Want to increase your patient volume but can’t hire PTs & staff fast enough?
Let’s face it. Before COVID it was often hard to hire a great physical, occupational, or speech therapist to come work with you. Now it is just plain crazy with the current job market!
In today’s world, your practice has to be able to attract more than patients. Your clinic also needs to be attractive to top talent that wants to help your practice succeed in helping more people’s lives.
People have options and are concerned with their image more than ever. They want something to be proud of that. That’s not HR, that’s branding & marketing.
• • •
Imagine this: rather than taking anyone with a pulse and license, wouldn’t it be nice to choose from a pool of resumes?
You have to treat hiring much the way you approach getting new patients, with effective marketing. That means:
- Be discovered online
- Build trust and interest
- Convert them to an applicant
- Sell them on why they should work for you
- Seal the deal and get onboarding
• • •
#1. Be Discovered Online
Your ideal therapist is someone who is already working but is looking for something better. First and foremost, your practice needs be discoverable online. Before anyone will ever contact your office, they need to see what you are all about, so your website and careers page really needs to pique their interest.
A broken website or “coming soon” career page is a major turn-off for patients and potential hires.
Here are some actions to take in addition to other normal job-hunting sites such as Indeed, Glassdoor, or Zip Recruiter.
Keywords and SEO
Most therapists searching for a job will search under ‘physical therapy job’ or ‘physical therapist job’. Therefore, your careers page needs to be SEO-focused around these critical keywords, so that this page can actually rank on organic searches in your local area.
There are plenty of other tips for improving your SEO & Google rank, but mainly focus on these to start:
- Job-specific terms mentioned above
- Have at least 300-500 words on the page
- Use your city/location in a headline and somewhere else on the page
Before anyone will contact your office, they need to see what you are all about.
In addition, you should use your career page to focus on other key positions you may need such as ‘medical billing specialist’ or ‘medical front desk jobs.’ This will help with recruiting for other positions you need to fill in your practice.
Google Ads
Google Ads are a great way to quickly start generating leads to your practice. You should create specific campaigns for job postings for key therapy jobs in your practice. Each type should have its own ad group so that you can target specific job search keywords.
Social ads on Facebook and Instagram can also help you reach a wider audience. The first step is to really spend time building your audience and getting your targeting right. Otherwise, you will waste money. There are audience targeting settings specific to hiring so learn about this first then write a couple of different ads and A/B test them to your careers page.
Your Website and Careers Page
Your website is the storefront of your practice, so it really has to sell anyone coming to it, whether a patient or potential hire. When your website looks amazing, people will think you are a professional and a wonderful place to work. At Practice Promotions, we help you elevate the effectiveness of your website for new patients. An added bonus is that our clients typically have a better chance of attracting top talent.
Your careers page is your sales page for working at your practice. It should answer this key question…
“Why should I come work for you?”
There are 8 key components to creating your careers page.
- Showcase your culture – people most want to work somewhere they matter.
- Show opportunities for growth and mentorship – therapists want guidance and opportunities to grow in their profession. Other staff wants this too!
- Make it visual – show photos of your team having fun and working together.
- Review your hiring process – what should they expect and how to apply.
- If you are more remote or urban, show what it is like to live in that area. What are the benefits, outdoor life, cost of living, etc?
- Have a way of capturing a lead or ability for someone to send over their resume.
- Showcase testimonials from your own staff – what do they have to say about working there?
- Make it fun – people are attracted to companies with an honest culture.
If you want to see how we apply that to our website here at Practice Promotions, check it out here.
Here Are Some Examples Of Our Clients Who’ve Created Amazing Careers Pages To Help Hire Better:
Elliot PT puts a strong emphasis on attracting people with the same mission – building healthy communities.
Even the custom image is an outside event instead of in the clinic!
Denver Physical Therapy & Injury Specialists
This clinic puts a strong focus on social proof using real testimonials and simple but custom images.
Avoid stock images on these pages, even if all you have is an iPhone camera.
This clinic manages many locations & leverages their career page to show both their leadership and the opportunities new hires have for growth.
• • •
#2. Build Trust & Interest
One of the first things people look for after discovering you is what others say about you. In marketing that’s called social proof & it’s the reason online reviews are so critical.
Social proof is one of the keys to lessening your hiring problem. What if your great staff actually left online reviews about working for you? Imagine what that would do for therapists searching for job opportunities.
You can use online reviews from staff in a lot of different ways. Not only on your careers page but on job sites like indeed.com and glassdoor.com. It is a good practice to have company accounts on these two job sites and send links to your team for them to fill out. It is an open format, so you can have both positive and negative reviews.
If you want to see what this looks like for Practice Promotions, check out our Indeed site.
Social Media
Your social media efforts can target therapists to hire in your area like mentioned above, but it also impacts what people think of you. You should do organic posts about your clinic featuring what you are about and when hiring, what kind of person you’re looking for. Ask your community if they know anyone that would be a good fit for your job openings.
Make sure to use lots of visuals and direct people to your careers page. Videos are a fun way to capture attention with a focus on making it about them, how they will grow, and what your culture is about.
• • •
#3. Convert Them Into An Applicant
When you’re marketing to new patients, it’s vital to show them an easy way to get an appointment whether by phone or online.
The same is true for potential hires.
Don’t talk about how great your job opportunity is and not give them a way to apply or make them search for it. Even if you’re directing to an outside job posting website, make it clear and simple.
Once you have that you can push market to increase applicants:
Other Ways to Generate Interest from Therapists in Your Community
Direct mail is a powerful way to build interest in your practice. You should have a current list of licensed physical therapists that are within driving distance to your practice and frequently mail them. It is better to have a waiting list of therapists than be scrambling at the last minute to hire.
Postcards
Postcards are a great, low-cost direct mail solution to advertising job opportunities at your practice. When you need to hire, make sure that you send repeatedly to your list. I would recommend a list of at least 300 candidates and send it every week for 4 weeks. When you are not actively hiring, you can do a postcard promotion monthly or every other month.
Your Patient Newsletter
The week before I signed the contract to sell my practice back in 2010, I had a PTA leave. That really was bad timing. Amazingly, I had 3 therapists contact me that week asking if I was hiring, and I was able to line up job interviews for the buyer.
How did I do this? A long PR push to the therapy community with our patient newsletter.
You should be sending out a professional patient newsletter every month both in digital channels and with direct mail to your patient list. This is a great tool for reactivating past patients, but it is also a great way to showcase who you are to prospective therapists. If you add your therapy mailing list once a quarter to your patient list, you keep your practice front and center with potential candidates, who are not actively looking yet for a job but may consider it when they see your practice.
Referrals From Current Staff
No candidate is better than a referral from your current staff member who you love working with. How can you find more people like that?
You ask your staff!
Ask them if they have colleagues or friends that want to join your purpose of being the best practice around! Many businesses even offer rewards to current employees who refer a successful hire since this saves on candidate-hunting expenses.
• • •
#4. Sell Them On Why They Should Work For You
You can no longer assume potential hires want the job you’re offering because they need it. There are more openings available than people to fill them so you have to compete.
The biggest key is to paint a future of success and ensure them you have a plan to get them there.
Building Excitement Before the Interview
Once you have a candidate who has sent you their resume, you have done a short phone interview, and now you have invited them in, you have to keep the selling process going.
Remember, you are “selling” your practice, your shared mission, and the benefits of working with you.
Once you complete a phone interview, immediately send them one of your info packets about your practice. This can be the same one you use for patients. It should be professional and showcase what makes your practice special. Imagine that as they receive in the email, you begin to create the desire. Every small touch can go a long way to bringing the right person on board.
• • •
#5. Seal The Deal And Get Onboarding
Lastly, get started!
This is the step where things transition mostly to an HR action, but don’t ignore a new hire’s experience early on – someone who’s put out dozens of applications could still be snatched by “greener grass.” It’s important to get them winning early and invested in your clinic.
I got this great tip from a PT clinic we work with:
“I always tell folks when I go on vacation I can enjoy myself because I know I’m not coming back to deal with problems. We’ve been able to hire a great team and keep them too!!! We developed a really rigorous application, interview, hiring, and training process. It sets expectations for everyone. It also affirms to the new employee that we have thought about who we are hiring and they will be the right fit for the position.”
Perhaps the best way to relieve hiring headaches is not to have to replace people, so take time to make onboarding a great experience
• • •
Final Tip: Marketing To Hire Is A Constant Need
There is so much you can do to attract and hire high-quality therapists and key staff to your practice – even if you don’t have positions open now. It’s better to be ahead than spend 4-6 weeks searching when someone puts in their notice.
It is important to approach this from a marketing mindset and never stop refining your brand to be highly attractive.
The best time to hire was yesterday, so implement these key actions, get your careers page up to speed, and start attracting new staff tomorrow!
