How to Hire for Your Medical Practice (And Actually Know Who You’re Getting)

You did the interview. You sat across from a candidate, asked a few questions, shook hands. Thought you were done. And then, three months into working with that person, realized that the version of them in the interview had very little in common with the version standing in our office.

Hiring for your medical practice can be as simple or as rigorous as you want it to be.

Adding a few steps borrowed from the business world, and using a structure that actually maps to how physicians think, gives you a much better shot at, in the words of Jim Collins, getting the right people in the right seats.

The book Who, made me realize that a CV is a list of someone’s perceived greatest accomplishments. And none of their weaknesses or failures. It is by default one-sided. When you think of it that way, all of a sudden CVs seem more like a screening tool. Not a benchmark tool.

Be Specific About What You Actually Need

Before you post a job or interview a single person, get clear on exactly what this role is. Not in your head. On paper.

Whether it is a new role in your practice or even if you are replacing someone who’s been in this role, getting crystal clear is only going to make hiring easier and more successful for you and whoever you bring on.

What are the responsibilities? What does a job well done look like, concretely? What doe success look like at 30 days, 90 days, 6 months?

This is useful for candidates because they can self-select out if the role isn’t what they want. It’s more useful for you because it forces the discipline of defining the job before you hand it to someone.

Another huge benefit of doing this? The job description document becomes the foundation for the position’s Playbook (or standard operating procedure (SOP)) ie what the job is and how to do it. This can be a living document, and any person, present or future, can add to it so that it is always up to date and can serve as training and a guide so you don’t have to repeat yourself over and over.

You Can’t Really Know Until You Work Together

Dan Martell, in Buy Back Your Time, puts it plainly: you can’t work with someone until you’ve worked with them.

We know this from residency. We did electives at programs we were seriously considering. We worked alongside the teams for weeks. When we were the residents and the attendings, we see how the medical students operate under pressure, respond to feedback, what their judgment was like in the moment.

The interview was not the most important part of the process. The elective was.

This translates this to when you hire for your medical practice. Potentially, you work with someone in the hospital who has a part-time contract. You might be able to work with them in a slightly different role but still get to know their qualities. This is how I actually hired the two patient-facing practice extenders I work with in my own practice.

If that’s not an option or the right person isn’t already in your orbit, the business equivalent is a paid trial project. If you have two strong candidates and a project sitting on your to-do list (like a post-op instructional video for patients), bring both candidates in for a defined, compensated period to do the work. Watch how they take direction. Watch what they do when something isn’t clear. Watch how the interact with your team. Watch whether they follow through without being chased.

This isn’t standard practice in most medical offices. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be.

Build In a Probationary Period

Even after a good hiring process, a probationary period matters. It protects both of you. It creates a clear window to re-evaluate.

The probationary period works best when the expectations are already written down (which is another reason clearly describing the role and laying the foundation of the Playbook is so important).

If you have done the work of defining the role clearly, the probationary evaluation is just a check against that document. If they’re meeting the goals, easy you’re good. If they’re not, everyone was clear from the beginning what success looked like and they haven’t been meeting it.

The Short Version

Is hiring always this structured? No. Plenty of good hires happen on gut feeling and a reference from a colleague.

But if you’ve ever had to let someone go, or navigated working with someone who wasn’t right for the role, you know what that costs. It costs time, your team morale and your energy (sometimes soul) for weeks or months before you do anything about it.

When you hire for your medical practice, the upfront work of defining the role, running a trial project and setting a real probationary structure is not extra. It’s insurance. And for physicians building a practice that actually runs the way you want it to, one that gets your time and energy back, it’s the kind of investment that pays back faster than almost anything else.

We don’t do this alone. And just like companies that became great, we need the right people on our bus.

Dr. Kate Boehm MD, MEd, FRCSC is a reconstructive plastic surgeon and the founder of DuplicateMeMD. She stubbornly believes that practice management is the key for female physicians to get time back.