There are challenges unique to being a job seeker in today’s world, but there are also challenges regarding hiring practices, especially in the holistic practice industry. How can you continue to grow your holistic practice with the best talent? What can your holistic practice do to ensure the smoothest onboarding experience for your new hire?
Find your answers to your questions surrounding hiring best practices further in this article and help your holistic practice ensure both growth and success.
Here at Holistic Billing Services, we understand that holistic medicine is unlike most medical specialties. This has its advantages - less local competition, more loyal patients, freedom to run your practice as you see fit - but can also come with drawbacks, like problematic payer relationships, smaller patient populations, and a smaller pool of potential employees with a background in holistic medicine or billing. 
Since it can be challenging for holistic practices to find job candidates with specialized experience, it‘s critical to hire as smartly as possible. The key is not to expect any employee to walk in with a keen understanding of the ins and outs of your holistic practice. Rather, it‘s essential to make sure you hire staff with the capacity to learn quickly and provide your holistic patients with top-of-the-line service. Here are some tips on attracting best-in-class applicants, making sure they‘re right for your holistic practice, and getting them to choose to work for you.
There are many facets to the hiring process, no matter what industry you’re in! The following best practices tips will help make this process more focused, positive, and rewarding for your holistic practice.
Look around your holistic practice’s office and do a mental audit of your current staff. Are you happy or unhappy with their performance? What skills are missing from your current team? Which employee‘s performance would you most like to see emulated by an incoming staffer?
Avoid making repeat mistakes - did your last two temp-agency hires prove unsuccessful? Try advertising with an online job posting site, instead. Or, if you‘re happy with the team you have, ask around for referrals; good people tend to know good people!
As you review resumes, think through your goals and the human capital on your team. Do you have a capable staff that could train a ’blank slate‘ hire without holistic healthcare experience? If so, don‘t discount recent graduates. If not, don‘t feel bad about holding out for someone with a more specific medical office background.
Your holistic practice should be leveraging data to help you target the right candidates for your open positions, conducting intake meetings with hiring managers, and coming prepared to those meetings armed with data to help guide the conversation. Intake meetings are an essential foundation for the employment process; recruiters and hiring managers need to be aligned on recruiting goals and ideal candidate profiles, especially when scouting for new or unique positions. As the person or team with expert knowledge on the holistic practice industry, you should be able to speak to the number of potential candidates available in a given market, as well as insights on salary expectations or market cost of the position you’re hiring for.
In the interest of time, you may want to just pluck out the first few qualified candidates from your applicant pool and bring them in right away. Do your best to avoid acting on that impulse! Narrowing down your list too quickly can put you in a bind, and if the interviews go poorly, you‘ll be back to square one.
Instead, conduct five-minute phone interviews with 7-10 strong candidates, and bring the top four in for interviews. That way, you‘ll have a good idea of the candidates‘ interpersonal skills before they come into your holistic practice.
When interviewing candidates, give them an honest overview of what the job entails and how much it pays; observe how they react. Are they eager? Intimidated? Displeased? Don‘t shy away from explaining the ’tough parts‘ of the job; the hire you choose should be prepared to accept the good and bad aspects of working at your holistic practice. It behooves all parties involved to have a candid conversation about the rewards and challenges of the work!
If you have only one opening, avoid making an on-the-spot offer until you‘ve interviewed your top four candidates. Once you‘ve met them all and narrowed it down to the right person, extend the offer right away while being direct about the start date and pay. Don‘t give the offeree too much time to decide whether to accept; you don‘t want to lose your #2 prospect to another opportunity if #1 doesn‘t work out.
Then, prepare to make your new hire a well-informed employee by plotting out your training plan in advance of your new staffer‘s first day. Who will be the primary trainer? Who will cover the trainer‘s other responsibilities while he or she tends to the new hire? Try to plan a comprehensive experience for your holistic practice’s newest employee, one that includes demonstrations of daily task management like record keeping, resources pertinent to training, icebreaker questions to help them acclimate to the team, and more. These efforts will help them adapt to your holistic practice’s environment, and give them a foundation for success!
An essential part of bringing your newest employee up to speed for your holistic practice is to clarify your expectations of them and their progress over the course of a set period of time. Make sure your new hire understands how long you expect training to take, and how soon you‘ll expect them to start working with patients and contributing to office productivity. Establishing a general timeframe for them to feel comfortable navigating your holistic practice and personal timeline for becoming more involved with their duties will help you evaluate their progress. Maintaining clear communication about such expectations, and being available to help answer questions or challenges they encounter, will help them thrive in your holistic practice’s environment. Careful planning is always the best way to ensure any new hire‘s success.
Established in 1999, Holistic Billing Services is an integrative health services firm focused on streamlining your documentation, billing, and coding process to enhance your revenue cycle management. Our secure online portal provides acupuncture practices, massage therapy practices, and chiropractic practices an easier way to manage their health insurance billing so they can focus on delivering quality patient care and growing their practices through effective hiring processes!
As the nation’s largest billing provider for holistic healthcare, we service over 1,200 practices across the country. Thanks to our knowledge of insurance reimbursement and healthcare auditing risks, holistic practitioners average over $185 per hour of treatment with our billing and coding services. Contact us today and see what we can do for your holistic practice!
At Holbie, we offer complete and innovative Holistic Billing Services for acupuncture, massage therapy, and chiropractic providers.
At Holbie, we offer complete and innovative Holistic Billing Services for acupuncture, massage therapy, and chiropractic providers.
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