we interviewed 15 applicants in january without posting that we’re hiring
Over the past several years, my role has shifted in our business more and more from technician to operator (Thanks E-Myth for giving us this language)! RJ and I work together often to clarify roles and responsibilities and focus on tasks that move our business forward. One of those tasks is hiring and onboarding. As leaders, we’re constantly refining our hiring processes. I thought I’d share some of these insights with you today.
This post might be helpful for you if you also run a small business, or lead a team, or make hiring decisions. Otherwise, you can skip around to my other posts on mental health and anxiety, if that’s why you’re here.
In our business — a collaborative mental health practice with two offices in Cobb County, Georgia — one role clarification that’s been helpful for us is that RJ conducts all first round interviews for hiring. He is also the point person for hiring and career inquires. This streamlines our process from the start. Next, if a candidate fits the overall criteria during the initial interview, they move on to a second round interview, typically hosted by myself or myself and someone else on our team.
If you clicked this post, you’re probably curious about how we interviewed 15 candidates in January alone without ever posting that we’re hiring. Before we dive in, no, we don’t advertise for open positions at our company. That’s an intentional part of our hiring strategy, which I’ll share here in a bit. Secondly, our company is currently (as of this writing in January 2024) 22 providers and two locations. Fifteen applicants in one month is a huge number for any small business. I also recognize it’s January, and many are looking for new opportunities at the start of a new year, but we have a steady flow of applicants year round, and we always have since we opened in 2020. When we announced the opening of our second office location in early 2022, we received over 20 applications for that office alone, before we’d even renovated our buildling. We opened Marietta with six or seven providers… I can’t remember the exact number at this time.
What comes next are several keys to our hiring mentality, strategy, and process as leaders and small business owners. For those who are wondering, RJ, my husband and business partner, is the strategic genius behind most of our company vision. I’m the operations/systems/marketing/compliance/nitty-gritty gal. If you enjoy this kind of leadership/entrepreneurial content let me know, and I hope to make this a series regular on the blog in addition to the mental health, relationship, and high performance habits content I regularly share. Be sure to say hi on Instagram and follow our business account.
ONE: Be a leader worth following
I shared this in my last post on leadership lessons, but I can’t stress it enough. Great leaders want to work for great leaders. American businesswoman and investor Barbara Corcoran says it best — your team doesn’t work for you, you work for your team. Although it may not seem like a “hiring strategy” the best place to start with hiring and leading a team is to be a leader worth following.
If you’re not that leader (yet), which I certainly was not when we started our company, it’s your job to become a “leader worth following” (a phrase I adopted from Andy Stanley) every single day. No one is responsible for the leadership and strategic direction and decisions of your company except for you. As a leader, your focus should be on leadership development and becoming more and more a leader worth following. Unless you want to run a solo-practice or business of one, if so, carry on.
Great leaders look at themselves first, lead themselves first, and inspire others to grow as leaders. Think about the best leaders you’ve worked for: What did they have in common? Most likely, they led themselves well.
Great questions to ask yourself as a leader who (wants to) hire other leaders:
Am I leading myself well?
Would I want to work under my leadership?
Am I a leader worth following?
How would those close to me evaluate my leadership?
What am I doing everyday to grow as a leader?
TWO: Develop a professional AND personal brand
One focus at our company is to create a strong professional brand AND personal brand. Our goal is not only to establish a strong brand, but to back it up with actual substance, excellence, generosity, and integrity. Anyone can create a brand with a decent website, logo, and copywriting, it takes consistent effort, energy, strategy, and investment to build a strong brand and company, so much so that others are desperate and passionate to work with you.
A company’s professional brand is only as strong as the leader’s personal brand. I learned about personal branding early in my career as a professional counselor. At the time, I was one of the youngest counselors in our local area, only 23 when I began practicing. My supervisor and mentor, a genius and successful business owner, advised me to play to this advantage. My mentor encouraged me to work with children and teens, a population I wasn’t at first interested in working with. My reputation and personal “brand” as a “relatable, young counselor for kids and teens” became so well known in our area that it built the entire foundation on which our current company stands. It also became what I was known for professionally in local continuing education and supervision circles in our industry. However, my “brand” wasn’t built in a day, on a whim. It was built on consistent, intentional excellence and integrity in the services I provided my clients and community over a period of years.
I believe one’s personal reputation and brand grows positively over time only when it’s built on substance. For us, this is the excellent customer service we value and model in our company. Imagine if the services we provide were just sub-par? No one would refer us to their friends. We’d have no real “brand” to stand on… other than bad customer service. And we can’t (and don’t) get it right 100% of the time. Trust me on that. The goal is that a personal and professional brand is built on what others encounter from you more times than not. Think 90/10. Not perfection, but direction determines your brand.
I know professionals in many different industries who have a weak personal brand. Either because they’ve established a reputation of dishonesty, or gossip, or price gouging, or stealing clients, or otherwise unethical or unprofessional behavior. I’ve heard it all. I try to stay out of it completely. I quit going to one doctor who I saw for many years because the front desk staff was rude to a patient while I overheard their conversation in the lobby. The bottom line: You’re always establishing your personal brand, for good or bad. Even when you don’t think anyone’s watching. But that’s what integrity is right? Being the same person publicly, privately, professionally, and personally.
Developing a strong professional and personal brand relates to hiring the right people in every way. A strong professional brand attracts the right people and detracts the wrong people from your business. I heard a rumor about myself as a clinical supervisor once — that someone (who never worked with me) shared they’d never recommend working with me “because Nicole has high standards.” You’re right, I do! If someone isn’t okay with high standards and excellence, they shouldn’t “apply within.” My supervisees know I have standards — they’re listed in my lengthy supervision contract. But my supervisees also know I believe they’re excellent and capable of meeting high standards, so I hold them to it.
If you’ve yet to establish a professional or personal brand, you won’t know who to attract to work with you and candidates won’t know if they want to work with you because they won’t know who you are. Branding is a key to business success in many areas, but your brand must be consistently built on substance.
Food for Thought:
What personal and professional brand am I displaying?
Can I back up my “brand” with substance?
Is my brand one of excellence or is it sub-par?
Am I consistent with my brand?
What do I value? My reputation? My quick response time to new clients? My clinical skills? My ability to network? My own ego? Leadership? (This will give insight into your values and brand.)
We could talk for hours on personal branding… maybe soon?
THREE: Clearly define your values and process
Building upon a strong professional and personal brand, you can’t know who is a good hire until you clearly define your values as a company and leader and your hiring and onboarding values. For us, our company values, or as we call them “Team Commitments”, define every decision we make for our company, from client care all the way down to hiring and onboarding.
When interviewing candidates to join our team, even from the moment we receive a resume and cover letter, we ask ourselves, “Does this person’s values align with our team values?” or more simply put, “Will this person be successful here and contribute to make our team better?” If the answer is “No”, we won’t hire someone. No matter how impressive their resume.
Great leaders know their values.
I’m hesitant to even share our values (as leaders and as a company), although they should be pretty obvious if you’re familiar with our company. Our values don’t matter when it’s your company that you’re leading. Often a company’s values will be based around a leader’s values. This can be both good and bad. Anytime a company culture or values is based on a leader, it can be detrimental if that leader leaves or isn’t leading in the same capacity over time. To combat this, we spent over six months with our Leadership Team developing our Team Commitments, asking together, “How does an AWC provider behave? What is important to us as a provider’s team? What do we say we value? Are those values portrayed in our actual day-to-day behaviors (i.e. are we consistent)?” This six month process was highly impactful for us as a team. It ensured that our values weren’t based on one or two leaders (i.e. RJ and I as the founders), and it defined our values into six Team Commitments that set the tone for all our team members.
Our Team Commitments also shape our hiring and interviewing process, questions, and decisions.
Clearly defining your values and processes brings clarity when hiring.
FOUR: Let others do the work for you
This tip isn’t about laziness. Great leaders are definitely not lazy.
I shared previously that we don’t post or announce publicly about our career openings. That’s intentional. You see, one of our values at Atlanta Wellness Collective is community. We value collaboration and community within our providers team. We say, if you want to show up, get your work done, keep your door shut, not engage, and go home, you’re probably not going to like it here. You’re not a fit, and that’s okay. More on that in #5. Because we value community as a company, and want to find the best fits for our company, our best hiring comes from (1) personal referrals and (2) word of mouth.
Note: #4 only works well if you have #1, 2, and 3 down because you won’t get many hiring referrals if you’re (1) not a leader worth following, (2) unclear about who you are/your brand, and (3) unclear on your values or your processes aren’t aligned with your values. Moving on…referrals.
Our favorite hires (okay, we don’t play favorites, really) are those who were already connected with our team members in some way… friends, neighbors, former colleagues, etc. For example, in December, we hired one of our current provider’s old roommates and friend. This new hire found out through word of mouth, from her friend who works with us, that we had an opening for a play therapist, and she applied. We’ve learned that by hiring folks through word-of-mouth and existing relationships, candidates and new hires are already familiar with our values, ethics, expectations, and company culture. And what’s a win for us is that our current team members would refer their friends to work with us also! We take that to say they really love their job and team, and we’re doing something right.
When we hire word-of-mouth referrals, we’re also hiring in alignment with our value of community. A hiring policy that’s been informed by this same value is that we hire candidates who live locally to our offices (with exceptions, but in general, we stick by this policy). By doing so, our team members live and serve in the same community as one another and as our clients. We value serving our local community and being a part of it. Another example of how our value of community informs our hiring processes.
So, to get back to it, we don’t publicly post about hiring, and we have a steady flow of applicants year round who hear about us, want to work with us, and have told us, “So-and-so said I had to apply here!”
Let others do the work for you.
FIVE: Know who isn’t a fit
As a small business, know who isn’t a fit for your company. So often, we can adopt a scarcity mentality that says there won’t be enough people out there. We make poor judgments and decisions out of a scarcity mindset. This can lead to bad decisions in hiring. First, recognize an abundance mindset says there are tons of amazing leaders out there just waiting to join your company. This was a mindset we adopted early on — we know the right people will always find us. Second, informed by your personal brand and company values, know who is not a fit for your company, and despite their impressive resume or referral, know when to say, “It’s not a great fit for us (or for right now), even though you are a great person.”
Only you know who will be a fit at your company and at what time. Only you know who will best thrive under your leadership. Only you can set the standard of who is a fit and who is not a fit. Once you determine these factors, create a system and steps to ensure that you’re interviewing and selecting the proper candidates. The goal? Find the best fit to join your team. Alignment will lead to greater team cohesion and success and will cause you less headaches.
For all candidates we interview, very few make a second-round interview. Even fewer are hired and onboarded. The main reason for this is because we invest heavily in our team members and care a lot about protecting our team culture. We’ve worked hard to refine our process of hiring and onboarding those who are a good fit to our team and our vision. This also (hopefully) allows our team to know how special they are because each of them is incredibly special to us. We don’t hire just anyone, and we’d rather have an empty office than a bad fit.
I’ll share a quick, related story about one of our current team members. In 2021, she applied for our Clinical Internship Program, and although she is amazing and would’ve been excellent, because our Internship Program is highly selective and competitive, she wasn’t the best fit at the time for our program spot. We ended up only taking one clinical intern that year, out of over a dozen applications. We told her after our second interview, “Come back after graduation. We think you’re awesome, and you’d be a perfect fit for our team!” Well she did come back. We were thrilled. Exactly one year later she joined us as an Associate Licensed Provider. A reminder that just because someone isn’t a fit right now, they could be a fit later. The important thing is to know who is and isn’t a fit. Ideally, hire the best fit at the best time.
One of RJ and I’s go to line when folks ask us if we’re hiring is, “We will always hire the right person.” Sometimes people get frustrated by this answer. But it’s true to us. We will always hire the right person.
Final Thoughts
I know leadership can be a challenging growth area for many — especially if you never envisioned yourself in a leadership role like myself. I never dreamed I’d be an entrepreneur!
Personal and professional growth are a journey. Leadership is a journey. Take it step by step. By consistently reviewing your own values and leaning into hard lessons, you create space for reflection, development, and growth. As you navigate this journey of hiring and leadership, celebrate your victories along the way. Don’t shy away from leadership challenges! You’ve got this! And let me know if you enjoy entrepreneurship posts like this, I’ll keep ‘em coming.
Thanks for reading! Want more writings and resources?
Here are a few blog posts you might enjoy:
001. Read me if you want personal development books to dive into
002. Read me if you need to delegate some things but don’t know how to start
003. Read me when your inner mean girl is loud
004. Join the weekly newsletter for resources, essays, and encouragement.
Disclaimer: This blog is not intended to substitute professional therapeutic advice. Although I’m a mental health professional, no content on this site, regardless of date, should ever be used as a substitute for direct professional advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician. Talk with your healthcare provider about your health concerns and before starting or stopping therapies or treatment recommendations.
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