Are you a small practice facing trouble while recruiting top talent? Here are a few effective tips?

Given their limited scale of operations, small and independent practices tend to face serious challenges while they run their competitive race for acquiring talent. Since they already suffer from a lack of recruitment and retention resources, limited financial cushion to offer lucrative industry-competitive compensation packages remains a leading concern of such practices. You can’t possibly be as generous as a large-scale practice, can you?

To counter the problem, management experts advise developing a well-crafted recruitment strategy so that such small and independent practices hire the right people for the right jobs. Following are a few tips that can prove really handy for hiring the best clinical staff for your independent practice:

Target the Right Talent

You first need to develop a profile of the ‘right candidate’. We advise targeting candidates belonging to different areas so that they bring in diverse knowledge from their respective backgrounds. These are people who are adequately familiar with their background regions, their requirements, and the norms of healthcare practices there; hence they will help broaden your practice’s scope and horizon. You should perhaps use professional networks, physician associations, and medical schools to identify potential candidates who fit your required profile.

Invest in Training

Learning and development remain pivotal in the success of any medical practice. It becomes all the more important for independent practices who must strive hard to retain their existing talent and avoid the cost of acquiring new ones. Hence, you should collaborate with regional medical associates or medical schools to attract potential candidates, train them well, and capitalize upon them as your biggest asset. You must offer them opportunities to learn about small practice medicine, for instance, to help them gain exposure and experience both.

Promise Growth Prospects

As important as training, promising growth prospects on the job will also help you attract and retain your talented staff. Small and independent practices must establish ways for their physicians, clinicians, non-physician providers, and support staff to grow professionally during their association with you. For instance, you can facilitate your staff to pursue further education. This way, you will not only invest in your staff’s professional growth but will eventually reap benefits in the long run. You are better investing in training and promotion of existing employees than taking an external hire on board. Make sure you don’t forget to advertise these professional development opportunities as your recruiting tool.

Offer Attractive Compensation but Budgeting First

Once you have the right talent on board, the trick is to retain it. Offering attractive compensation plays an important role in both contexts. This includes a market competitive salary plus standard benefits such as health insurance, paid vacations, sick leaves, and so forth. Again, being a small practice with limited resources you don’t have extra money to fund a new position. So, you must plan strategically and start budgeting for any potential new positions well in advance.

Offer Incentives

While salary is perhaps the most attractive component of acquiring and retaining staff, small practices can also tie up hard work to compensate. This will boost the total compensation package. You might want to offer bonuses to clinicians who meet their productivity goals. Another option could be to establish an employee profit-sharing program. Don’t forget that your current staff in your goldmine and they can help you in finding new employees. Hence, you can perhaps institute a referral program in which the existing team members refer to a new hire and earn rewards.

Offer Benefits and Perks

Individualized benefits always drive the staff to work harder and exceed expectations. Offering flexible working hours, for instance, can be a major driving factor for a working mom physician. Similarly, another staff member might be more interested in paid leaves as compared to health insurance since she is already covered through her spouse’s plan. You must take time to understand the individual needs of your staff members and tailor their compensation packages accordingly. Another meaningful initiative can be empowering the physicians to hire their own care teams, defining their own comfortable office hours, and so forth.

Formalize, Standardize, and Document

Despite the fact that small and independent practices should focus on offering individualized employment packages, a formal procedure must be in place to document. Proper policies and procedures must be in place to establish available benefits so that the individualized packages don’t seem inconsistent. Make sure you are a good employer and not just a good healthcare provider.