How to Hire Clinicians for Your Group Practice
Download the checklist of group therapy interview questions
Download free resource
Enter your email below to access this resource.
By entering your email address, you are opting-in to receive emails from SimplePractice on its various products, solutions, and/or offerings. Unsubscribe anytime.
When considering how to hire clinicians for your group practice, you’ll want to first define the employee journey before you hire for your therapy group practice.
Similar to defining the client journey—where you conceptualize your client’s experience from first contact to termination session—you will want to map out this experience for your future clinicians, too. This will give you clarity on how to expand your private practice in a values-aligned way.
“Your employees can only go as far as you've envisioned,” says Julianne Guinasso, LMFT and co-founder of Level Up Leaders Inc.
While you can't foresee every change, if you have clarity on their growth path, you decrease the chance of employee turnover or stagnation during an intended growth phase for your therapy group practice.
Consider these questions to determine how you will support clinician development:
- Do your clinicians specialize in caring for certain populations, diagnoses, or treatments?
- Will they have the opportunity to expand their clinical services beyond the therapy room, such as through workshops or intensive services?
- As you grow and expand, will you be creating opportunities for clinical or administrative advancement?
As your team grows, the goal is to diversify your team's strengths, styles, and identities. The broader your vision, the more comprehensive and inclusive your workforce and service offerings will be.
In this article, we’ll cover how to hire clinicians for your therapy group practice, starting with mapping the employee journey.
How to map out the employee journey
Take a pen and paper or tablet or computer, and envision the ideal employment journey for each position you need to hire.
The journey documents should include the values and skills each applicant would need to espouse upon hire and in order to advance on their career path in your private practice.
Consider the following as you map out your group practice clinicians’ employment journeys:
- Conceptualize and visualize the work culture you would like to have.
- Identify the values that would need to be practiced to develop this type of work culture (e.g., curious, generous, inclusive, transparent).
- Identify what positions you need to map out (e.g., associates, licensed clinicians, clinical supervisor, clinical director, etc.).
- Determine how you want each position to grow (e.g., associate to a licensed clinician to clinical supervisor to a clinical director).
- What values and skill set does each position need to embody (e.g., demonstration of client retention and successful terminations)?
- What’s the expected employment span for each position (e.g., clinicians are anticipated to stay 3-5 years before transitioning, taking on new responsibilities and services, or being promoted to a leadership position)?
Establish a transparent pay structure that incentivizes growth.
Once you document the employment journey, put yourself in the employee's shoes.
Would you make this journey?
Consider shifting the employee journey based on your introspection. Your business health is reliant on retaining your clinicians and allowing them to grow alongside your practice.
How to hire clinicians for your group practice
After you’ve mapped out the journey, you’re ready to find clinicians and prepare for the interview process. Here are steps on how to hire clinicians for your therapy group practice.
Where to find clinicians
Although the transition from solo to group practice can be overwhelming, the process of creating your team and envisioning your workplace can be exciting—especially if you’re starting a mental health practice from scratch. Your work culture is how you set your group practice apart from other employment opportunities.
Here are some passive and active ways you can encourage clinicians to apply:
- Network with colleagues
- Post and share on social media
- Have a dedicated page on your website where applicants can complete a brief application or submit a resume
- Ask current employees for recommendations
- Post on online job boards
- Reach out to local universities
Make sure your job posting and the job description are in alignment. For example, you might include expectations around their caseload, the type of work required (such as individual therapy or group therapy), treatment modalities, populations served, and work location.
Include information about your work culture, values, and mission. For example, what are your diversity equity and inclusion (DEAI) or anti-racist practices? How is your work culture trauma-informed? What practices within your work culture support psychological safety? Sharing active practices showcases a values-aligned work culture for potential applicants.
Qualities and credentials to look for
Before offering an interview, you want to gather and share information on the following items to properly screen applicants and save time:
- License type:
- Confirm the applicant’s license directly with the qualified board respective to your state licensure and type.
- Gather a brief description of the applicant’s prior clinical work experience.
- Specialization:
- If your group practice specializes in a treatment modality, service, or treatment population, consider what training or certificates would be relevant in advance.
- If you’ll be providing those upon hiring, it’s important to know the applicant’s interest in working through a specific modality, service, or with a specific population.
- Share if the position is full-time or part-time employment.
- Clarify if the position is in-office, remote, or hybrid.
- Ensure salary expectations are in alignment with applicant expectations, and consider how benefits, flexibility, and other factors can offset any differences.
Interviewing beyond clinical skill set
Experienced interviewers will tell you that clinical skills aren’t always the most important factors in considering a new hire. It may be more prudent for you to hire someone who is open to learning, interested in cultivating an inclusive work culture, and willing to contribute to a shared vision without erasing each individual's unique contributions.
How applicants perform in interviews does not equate to how they will perform as employees. There's still a lot you can do to ensure the best fit makes it past the finish line. Thinking back to the employee journey, what key values and skill sets did you need for the position? List those out, and be prepared to listen to the applicant's responses, when asking them about their values and skills.
Creating a relational interview process that encourages formal and informal conversations around values and the working relationship communicates to applicants that they are valued as humans.
Group practice therapy interview questions
Future goals and growth
- What are your goals as a clinician?
- What inspired you to apply to our group practice?
- Do you have any professional development goals outside of the therapy room, such as leadership opportunities, offering workshops, or creating educational content?
Mindset
- Tell us about a time that you overcame a major challenge in your work. Who or what provided you support?
- What’s an important value you hold about your work, and how could we support you in aligning with that value if you joined our team?
- How do you care for your well-being during the workday, and, if possible, how could we support you in doing that?
Work culture
- What’s an important value you want to see demonstrated by others in your work environment?
- Tell us about a time you felt seen, appreciated, or supported in your work.
- Share an example of how you have engaged with your colleagues to support an inclusive and unified work culture.
Clinical experience
- Share a clinical success you are most proud of.
- Tell us about a time when you received difficult feedback about your work.
- What modality or group of people are you most passionate about working with?
- What modality or group of people are you least passionate about working with?
- How do you feel about clinical documentation? What methods do you employ to maintain or catch up on your documentation?
Collaboration and communication
- Share about a challenging time you had to work collaboratively with a colleague. What strategies and communication skills did you use? What was the outcome?
- Share about a time you experienced frustration at work. How did you manage the feelings of frustration and work towards resolution?
- Share about a time you disagreed with your supervisor or leadership. What was the disagreement? How did you approach the situation? What was the outcome?
- Share about a time you made a mistake at work. Did you feel supported by your supervisor? What was the outcome?
Other considerations to keep in mind
Another question to think about when you’re determining how to hire clinicians is: What skills or qualities are you willing to nurture, and what skills or qualities need to be in place upon hiring?
Having these defined in advance will be helpful. Whether you’re moving from solo to group practice or are an established group practice owner, everyone is different and supports clinical and professional development in different ways—it’s important you hire clinicians who are compatible with your managerial style and strengths.
Everything is ultimately coachable, yet there may be some skills and qualities you don’t have the bandwidth to coach and develop. For example, maybe you’re willing to work with an employee around learning to have a curious and open mindset at work, but you really need someone to be on top of their documentation, or vice versa.
The more clear you are on what you have the capacity for, the more successful you'll be. Following these steps improves the likelihood that the employee experience, from first contact to onboarding, establishes a mutually beneficial outcome.
How SimplePractice helps you confidently manage your group practice
SimplePractice is an all in one practice management software that helps you confidently manage a group practice and handle everything from insurance billing and client work to team management and business operations.
Streamline insurance billing with easy-to-use tools that enable you and your clinicians to create, submit and manage batches of claims all within SimplePractice. Or, opt to let professionals handle insurance billing on your behalf, from claim submission to claim resolution.
Plus, your group practice clinicians benefit from integrated client care and management tools. Clinicians can automatically send and analyze client measures like the PHQ-9 and GAD-7, while keeping track of client outcomes over time, and seamlessly manage client engagement from one Client Portal.
Try SimplePractice free for 30 days. No credit card needed.