clinics Fully Staffed
Paul Martin walks through six forward-thinking methods that work for both recruiting and keeping the people you hire.
Full transcript
Generated from the episode audio and lightly edited for readability.
Many practice owners that I talk to are still posting on Indeed and waiting for a therapist to apply. That is not a recruiting strategy. Today, I'm going to give you six things that will actually work to make your business fully staffed with professionals. Hey everybody, I'm Paul Martin, founder and president of Martin Healthcare Advisors. Staying fully staffed with the right professionals has become the single biggest constraint on growth for almost every practice owner that we work with. The talent crisis is real, folks, and most of you are feeling it every single day.
So, I'm going to walk you through the six most essential things you can do to keep your clinics fully staffed with professionals. Now, the first two are recruiting strategies, but the next four are retention strategies. The reason for that mix is that the practices winning this right now are not the ones hiring the fastest or hiring the most people. They are the ones hiring well and then keeping their people exclusively their professionals. Before we get into them, I want to point you just to our website to get a little bit more information on this.
That's www.mmartenhealthcareadvisors.com and specifically to our recruiting engine page. We've built out seven component system for clients that takes the guesswork out of recruiting and I'll reference parts of it as we go and I would encourage you to read through it after this episode. So, let's get into the six. Number one, a direct mail campaign that's built around your five reasons to join us. This is, in my opinion, the most underused recruiting tool in our industry today. And it is also one of the most effective. And here's why.
Every physical therapist out there in your market is getting hit constantly through email, through LinkedIn, through recruiter calls. Their digital inbox is full and they are tuning most of it out. Their physical mailbox on the other hand is typically empty and you know that with young people. So, a well-designed multi-touch direct mail campaign cuts through in a way that digital cannot match right now. And what you send is obviously just as important as the fact that you are sending it. Every campaign we build for our clients start with this.
What we call your five reasons to join us. Whatever physical therapy it may be. These are the five things that make your practice a place a therapist would actually want to spend the rest of their career in. These aren't generic, not the same talking points everybody else is using, but the real reasons. Some examples, your mentorship program, your patient mix is oftentimes very attractive to u physical therapists, your incentive opportunity, your scheduling practices, your culture, whatever your real story actually is, and utilize your staff, your current staff to get those five most important reasons.
We help our clients land on those five and then we build the campaign around that message. We typically run this against a 30 to a 60 mile radius of physical therapists because that would be a market that they may be driving to and from. And that's with an automated multi-touch sequence that measures response rates and adjusts as we go. And we recommend pairing the mail with eventbased recruitment. These same five reasons the that message you are sending in the mail should be the same message you are walking around with at your state APA events, at PPS, at CSM, and at the local events where your therapists in your market actually gather.
You got to found out find out where they hang out and you got to go there. The mail and the events work together. The candidate hears from you. They see you in person at a conference. Then they hear from you again at home. And by the third or fourth touch, you're no longer a stranger to these folks. All right. Number two is to build a real pipeline with your physical therapy programs in your market. So this second recruiting strategy is the it this is the long game work and it and it is one almost every owner kind of underinvests in.
Your local physical therapy programs are graduating new therapists every single year. The ones who took clinical rotations at your practice during school while they were in school are the ones most likely to come work for you after graduation. This is just human nature. People go where they already have a relationship. I did that coming out of school. I went back to where I had a phenomenal internship and I think many students do that. So the question is not whether you should be working with the physical therapy programs in your area.
The question is how structured your relationship with them actually is. We t we typically recommend that our clients build a real internship and externship program with the programs within a four to 600 mile radius. Not just accepting whoever the school sends you, actually building a curriculum, assigning the right mentors and giving those students a real experience that re actually reflects how good your practice and your business are. You may have therapists that attend these physical therapy programs and they should be making contacts with the students in these programs through teaching opportunities, speaking opportunities, as well as just reaching out and being an asset that can be utilized at any time by these schools.
I talked to a company at our last conference, our last private practice section conference in Orlando about this exact strategy. Every one of your current staff physical therapists came out of a physical therapy program. Let's get them back into those programs again as I just described, teaching, training, helping out with these programs. The other thing we mix in here is your digital presence. Because when that student finishes their rotation with you and goes back to that school, the first thing they are going to do is to tell their other students about your program.
And then guess what the other students are going to do? They're going to look you up online. They're going to go to your website. They're going to go to your LinkedIn for reviews, for your social media reviews, Google reviews. If what they find online actually matches the experience that your student has described to them, you have a very strong likelihood that they may be looking to come to you for their next internship or potentially calling you after they graduate. If it doesn't match, you'll lose them.
So the digital and platformbased recruiting piece of our recruiting engine has to be tied directly to what students are experiencing in your clinic or clinics. The two have to tell the exact same story. All right. Number three, win them in on boarding, not just in the hiring. And now we're going to kind of move to retention. And the first retention strategy starts on day one because you can hire a great therapist and I hear this fairly often. You can lose them in the first 60 to 90 days.
Good on boarding looks like a structured plan for the first 30, 60, 90 days. They should see exactly what they are going to learn and exactly what they're going to be capable of. It looks like a real mentor assigned to that therapist, not just a vague offer to ask questions if anything comes up. It looks like a manageable case load in the first month so they can learn your systems before they become buried. And it should look like regular check-ins from leadership, not just from the human resources team.
If you bring a new therapist in and just throw them into a full schedule on day one, you have already started losing them. And look, I'm all for therapist productivity. But slow down a little at the beginning and you will definitely keep them longer. All right. Number four, and this is essential, build a culture around getting patients better. Therapists did not go to school to simply push productivity numbers. They went into this field to help people get better. So if your clinic feels like a factory, not because you're busy, you're going to lose people to practices down the street that feel more like a place of healing.
And again, this is not how busy they are. It's where you place your focus. The owners who are winning right now are the ones who have made patient outcomes the very center of their conversation. They talk about it in team meetings. They celebrate it. They share patient stories. They give their clinicians the time they need to actually do good work. That doesn't mean we have clinicians doing and taking as much time as they need or want. It still is within a program, but we are constantly measuring those outcomes.
That kind of a culture does two things. One, it keeps your current team engaged and it becomes the reason new candidates will choose you. Again, this does not mean that you do not send set standards for levels of productivity in your practice. It simply means that you lead you lead with patient outcomes. Many times we have found that spending one-on-one time for an hour with a patient is not always what generates the best outcomes. But if that's what you start with, then there's no discussion of outcomes, you're going to be in for a longhaul because then it's a matter of how much time do I spend?
No. Uh-uh. It's a matter of working within our system and getting great outcomes and trying to come up with the formulas to get the best outcomes. Keep in mind, culture is not just a poster on the wall with some great words on it. It's what people feel when they walk in the door on a Monday morning. All right, number five. Prepare your team to work under pressure. This goes back to our Curt Cignetti episode. But here's the reality. Even in the bestrun practices, they're going to be weeks where the schedule is just absolutely full.
Somebody calls out and the team has to absorb the pressure of those additional patients. The question is whether your team is set up to handle those weeks or whether one bad week pushes someone just out the door. You have to set them up for that first. Prepare them for that. And you know, a few things matter here. First, your senior clinicians have to be available to help the less experienced staff when you run into those issues. Mentorship is not just a recruiting tool. It is what holds the team together when things get really busy.
Second is you have to make smart use of your physical therapy assistants. They are they are a big part of the answer to capacity and our recruiting engine page describes how to use them strategically while continuing to maintain the quality of care, patient satisfaction, and outcomes. Outcomes. That's what we want to be focused on. Third, you need to recognize what your team is doing when they step up, right? You know, when you go through a day and you've asked a therapist to see a patient at the end of the day, you ask somebody to come in a little bit early, a simple thank you goes a long way.
And if your team feels seen during the really hard weeks and days, they will stay through the hard months. Look, every once in a while, bring donuts and coffee in. We used to do this many years ago in our clinics. I know when we're going to have a really rough day, I would come in with donuts and coffee in the morning. Come on, guys. Let's drink up because we got to get ready. Or just send out for a pizza at lunch. Do whatever you can that will make them feel as though you are honoring them for just keeping everything moving.
All right. Number six, treat retention just like recruiting. I hate to use this word, but the cheapest hire is the one you do not have to make because you kept the person you already had. I see a lot of practices and businesses spending heavily on recruiting and almost nothing on retention. The branded introduce us to a friend program we describe on the recruiting engine is a great example. When your team brings you a candidate, your conversation rate is going to be much higher than what you will get from outside sources.
Pay them well for that. Make it real. Make it make it worth it to them. Beyond that, do some of the small things. Career conversations, continuing education support, recognizing tenure, being a place where people feel respected. Retention is not magic. Really, it's paying attention. So, these are the six. A direct mail campaign built around your five reasons to join us. A real pipeline with your local physical therapy programs, winning them in onboarding, building a culture around getting patients better outcomes, preparing your team to work under pressure, and treating retention even more even more so like recruiting.
And if you put these six in place and stay with them, you will be in a much stronger position than almost every competitor in your local market. If you want to see how the full recruiting engine works, head over to our website and look at our recruiting engine page. There's a recruiting potential assessment that will tell you based on your market, your current practices, how many new therapists and staff you should be able to add, and what that investment looks like and the return that you can expect on an investment like that.
Hey, I appreciate everybody. This is a tough subject, but thank you for joining us today. And if you have any questions or would like to chat about anything that I've discussed today, just click below and let's talk. Thank you for joining me today and I look forward to seeing you in the very near future.
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