Seal The Deal: Tactics To Get The Next PT Candidate To Say “Yes!” With Brian Weidner

 

Going through the interview or hiring process is much like courtship. When you are really smitten by the right person, you can become a nervous wreck and bumble the job offer process. Brian Weidner of Career Tree Network is back on the podcast to share even more wisdom on successfully recruiting and hiring your next PT. He shares some successful actions that you can take to increase your odds of getting a “Yes!” when you put an offer out there. You’ve moved the ball this far down the field, be sure you get it across the goal line!

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Listen to the podcast here:

Seal The Deal: Tactics To Get The Next PT Candidate To Say “Yes!” With Brian Weidner

I’ve got Brian Weidner from Career Tree Network back in the show in order to talk about that last step in the hiring process, the offering of the job letter. Sometimes that can be a nerve-wracking experience to send it out, not knowing exactly if they’ll accept it or not. You’re putting yourself out there and you want to seal the deal and sometimes we can lose people if we don’t handle that correctly. We want to talk about that last step in the process and how to successfully offer and present a job offer to an applicant that we’re excited to bring on. If you have read the past episode with Brian, we talked about recruiting physical therapists and some tactics you can use to successfully recruit more physical therapists on your team, but we niche down a little bit more on this interview. Let’s get to it and see what we can do to make that last part of the recruiting and hiring process as successful one.

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I’ve got Brian Weidner of Career Tree Network on with me. Brian was a past guest. If you want to know little bit about his story and where he came from, I recommend you look back. We talked about some tips and tools as to recruiting physical therapists and what he does at Career Tree Network to help physical therapy owners and staff their companies with physical therapists. He reached out to me because he’s recognizing that there are some holes in our abilities to actually get candidates to accept our offers. We want to talk a little bit about best practices in terms of extending job offers and getting those people that we want, those physical therapists that we want to join our teams. First of all, thanks for joining me, Brian. I appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be back. I appreciate the service that you provide here.

This is something that you’ve been noticing with the people that you’re working with. What are some of the things you’re recognizing? Maybe there are some tips you can give us on how to get that person that we want, that physical therapist that we think aligns with us and taking them through the application process, whatever that is. There’s still that nervousness that maybe they won’t say yes when I present them the ring on one knee. You’re going into this marriage and not sure what they’re going to do. You worry about numbers. You worry about if they’re going to accept it or not and how the negotiation processes go. What are some of the things we can do to make sure that goes to our advantage?

I like that example of a courtship process. You are building a relationship with this candidate and especially at a smaller practice, if they are hired onto your team, you’re going to potentially see them more often than you’d see your own spouse or family. In a lot of ways, the people that you work with are your relationship, or at least they’re part of your interactions with other people for sure. We’ve all had that time when we extended a job offer and then that candidate that we thought we liked and we wanted to hire, they would not accept our offer and they would go and work for one of our competitors. Losing that good candidate is very painful. It’s also sometimes preventable in terms of the process that we’re using. In general, we’re at a point here where PTs are in very short supply. Whether we like it or not, they hold the control and they’re driving the relationship often. That’s because they have so many different options not only within private practice, but also in the other practice settings. When a PT is looking for positions, they’re often interviewing at multiple organizations and it’s important that in on their side that they find the best fit. Through those multiple interviews, they’re also receiving multiple job offers. This is a topic that offers process, if you’re doing it in a way, you can increase your response rate and you can actually get more candidates to accept that offer.

It does actually go back to like the relationship. What’s needed is important. Candidates often lose interest quickly if they don’t hear anything back. If you’re able to extend that job offer quickly, that’s the most important factor. We had one client who had a candidate who they liked, but the candidate was interviewing multiple places and they had multiple interviews scheduled down the road. Our client was waiting to potentially extend the job offer until that candidate had finished all of their interviews. In other words, the candidate was the best person for the job. The intention was to extend the offer, but they wanted to almost wait until they got permission from the candidate to extend that offer.

Like the candidate is going to say, “Now I’m open for offers.”

That’s the first piece of advice that I would give is that you don’t need to wait until the candidate is ready to receive the offer if you know that the candidate is a good person for the job. If they can do the job well based on your evaluation, go ahead and extend the offer.

We talked about this last time and how speed is so important. I don’t know why we want to slow things down. Maybe that’s a procrastination technique or maybe there’s a fear that we’re trying to avoid but think about it from the candidate’s point of view. If they think, “That interview process went well with that particular PT owner, I wonder what they think about me. I wonder if they’re going to extend something to me,” and then I don’t hear from them for a week. Going back to the courtship idea, usually if you want to go out with somebody, you want to let them know rather quickly and not wait a week and see if they come around to still wanting to go out with you. You want to jump on and as soon as you can. You don’t want to let them linger out there waiting if you’re actually interested and you’re excited about that person. It’s okay to show that excitement and extend the offer and say, “I was impressed with you. I’d love to bring you on to our company. Here’s our offer. Hopefully you can talk more.”

Showing them the emotions and doing that heart to heart type scenario with the candidate is great. You never know, the PT might accept your offer and cancel the other pending interviews. There’s no benefit to waiting. The only downside risk on that, which a person might ask is, “We can’t have the job offer open forever. How do we make sure that the candidate gets back to us quickly?” The piece of advice with that would be to have an expiration date on your job offer. You could say something like, “We see you as a great candidate for our opening. We’d love to get this wrapped up as soon as possible. When do you think can you get back to me on the offer?”

Is it too much to say, “This is our offer for the next week?” If you know that they’re going to do some interviews over the next two weeks, should you jump the gun and say, “We need to know within the next week,” even though you know that they’re going to be interviewing for a little bit longer?

That depends. You might phrase it as, “I know you have a few extra interviews scheduled. Is there anything else that we could do now to enable you to accept our offer at this point?” Maybe there is something else, like a specialty area or a certification they were looking for or something simple that you could go ahead and do and that the candidate might cancel their other interviews. It’s more of a case by case basis where you want to be respectful of the person doing their due diligence and making sure that they’re exploring all the options on the table. At the same time, if you’re open with the person and like, “We want this to work out. What can we do to make it happen?” that’s a good approach. You never know what the candidate might say. It might be something we all fear, like if they’re going to ask for a sign on bonus or they’re going to ask for a corporate jet or a briefcase full of diamonds or something. We don’t know what they’re going to ask. They might ask for Friday afternoon off at 4:00 PM and you’re like, “Let’s do that.”

 

I like what you said about things that you can add because there are some things that maybe as smaller practices that we can add to the pot, if you will, if you’re trying to woo a candidate that maybe other larger entities can’t provide. That is maybe the ability to pursue a particular niche or treat a certain demographic of patients. Maybe provide time off to work at certain places within the community that you could leverage to then increase the patient volume on their schedule, something like that. Those are things that we can leverage as small practice owners, and you talked about this before we started the interview. It’s important for us to play to those strengths, especially going up against larger chain practices or corporate settings that might be offering other things, even larger salaries. Maybe we have to stick within our realm and offer other things that maybe those companies can’t provide.

A lot of our private practice clients are quite concerned on the salary side. How am I supposed to compete with the larger hospital systems? They have deeper pockets, they have higher reimbursements, better benefits, things like that. Playing to your strengths is the best approach. Private practices offer a great mentorship opportunity where you can play into that card. We want to be the best physical therapists in this community, and we will work with you and mentor you and you will exponentially grow in your skills here. That’s one angle, that professional development piece. Another card would be flexibility as well. Like our company here at Career Tree, we’re quite small but we offer a great flexibility. If you want time off any day, any time, go ahead, take it off. That’s perfectly fine. A larger company would have policies and hoops to jump through and that is annoying for folks. That’s one other thing on the strength side. Some of the smaller clients that we have, they don’t offer like health insurance, for example.

My recommendation on that would be to have a stipend earmarked on the paycheck that has a wellness stipend that can be used for a wellness benefit or health insurance where your employee might be able to purchase health insurance on their own via the exchange. If you don’t offer health insurance, I feel like in order to compete apples for apples, you should still do la certain amount of money earmarked for that wellness stipend so that the employee can compare. “They’re not offering me health insurance, but they do have this wellness stipend.” It helps equate the two offers. Some clients will say, “We don’t offer health insurance, but we try and pay our people a premium rate.” That’s fine but that money should be separated out in that separate bucket so that the candidate can see it clearly as a benefit to them.

They recognize the full value of their compensation. Maybe I can get your two cents on this since you’re talking about benefits and that can be a huge issue whether or not someone joins you. I’ve sat in a presentation by the guys from Paychex. They provide payroll but they also provide HR support and they can help you with all your onboarding and your contracts that are reviewed by lawyers. You can also enroll in what they provide health insurance-wise. Because they have a large network of small business owners, their premiums can be lesser. Have you had any experience with a company like ADP or something like that where they provide benefits? I wonder if you’ve seen anything from your angle.

I know some of our clients are enrolled in similar programs where it’s more of like a group plan. My personal preference and maybe from employing people here and maybe from a candidate perspective would be it’s a lot cleaner to offer a candidate that money earmarked for the wellness benefit and then they can do whatever they want with it. If they get insurance through their spouse or maybe they’re younger and they’re still on their parents’ plan. Because when you do those interesting health benefits, I don’t want to name names, but there are some that they’re not that great where the candidate would say, “The health insurance that you’re offering me is very low quality versus what the larger hospitals are offering me.” Rather than comparing health insurance plans, it’s better to give them money and then they can use that money for whatever they want.

I wasn’t planning on going into this too much. If we didn’t offer full health benefits, we would also offer what is called Teladoc benefits. We got ours through redirect health and that gives you 24/7 access for a phone call to any physician at any time. You talk to them about your issues and they can also prescribe medications and send the prescription directly to the pharmacy for you to pick up and offer $100 or $150 or something like that per employee per month. You can provide those types of benefits and I believe it falls underneath the Obamacare guidelines if you’re greater than 50 full-time employees. It’s something also that’s out there that you can utilize and not have to buy a full-blown healthcare plan for each employee that could cost you $500 a person. It’s good to recognize that there’s a telehealth option out there. I actually love it because then I don’t have to make an appointment with my doctor and take my kids in and all that stuff. I can call them anytime day or night and Facetime me if they need to see, I don’t know, a rash or a cut. Nonetheless, we’re getting a little bit off topic. Sorry about that. I like what you’re talking about as far as working with that person and making sure speed is a part of the process. Would you ever recommend someone have an offer ready to give to the candidate in person?

You don't need to wait until the candidate is ready to receive the offer if you know that the candidate is a good person for the job. Click To Tweet

Yes. That’s a great option to do it when they’re on site at the interview. If you have the interview scheduled and the candidate is coming in, you can have the offer ready to go and give it to them at the end of the interview day while they’re there. That impresses a candidate that this practice is interested in me. You’re covering the speed basis. They might accept it on the spot based on their positive experience from the interview and the job shadow. The only other piece of advice with that is some organizations will do reference checks or background checks and the fear would be, “If I extend the offer, how am I supposed to do reference checks and background checks?” You can have the offer contingent upon successful completion of the reference checks and background checks. We’re extending you this job offer. It is contingent upon your licensure in the state that’s contingent on your graduation from PT school. It’s contingent upon whatever else you need, but you’re still offering them that position or giving them all the details at that point.

More than likely, extending them an offer in person isn’t at the first interview unless you’ve done a ton of maybe conference calls, video conference calls or multiple calls on the phone. I’m glad you said after their onsite job interview because maybe you want them to work within your facility amongst the other providers and patients for a couple of hours so you get a feel for how they work in the environment and how and what the other people think of them. I could see where this might be completely appropriate after you’ve had a couple of those types of phases that they’ve been through in the interview process.

We do recommend doing the onsite interview in one day because it’s very difficult to get the PT back and do a second day and oftentimes a candidate will drop out of the process if you say, “I want you to take another half day off of work and come in again next week.” That’s not feasible for some candidates where if they’re already there, I would say, “Let’s do the job shadow,” or do whatever you need to do on the day when the candidate is visiting. You might not fully be interested in a certain candidate, but they can still do the job shadow. You might as well have them do everything on the same day. That way they don’t have to try and come back. You don’t have to schedule it.

On the delay side, there will be less delays between the steps because every time that there is a delay, that candidate is considering other employment opportunities. Those delays are very important to minimize in terms of the sending the job offer in person. If that’s not possible, the next best option would be doing it over the phone. I would not recommend sending it as a blind email. “Thanks for your time. We’d like to extend you the offer,” because you want to be there either in person or on the phone when the person first learns that they’re going to be receiving that offer. Because then you can answer their questions and you can clear some things up right away and maybe get the process through to closure.

A lot of our clients would email the job offer, “We decided to offer the position to the candidate. We didn’t call them or bring them back in person. We let them know via email that we were going to offer it to them.” That causes some delays because did the candidate receive your email? Did they open it? Did the attachment work? The candidate can wait and they can reply back at their convenience. Also, candidates are more likely to negotiate. They’re more likely to feel empowered to negotiate job offers via email or text message, which could wind up costing a lot more in terms of wages and benefits if you negotiate via email because the candidate is more empowered to ask for things.

I can understand that. If I recall our process, we usually call and say, “We want to offer you this position. Look for an email from us.” You’re saying you take it a little bit further and say, “We’d like to offer you the position.” Would you get into the details during the course of that call or would it be sufficient to say, “We’re going to send you an offer. If you look in your email right now, it’s there.” How quickly do you want that to happen, so we minimize that time distance between the interaction?

 

I would say the best practice is to extend the offer via the phone and actually go into the details, go into the most important details. “We enjoyed meeting you. I’m calling to offer you our position here. We’re excited for the opportunity to work together. For a start date, we’re flexible on that based on your preferences. For the hourly rate, we were looking at XX per hour. The benefits would include three weeks of PTO. How does that sound?” and go from there. You can say, “I’m going to follow up with the offer letter via email. It sounds like you need a couple of days to look at it. That’s great. let me know as soon as you can because we’d love to work out with you.” Trying to get those questions answered as well right away is important because a candidate might not feel comfortable or might delay the process if there’s emails going back and forth on questions and stuff.

If you can knock it out during the course of a phone conversation, then that could save you days of emails.

We’ve seen a lot of candidates that accept the offer right there on the phone. They don’t negotiate. They accept. On the negotiation side, I may have talked about this last time, but a lot of newer grads are uncomfortable negotiating. They basically take what offer is given, which is from a business perspective, that’s a good thing in some ways. Because PTs are in such high demand, they’re not going to necessarily go back and negotiate with you. They’re going to accept whatever else is out there that’s better fit for their needs. We always recommend to aim high with the offer process rather than trying to low ball and say, “We’re open to negotiate. Let’s offer what the wages to as much as you can on the initial offer and leave it from there.” We can’t risk the candidate not wanting to play ball and do any fancy negotiations. Because then we’re going to maybe miss out on that person.

You imagine what you might gain in offering a lower salary. You could potentially lose out on them finding out that they could have gotten $5,000 more if they went over here and that being an issue down the road. What does that cost you to replace that person? If you low-balled and they’re more than likely going to get a higher offer somewhere else, you might as well add onto your offer in the first place and thus avoid the possibility of losing that person, especially if they’re aligned with you and you see a future with them in your company.

The wage from the employee perspective needs to be competitive. You can certainly play to your strengths like we talked about before, adding in some fun benefits that a larger company might not be able to offer.

That’s part of the interview process. I talked about it a little bit with Kim Rondina. You want to find out where they want to go on the future, what do they want to do with their PT? If they’re looking at particular things that they want to do specifically, that’s maybe also during the course of that job offer where you highlight, “This is what we can do for you. We can provide mentorship via this channel. We can provide continuing education specific to this specialty that you’re wanting to do. We can provide some bonuses that can be tied to student loan repayments.” That sounds like a big thing nowadays because every student’s coming out with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. As you not only explained the benefits, you also might want to take advantage of taking the time to explain the value add that you provide as a small business owner compared to other facilities they might go to.

The people that you work with are your relationship. Click To Tweet

Just one other point that I had on the offers and related to the business owner side is when you’re extending the offer, try and remove the emotion from it. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future in terms of will that PT stick around? Will they leave and go and work for somewhere else? There’s a lot of fear and emotion around that job offer process and that often leads to the hesitation. Should I offer this candidate position? A larger organization, they’re able to oftentimes move quickly because they don’t have that emotional side. We often see it as well in terms of maybe holding out. We’ve had a few clients that we’ve had a lot of people interested in their position, but they’re holding out for a rock star unicorn person coming forward. Not every candidate is going to be the next award-winning physical therapist. Not to say that you shouldn’t hire a quality person, but if you have a job that’s open, you need to evaluate candidates. Can this person do the job? Will they do it well to a certain extent? Will they meet the needs of what we have? That emotional piece sometimes comes into play.

The best way to get around that is to have other input within the hiring process so it’s not you as the owner making the decision. You have your administrator or you have other PTs on your staff that are helping you like a panel discussion where the quality of the hire would increase if you have more data points and more people giving their perspective. You remove yourself a little bit. You obviously still make the final decision as the owner but to have more data points. It helps to remove that emotion in the process.

Maybe stepping back and saying, “What I need is a staff physical therapist.” If that person can perform that job and maybe you don’t see a higher trajectory for them and you don’t project them to be leaders, then maybe that’s okay. Not everyone has to be leadership quality. I surprisingly had therapists who I didn’t think would do much leadership-wise become clinic directors and killed it. Because not everyone has the personality where they’re going to come out and shine and show a ton of charisma and be flamboyant and confident and know exactly what they want to do and how they’re going to do it. “This is how I’m going to rule a team.” Not everyone’s like that. If you’re simply looking to add PTs on staff, you don’t have to have the unicorn out there. Maybe you can suffice with a very solid rock star. Maybe not even a rock star. A very solid person who simply aligns with your values and that’s okay too. Those people can have places within your company.

As your clinic grows and you’re looking to add additional people, there’s a business need to have additional staff. That business need, if you need to hire someone at a certain point in time, there’s only a certain group of candidates that are potentially interested to join you at that time. When you’re recruiting for a position and a given window of time, you’re seeing the interest in candidates at this moment who can join your team, fill your position, help with your utilization and etc.

Is it only in that given period of time?

Down the road. If you wait six months, you’ll have a different pool of candidates at that point. We need to be more business minded with the hiring process.

 

That goes back to what was successful for my business partner, Will Humphreys, and I especially as he was doing the recruiting, is that we’re always recruiting. We’re not going to limit our scope to this period of time. We’re always taking candidates. We always have an ad out. We’re always open to take resumes for physical therapists. That way, when someone does come along that is the unicorn, it’s not only when we have a position available, but it’s at any time we’re open for that person to come into our clinic.

Not having that networking mentality and being willing to talk to candidates even when you’re not actively looking. Are you still willing to you have a PT contact you? Are you still willing to talk to that candidate and maybe help them get connected with another practice area or to save their resume for your future hiring? Maybe they want to come in. Maybe they’re a newer grad and they want to come in and do a job shadow. Would you be open to support that student or that recent grad and have them come in and network with you?

That puts you at least in a position of power where we actually had people on the bench waiting to get into our company. People who would tell us, “When you have an opening and a position in your company, I’d like to be considered please.” That puts you in a position of power so that when someone does leave, and inevitably someone does do so with short notice, we have a pool of candidates that we could pull from that had already been vetted. That changes the dynamic and it puts you in a different position altogether to find the next great person to join your company.

Some candidates are not in extreme hurry. We have a situation right now with a client where they do have a candidate waiting to go in basically. The candidate is continuing their current employment, and everything is fine. Once the situation opens and the clinic becomes available, it’s intended that they’re going to join the team. You never know what’s going to happen. At least have a few people on the sidelines. It’s great.

It makes a big difference. Thanks for your insight on that. We talked last time a little bit about recruiting the PT. I don’t remember us taking it all the way through to how do you get them to accept that offer. These are some important tools and tips to make sure you carry that ball all the way across the goal line.

It’s important. Obviously, we know once you have that candidate, you’ve interviewed them, you see them as being great and how do we seal the deal and actually get it going. Especially when you have larger organizations with more sophisticated HR and recruitment procedures, the PT is going to have multiple job offers as well. Getting out there and getting there first would be ideal.

Thanks for your time again. If people wanted to get in touch with you, Brian, how would they do that especially if they’re looking to get some help for hiring PTs?

We still have our website, CareerTreeNetwork.com. We also added HireAPhysicalTherapist.com as our second website, which is more employer-focused. There are blog posts with strategies, information about our service as well. People can actually book a call to chat with me right on the HireAPhysicalTherapist.com website. I’d be happy to talk. I know I’m not a salesman per se, so I’m happy to chat about this for free. Feel free to book a call and we can chat if anybody’s interested.

Thanks again for your time. I appreciate you coming for a second go around.

Thanks a lot. It’s a lot of fun.

Important Links:

• Career Tree Network
• Brian Weidner – Past episode
• Paychex
• Teladoc
• Kim Rondina – Past episode
• CareerTreeNetwork.com
• HireAPhysicalTherapist.com

About Brian Weidner