How to Recruit Practitioners Without Posting a Job Ad | GYC Podcast 363

What if your Instagram could become your most powerful recruitment tool?

In this episode of the Grow Your Clinic podcast, we unpack a smarter, proactive approach to hiring that goes beyond traditional job ads. We dive into the power of a simple weekly recruitment time block and how adopting an “always hiring” mindset helps you attract the right practitioners before you even need them. From creating a standout ‘Join Our Team’ page to building binge-worthy social content that showcases your culture, we cover practical ways to position your clinic as a magnet for top talent. You’ll also learn how to leverage your team’s network, nurture relationships with past applicants, and build a go-to pipeline of future hires - so you’re never starting from scratch.

If you’re ready to turn your online presence into a consistent stream of aligned candidates, this episode gives you the playbook.

Need to systemise your clinic? Start your free trial of Allie!
https://www.allieclinics.com/ 

In This Episode You'll Learn:  
📸 Tips for creating a binge-worthy Instagram grid to attract ideal candidates 
🌟 How to boost applicant numbers and quality without job ads 
🗓️ The power of time-blocking for recruitment efforts 
🤝 Building a pipeline of potential applicants through relationship management 
📈 Strategies for showcasing your clinic's culture and values to prospective team members

Resources:
CM's Recruitment Immersion (for members only)


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► http://facebook.com/clinicmastery

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Transcript

0:01

G'day, good people. Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic podcast by Clinic Mastery. Here's what's coming up inside of this episode. This episode will be right up your Allie if you're looking to recruit practitioners to your clinic. We're diving into boosting applicant numbers and quality. And trust me, you want to hear Bex take on her always hiring approach that gets applicants without a job ad. Plus stick around for when we discuss the ultimate join our team page on your Imagine being able to recruit without posting a job ad. Is She time blocks into her calendar every week, a Showcasing your clinic. You want to think, what would That's the interesting thing about content, is that usually it's other clinicians checking out what other clinics are doing. Because I'm not wanting to attract every But over time, as you build out your Rolodex, or for those who are perhaps younger than 35, your contacts database on your iPhone, you're building the skill. And that's the thing, Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by AllieClinics.com. If you're the kind of clinic owner who loves to feel organized and stay ahead of the chaos, you'll love Allie. Think of it as your digital clone. It's the single source of truth for all your clinic's policies, systems, and training. Test it for free at AllieClinics.com. And in other news, applications are now open to work with us one-on-one at Clinic Mastery. If you want support to grow your clinic and bring your vision to life, just email hello@clinicmastery.com with the subject line podcast, and we'll line up a time to chat. All right, let's get into the episode. Good to be back. It's episode 363, Back in the Saddle. My name is Ben Lynch. If you're new to the pod, welcome. And for those listeners that are tuning in every single week, thank you for your loyalty. Thanks for the comments. Thanks for the reviews. We love hearing the stories. We got one through that I saw at least on Slack. Was it Kira Lee who recently said, loved the podcast and led to me joining in the Business Academy or Elevate? Sorry, I missed the specific one there, but welcome to you. I'm again joined by Bec Clare and Jack O'Brien, the co-hostests with the mostests. Is that how it goes? Anyway. Good to see you both. A warm welcome to a few folks that have joined Allie recently. It's been going crazy, J.I.B. I know your videos are gaining lots of traction on the interwebs. But a warm welcome to Adrian, Kyra Lee, Adil, Jasmine, Orit, Jen, and Lauren. Thank you for installing Allie for all HR and compliance. If you feel like things are a bit of a scattered mess when it comes to compliance, check out Allie. J.I.B., Well, I've got a couple of things. My email address is jack@clinicmastery.com. If you want to see if there's a fit for you to join our programs or get in touch about our summit in Adelaide, March, 2027. We've had a couple of podcast listeners already reserve their tickets. We have a literal handful of tickets for non-members. So email me jack@clinicmastery.com. But again, a warm welcome to And the recent members who have joined our community, JC, Chloe May, Richard and George have joined us since we last recorded, Ben. So welcome to those folks. I have to say, with the summit coming up in 2027 here in Adelaide, I've just done a weekend down in Port Lungar and we hired e-bikes for the weekend. So if you're coming over for the summit, book an extra few days. and go and explore the regions that are so close to Adelaide's doorstep. We just had the best weekend. Two-year-old on the back of the bike. She slept while we toured wineries. I have to say I'm a convert for an e-bike now because those hills, I You mean Valtteri Bottas around McLaren Val? Golly, I don't know if you'd want to be associated with Jack on a bike there, Beck, but We could get some Clinic Mastery Lycra. I'm sure Shane Bennett could get around that. If you're listening, there's plenty of cyclists in the community. Yes, I mean- And I've offended all of them. Yeah. Justine joined us at the summit recently, world champion. There's a lot more cyclists than we realize. We're all a bit closet cyclists Okay. All right. I'll wait for that. Well, I'm excited for today's conversation. Imagine being able to recruit without posting a job ad. That's essentially what we're going to discuss today. I think most clinic owners wouldn't say, oh yeah, I've got a recruitment problem until they actually do have something live in the job market and realize how challenging it is. And often, it's quite a tense moment, like someone resigns and they need to replace them. Maybe their wait list is growing and they're feeling guilty of not being able to service the people in their community. Maybe the owner's stretched clinically, they're doing 60 hours a week and they're just like, somebody please help. And it's often like, I wish I could have hired yesterday. And so typically they'll post a job ad, maybe they'll put it into a Facebook group, you know, the physio Facebook group or the psych Facebook group. Maybe it heads on to something like Seek as a platform and then you kind of wait. And more often than not, you're disappointed. There's like a lack of applicants, just in a raw count. And of the applicants, the quality is often poor. And we hear so many clinic owners saying, all I've got is like international people. And that's just something I'm not willing to entertain at this point. When you think about it, and Dan Gibbs and I often talk about this, what are the chances that the right person, the ideal person, is looking in the exact window of time, normally like four to six weeks, that you happen to be hiring? I think that's where we shifted our thinking from, you know, we hire when we need to we are always hiring. And I want to unpack what that actually means so that you build like a pipeline of great demand, of great people that want to work at your clinic as like a destination clinic. So, I'm interested, Bec, you've grown the team significantly over the past few years. What are some of the things that you feel have worked really well? Because I know you've tried a lot of stuff, but what do you feel has worked really well to help you recruit with greater confidence that you're going to get the right people on I took this from Melinda Weber a few years ago where she time blocks into her calendar every week a recruitment time block. whether she's recruiting or not. I was like, I love that. And it's not necessarily about actively putting out your CCAD or Indeed or wherever it is you're advertising, but doing something in that space each week. And that's something that I've taken on board to do. So whether it's looking at what our Instagram feed is doing or reviewing our join our team page, there's just some organic stuff. Cause Ben, as you say, the chances of finding the right candidate in that window is challenging. Not impossible, but challenging. But it's also about how does that person, when they do see your eventual ad, go, yes, I trust this clinic enough. They have to have seen some of your content and not like explicit hiring content, just stuff that showcases your community, your team, your PD, your tech, whatever it is that's special about you, that they go, yeah, I've seen that brand pop up enough that maybe I should entertain this It's a really good point about being able to show off what it's like to work at the clinic. You've touched on a couple of things there, a careers page or join our team page, how many clinics don't have that or they do but it's got nothing on it. It's got one photo and a form underneath if you're interested. I want to actually share a couple of examples here today. JB, you are big on the content side of things. I think it's natural, whether you're looking at a restaurant or a cafe or a business to go to. You check it out. I don't know about you guys, but I'll open up and I'll check Instagram typically, or you're doing a Google search to see what this place looks like. I imagine a lot of potential recruits are doing the same. And if it just looks like you barely exist, well, that's not a good starting point. So JB, on a content front, What are some of the suggestions that you have or some of the things that you've seen work really well for creating that presence in, I guess, maybe positioning you as a place you're I mean, when it comes to content for showcasing your clinic, you want to think what would a prospective applicant be looking for? Again, as you described, Ben, they're going to be opening up Instagram, scrolling through and seeing what you're about. Now, there's a place for the job ad, like we're hiring positions vacant host, but most of the other posts should just be what it's like here, a peek behind the curtain, come and see a day in the life of showcase the things. We've done this previously for folks on YouTube. I'm about to share my screen for folks listening on Spotify. or iTunes, you can come and join us over at the YouTubes to see what we're about to share. But Beck, I'm going to highlight your clinic once again at PhysioWest. It's a great example, not because it's you, Beck, but because your clinic does it well. If we have a look here, we're sharing posts around our values. We are showing what sort of CPD we're doing at our clinic using VALD or other technology. We're showing the positions that are available. We're showing highlights of like a quick look tour through our practice. We're congratulating team who are being promoted. We've got team days here and full team photos. And so the point is that if I was a physio, in this case physio, remedial massage therapist, if I was looking around, maybe I'd heard that Physio West are hiring or I'd heard about them like, oh, I wonder if I fit there or not. I can go to the Instagram page and I can get a really good feel for if it is the kind of clinic for me. And so the advice then for clinic owners is, does your grid, does your Instagram profile accurately and currently reflect your clinic for folks who might be, let's say, perusing the menu? Maybe they're not looking for a position to apply for, but they're just checking for a fit. It's that quick pulse You changed your approach, didn't you? Quite intentionally for Instagram, at least, to Yeah, absolutely. Because the reality when we actually looked at who was following our Instagram page, it was mainly other clinicians. And that's the interesting thing about content, is that usually it's other clinicians checking out what other clinics are doing. And so you've got a captive audience of potential applicants sitting right there in your followers. Or they know someone. It's a huge industry of like just people following one another. If I looked at who I'm following personally on Instagram, it's mainly clinics to find out what they're doing on their socials. It's So here's the quick pulse check for clinic owners. Is your grid binge worthy for your ideal applicants? That's really the kicker. As a clinic owner, you need to be thinking, if potential applicants are coming through my grid, are they binging? Are they getting to know us? Are they liking us? And will they trust us? That And what I like about our grid is that it also showcases the type of team member that we're looking for. Jack, to your point, it's the type of team member who's wanting to get involved in the community. It's the type of team member who's happy to get onto the socials. That's who I'm looking for who can help continue to drive that element of our clinic. Because I'm not wanting to attract every physio. I'm But clinic owners are scared of this. They're scared of repelling other therapists. But good content on your grid will actually repel the wrong types of applicants and it will attract the right types of applicants. So it's okay to be a little bit polarizing. It's okay to maybe cop a little bit of heat in the comments here and there because ultimately, more Beck, does that mean you've completely abandoned focusing on clients on Instagram in your content and just Amazing that you can do both, but I'd say that like we're 60-40, right? 60% is about attracting ideal team members and 40% for attracting clients because the client focused posts, like our VOLs or our running assessments or our women's health assessments or showcasing our beautiful clinic, that's also really relevant for people and building trust with people who want to come and see us So what does that mean though, Bec? When you say 60, 40, you mean one, like six days we're going to do team attraction stuff and then four days practitioner or every sixth post we change? Like what do Yeah, so we're trying to post something that's really quite team focused and like client, team member attraction, so recruitment, probably like two posts that are quite heavily weighted that way, and then one that's more heavily weighted. But as I said, like a lot of these posts, we wanted to showcase our beautiful clinic. We've talked about it here on the podcast. I'm going to brag because we love it and it's awesome. Like that's attractive to prospective clients, but also for team members. So like almost all of our content can serve both. Um, but we're really trying to talk to It's a really interesting point that you make here and perhaps as a visual as well to compliment this. is the recruitment ecosystem that we've got. Jack, you and I have talked about this web. People don't come in in such a logical, sequential order into the pipeline of potential team members at your clinic. But perhaps you could think of this, and what I'm sharing on the screen here, as concentric circles, where the inner circle is your team. And then you expand outwards to the massive population of your profession, physios, osteos, speech, whatever it is, that have no idea that you exist, which is the far majority, even if you're a big clinic. And what we're looking to do is actually have a number of different strategies at each one of these layers of them getting toward the inner circle, which is joining your team. Say, for instance, here we've got consideration and evaluation more towards the mid part of this journey. This is where they are actually checking out your Instagram or checking out your careers page because they know you. They're starting to get some interest and perhaps they're even applying for a job. And that's where those specific assets can really play their role. They play their role across the whole sort of ecosystem. But this is a useful visual for thinking about actually how do you build an ecosystem where you get messages like this. I want to share what Mick had shared, Mick Rizk with us recently in the Slack community here for our Business Academy members. This is a screenshot of an email that he had with someone. It says, thank you so much for your time and patience. I also wanted to apologize for delayed responses, yada, yada, yada. We've had an overwhelming response to the job ad with over 18 applicants. Eight have progressed through to the third interview. The position has now been filled. However, and this is maybe one of the key things, I wanted to ask if it was okay to keep your details on file as we're growing quickly and have two to three more clinics to come this year. We would also love to invite you to any of our Team CBD sessions, which are every Wednesday at 12. These can be attended live or online. So what I love about this, and I want to throw to you, Bec, as to how you've kept in touch with your pipeline or build a pipeline, is one, There is a database or pipeline, nothing fancy, just like a spreadsheet or you've got a list of people that have previously applied and you stay in contact. And number two, we talk about the tell them, show them, involve them framework where you get a richer experience as you go down that framework. So tell them is like we have great mentoring cool show them is like is there a video is there a PDF is something that I can see but involve them here which is what mixed on is come along to our CBD and experience what it's like to be part of this team experience the CBD on mentoring that we have. Beck, in terms of building your database, whatever you want to call it, of potential applicants into the future or past applicants, how We've managed it by keeping quite a simple spreadsheet, really. Anyone who's ever applied. what they were applying for, where they were at in their stage of career. And what's been really useful is there have been times we get inundated, as I'm sure a lot of clinics do, with applicants who are early career therapists and we may have reached our quota for early career therapists for the year, as an example. But they might have something quite special on their CV or I want to know whether they're two years down the track and potentially got itchy feet somewhere. Is that right, Jack? Itchy feet? Cold feet? Whatever it might be. We've jackled this one before. Um, and they're worth a reach out or link on them with LinkedIn, follow their journey, congratulate them when they've done another course. So there's some really nice little touch points that you can have there by having a bit of a spreadsheet. It's also, there might also be applicants and where we store our applicants who are a no for us as well. And the notes that go along with that, because I've had applicants approach us year one and then year three and then year six. And they were a no at both other points. And you get so many names in front of you that you're like, I'm sure I've met this person. I'm sure. So just even just keep notes about the little nuances to why it was maybe a no at the time. Are they a no just long-term in terms of values fit? It's just a really nice database hub. We keep a database of our clients. A database of our applicants is also a really helpful mechanism. And to bolt onto that, Beck, clinic owners need to avoid this type of mistake when they're thinking about nurturing past applicants, sounding like AI and generic follow-up slop on LinkedIn. Number one, stop it. But number two, here's a great way to stand out. Use the voice memo feature on LinkedIn or Instagram. We're trying to scale the unscalable here. You can pump out generic AI rubbish, not this, then that, blah, blah. And, you know, every therapist can spot it from a mile away. But if you did a video or a voice memo and add to that human connection, it goes such a long way to nurturing the relationships. Ultimately, we're in the human game and AI has its place, absolutely. We are doubling down on how clinics can optimize AI, but don't optimize the wrong things. I love that, Beck, that you are humanizing. Absolutely. So as I said, it's like celebrate courses that they go to, celebrate milestones in their life. But like LinkedIn ultimately is brag book, right? So pump up other people's ego and I think just to clarify what you mean by build up other people's ego, what you mean is to genuinely congratulate and highlight where they're doing well. We're not blowing smoke here. We're trying to show that we are human and making a real contribution to the professional The CPD one is just such a great way, I think, to leverage something that you're already doing internally and make a version of it available to prospective team members in time, right? Whether that's like by giving them a live recording, inviting them to the session, whether it's every couple of sessions. I know that in tight markets, whether that's geographically or within the profession itself, a number of clinic owners within the community have really leveraged this to put on CPD specifically around a certain pathology or intervention that's trending or notable or is a big pain point. They might even get an external expert, clinical expert to come in and do that, pay them $500 to$1,000. And it's in a way doubles as lead generation for prospective new team members because maybe it's a free event, maybe it's a paid event and you offset those recruitment costs. But now all of a sudden you've got an ability to show off your clinic because you know, in those instances they were hosting it physically on site. And so there was this great way to meet the director and the senior therapists and go through a tour and whatnot. So I think there's great, great opportunities there in The CPD, what work are we already doing that we could actually share externally? Another one, JB, you and I have spoken about over time is like pathways for developed, like if we've got pathways inside our clinic and it's documented beautifully inside a PDF, why don't we make a version of that available externally on our careers page? Because that's what's available. How else do you find starting to use some of these resources, JRB, internally to then... What was the duplication method? You talk to it way better than I do, but just explain to us how you Yeah. Remind me, I want to come back and highlight a few clinic owners. But what you're speaking to there specifically is what have we already got? You don't need to create more things. We need to document what we've already got, duplicate it across multiple forms, and then distribute it across multiple platforms. And so, this isn't about recreating the wheel. It's about maximizing to the full extent what we've already got. And so, actually, I'm going to segue into this really nice. I want to highlight a couple of our members that are doing incredible things in this space. To start off with, I'd love to highlight Joey and Emily who are from Milestones Health here. And I'm going to walk you through a series of of examples if you're watching on YouTube. The first instance here is their clinic's Instagram page and they do a stellar job of highlighting what content they've already got here. You know, what we wish every new grad and OT speechy knew comes from some things in their induction, right? And so then once we move on from that one, we then can have a look at how they've, again, done a great job of creating their own personal brand which speaks to Speeches and OTs, specifically here is Joey's profile, OT with Joey. She's got 18,000 followers who are mostly occupational therapists, right? Super powerful. And then finally, what they've done is they've really built this out into a podcast. And so we can see here they've built up behind the milestones podcast where they're talking with their team and they, you know, young early career therapists and themselves around career education. And I want to highlight number one, what they've built at milestones and they've taken action. So much of this has come from our coaching sessions that they have implemented in a personalized milestones way, but they've taken seriously what it means to be owners who are always recruiting, you know. ABR, always be recruiting and stay on that game. And then the second one that I would love to highlight would be Blake, Blake Withers, who has built his, let me find it here, I can share it now, there we are, and he's infused his personality into this really clinical expertise. He's a sports podiatrist and talking all things running and graphs and charts, he's doing his PhD, but there's so much personality in here. It's like if you wanted to work at his clinic, then it would be really obvious what it looks like there. You can hear from Blake, and he puts a lot of effort into this, but it's really obvious what it's like to work at his clinic and be a part of his team. He's done a stellar job of taking what is his CPD in the first place and just extrapolating that out for a public audience. Folks, it's never too late to get started with this. You might think, oh, they're already doing, there's already a speech and OT podcast or there's already a podiatry. No, get amongst it, get your content out there, get your personality out there and watch it I think of Mick and the iMove Facebook group that he's been running for, what, maybe eight to 10 years now. I'm not sure how many people are in there, but it's probably close to 10,000, right, JB? Yeah. And whenever he puts out a job ad, there's this massive demand, but that started with one person in it, and then there's just content added and conversation. It's not even necessarily all just him producing that, but just being the place to facilitate conversation. What I love from both of you and what I picked up is so many of us can think of Each of these activities is like discrete, isolated, siloed pieces of work. Like, okay, Beck said, put in the time block for recruitment. Okay, I've got to do recruitment-based stuff. And that is true, and that is useful. But you're already doing, say, the CPD, as you also spoke to. So how can we actually just use that in a recruitment sense to attract more of our ideal team members? We don't know what's necessarily going to work. And we've seen, J.B., a lot of those examples. different things that work for different professions in different regions and geographies. And, you know, if you're in rural or remote centers, it's got its own unique challenges that you need to address. So there's no like silver bullets, but what we're trying to do is maybe create a canvas, a tapestry of recruitment that is multifactorial and there's different ways to do it. Probably Beck, I'm interested in your Instagram one to go back to that because Blake's It looks like he talks to camera quite a lot, and hearing that clinic owner go, I'm not comfortable in front of the camera. And it looked like, Beth, there wasn't a lot of talking to camera. Correct me if I'm wrong, at least in what I saw there in the screen share. One, is that reasonably on point? Two, is that intentional? Because a lot of people will feel uncomfortable talking, but they can still Absolutely. Like you can see from ours, we probably have a team that's not overly comfortable, um, place to, like, piece to camera. And that's the reality of it. So we can still produce content and stuff that attracts ideal team members. It's just a matter of, it looks a little bit different. Having said that, our quarter drive is actually to do more of that piece to camera and have it more humanized in terms of our content, a little bit perhaps less, what I'll say, polished and edited, um, so that it feels a little bit more organic. Just because our Instagram has looked one way for a period of time doesn't mean you can't also change that either. So it's about sort of testing and retesting a few things for us. It's at the moment, our goal is to boost the confidence of It's a really good point, Bec. The algorithm rewards good content. It doesn't reward, it doesn't punish you for bad content. It doesn't punish you for small follower counts or likes. It learns and so you're never too far. You're not too late to get started and you can test and experiment and the point is volume to keep figuring out what works I want to share a couple of career pages here so we can continue to shout out some clinics that are doing things really well. And this is such a key asset, right? People are going to check out the website, see what it's like to work with you. So I've got one here, which is by Physio Inc. Shout out to John O'Moody and the crew there at Physio Inc. So again, come and join us on YouTube to see this. And I think this can be iterative. If this is part of your one hour a week, how do we improve the careers page here? I've also got Profeet Podiatry to come to in just a moment, another great example of following through on a lot of the things that we have here at CM. What I love about this is at the top, like browse our current seat jobs and on LinkedIn or email us and make it really easy to get in contact. Pictures of the team looking happy and smiling and looking at some of the key advantages of what they offer at their clinic and testimonials from the team. These are just pictures with text, though, as we'll come to see, I think in ProFeet, but you should do this anyway. Can you get video of your current team? maybe team members that are leaving, hopefully on good terms, of what it's like to work, coming back to that show and tell and involve. Can they talk about what the mentoring is like, the one-on-one support, the caseload, the variety? One of the reasonably cheap things that you can do is get a local photographer to come into your clinic, spend $1,000 to$5,000 to get high-quality images. that will last five years. Such a simple thing to do. As we scroll down, I love that they also talk about their culture. For me, this comes back to show. So everyone says, we got great culture, we're like a family, blah, blah, blah. They try to out wordsmith the next job ad. But what I love here in what we're seeing on the screen is our recent employee engagement survey highlights, and they got a bunch of these stats. 91% engagement score. It's above the average. Anything Well, I'm glad you rolled down to the reviews here, Ben. I spoke with a clinic owner this morning in a coaching session and she recently had two inbound applicants. And so these are, she didn't advertise, put it on seek. These are therapists actively applying to try and join the team at her clinic. And she asked, how did you hear about us? Or what was it that led you to inquire or apply? And these applicants said, you know, your website, socials all look great. And then I went to your Google reviews. And I was so impressed by what others had said, both patients and other team, other community. And so here's the lesson for clinic owners. Can we actively solicit Google reviews for marketing purposes? No, from clients. But you can absolutely ask team members or family or referral partners for Google reviews that have nothing to do with the clinical services of your practice. Can speak to culture and relationships. So here's my advice. Get out there and solicit reviews, not for clinical purposes, not for marketing purposes, but for recruitment purposes. Get Great, great point, JB. And maybe to the broader point is having an up-to-date Google profile listing, your business profile with photos, website, opening hours, etc. Now, I've changed sharing screen, we're looking at Profeet Podiatry here. And what's interesting in some of these more mature businesses, when you look at their careers page or pages, They actually go layers deep. So, probably one of the distinctions here is like career pages. So, you join our team page, but then they've got a specific page for the graduate program. So, in targeting graduates. So, again, great sort of picture, but then we met with like a hero video, a polished video, probably paid a videographer. $2,000 to$5,000 to help with this. Testimonials of team members talking through what it's like to go through the graduate program. And then you can download the Grow2Pro program. That's clearly something that they do and outlines probably the 12 months or 12 weeks of the program. That's an internal asset that then is just made available externally as well. And then they go into more depth on this is explicitly what's included, you know, weekly one-to-one mentoring. $1,500 CPD allowance, a Keeping You Well program, $1,000 to spend on your health and well-being, and they go down further and further on this. These are just a couple of examples. There are many other great examples out there. The question really is, when you look at some of these examples, How do you stack up? If you feel like recruitment is a challenge, then here's clinics that are not challenged with recruitment because of the effort that We've spoken recently or previously, Ben, particularly on Instagram around this notion of fishing, farming, and hunting. Yes. And so this is the key because I can imagine there's some clinic owners who maybe have some limiting beliefs or some mindsets of like, oh yeah, it's easy for that clinic or yeah, they're only showcasing the shiny clinics doing a great job. These clinics did the work. They did the one percenters, the basics weeks or months or even years ago and they got started because they had the same beliefs as you did, but they decided to overcome them and get started. Now, if you need someone to fill a vacant job position yesterday, I get it. You want to be maybe fishing on seek, but you need to go hunting and find the right people. But as well as that, you need to start farming tilling the soil, planting the seeds, watering the paddocks now so that not just for this recruit but for the next one in six months time and when you're hiring three at the same time next year that you're ready to go because you've done the farming today. That farming for me is the one hour time block. It's there, it's in. Yeah, we've got some of this infrastructure already set up, but it's that continual iteration, the continual farming, the watering and tending to that soil. We are getting probably combined early career therapists, senior therapists and overseas trained therapists. We're probably receiving six to 10 applicants a I have a question for you though. We're not recruiting. Okay, door's closed. I've got a question for you, Beck. The farming concept here, the long-term work fits into that matrix category of important but not urgent. Really easy to just flick off the diary, to rain check, to fill with something more important. What do you do or what advice do you have for clinic owners who struggle to do the important but not urgent work when there's urgent work to It's real struggle, right, when you've got spot fires to put out. What I know is that the spot fire that's my largest, it's like a burning bushfire, is when I have a team member who gives notice and is moving on and I have a full list of clients that need to be seen. So I constantly remind myself when I want to push that that time block away and go, I can do it another time. I really don't have time to do it this week. I just remember the pain and the challenge of being in that moment where I feel desperate. And I just Yeah, I do. I remind myself that I just don't want to be in that position again. We've too many times hired in desperation and know what that feels like and it's been just It's a good point. The way that I tend to think about that one as well, JB, is, okay, I don't have a lot of time perhaps to do the proactive stuff, but what's one simple thing that I could do to maybe just feel like I've made progress? And it might be, hey, we did take a bunch of photos recently at CPD. I'm going to put them up on our Google business profile listing. you know, one to five minute job type thing. And I feel like I've made progress. Or can I jump on the careers page if you have access, if you know how to edit your own website? Can I make a couple of adjustments there? And I spend five to 10 minutes doing something that I feel like, okay, I made some progress. It's not earth shattering, but I made progress. Benny, I really like that because there are occasional things when it comes to recruitment that require deep focus project work. I know we've got a handful of clinics joining us at our retreat in Palm Cove. They're carving out five days of intentional off-grid work to build this type of thing. But that's the minority. The majority of these things are little one percenters. And I shared a quote on my story this morning, my Instagram story that I thought is really relevant here. It was by Johnny Wilkinson, the old rugby player from England. And it's so relevant to clinic owners and recruiting. He says this, what's the difference between basics and high performance? There is none. And so if you're a clinic thinking, oh, you know, I'm not a high-performing clinic. I don't have all these resources, all these things, all these people, all these assets. No, no. What's the difference between that and just basic where you're at? Nothing except Get it done. It's a great point. And for the members that are listening, all of these assets, even templates, real world, ready to use assets that you can use in your recruitment like we've shown. are available to you inside the learning portal. So, go check them out in the recruitment ecosystem. There are a number of sessions. You're looking at probably 5 to 10 hours worth of content and then the associated resources that you can just substitute your logo for ours, a couple of words from yours and you get started immediately. So, it doesn't need to be started from scratch and by extension if you're thinking, well, maybe actually I need a bit more help retaining some team members or I'm really interested to articulate that pathway because I want to recruit a senior therapist. Then go to the pathways I'll say this about the learning portal content, Ben. It's not just generative content because anyone can go to your your AI portal of choice and say, give me a recruitment pathway. And it just, what does generative AI do? It strings sentences and letters together. What we have in the learning portal is proven to work. This is what clinic owners use week in, week out to generate real applicants who fill real positions and who stay for a really long time. This is proven, I love recruitment because it's part of where Clinkmaster really started, which was to create amazing places to work for team members. And that starts with getting the right people on the bus. And so if you're able to attract those people, it's quite rewarding and fulfilling to do it. And perhaps even there's a point in that, JB, which is if you feel like your culture isn't where you want it to be right now. you know, to what degree is that actually a reflection of a poor recruitment effort? It's a really sobering, humbling sort of analysis to have that you've actually got the wrong people on the bus. And that's a reflection of if you take the Jocko Willink extreme ownership, that's your fault. And so it's like, okay, what can I do to actually attract more of the right people here? Beck, for someone that's going, okay, you've got your one hour time block. What's your process for deciding on what you work on? Let's say you don't have an active job right now, as you said, like we're not trying to fill a spot exactly this week or this month. How do you decide what to work on during that one hour time block? Yeah. So every quarter our leadership group gets together and we work out what our goals are. And so in that we actually have a recruitment topic where we, we talk about what is, what is on the agenda for this 12 weeks, um, or this 120 days rather, uh, for our four month cadence. And we sort of talk about, okay, in that this, this round we want to update our join our team page. This round we want to highlight the socials. This time we want to be really targeting some stuff on LinkedIn. So I've got a bit of a, a actions checklist having come off of our leadership time. I'll also use that recruitment one hour to be in contact with my team as well. So it's not just sit at the computer and plug away at the work. Sometimes I, I, our biggest recruitment assay is our current team, as I see it. What do you mean? Firstly, we've got the culture that we're after. We've created that hub of people and they hang out with like-minded people. Um, so getting around our team and talking to them about what is planned for the future and, Hey, do you happen to know anyone? Or I'm looking for this type of person. Could you put me in touch with them? Or, um, Hey, I'm going to be posting onto LinkedIn. Could you share it? Whether that be a job ad or not, but could you share this content onto your LinkedIn? That means it's going, the broader reach is heading out there. So I'll quite often just spend that hour in and amongst our team cause they're I love it. J.O.B., how's my maths here? You know, work with me here. The math, we've got a math. All right, let's work through it. For those folks that might be thinking about, do I get a recruiter? Recruitment is hard. Should I pay a recruitment aid? And there might be reason to do that, especially if you're after a specialist skill or seniority or for those that are in rural or remote areas where it is tricky. That could actually be a viable option. And it maybe speaks to a deeper issue of like, hey, do you have a recruitment budget? Like literally a line item in your zero that is, this is what we're going to spend and how we're going to spend it. But if I just zoom out and we say that recruiters tend to take a percentage of the first year's salary, that's a typical payment model, right? And it might be somewhere between 10 and 15%. Yep, and so let's just round up and say that we're gonna get someone for $100,000, a practitioner, so we're looking at 10 to 15,000 bucks, that we would pay a recruiter to successfully fill that role. If a clinic owner's earning rate for themselves or billable rates, and we can get into the nuance of this, is 200 bucks an hour, $10,000, that would be 50 hours worth of work. Okay. So 50 hours at 200 bucks an hour is 10 grand. So if you're doing literally an hour per week over 50 weeks, just doing a bit of a roundabout here. Look, we can play with some variables here. But if you did that over a year, how much more confident would you be that you could recruit with greater ease? So I just wanted to put kind of the investment into some sort of context. What do you think to that? Is that a reasonable way to think about this? I'm thinking about the budget, the allocation of time, the allocation of money to get an outcome, which is to fill a position, you know, now and ongoing, because I'll throw to you in a sec, it's like, the question is, How many therapists do you think you might hire over the next two to three years? And it's probably somewhere in the range, depending on the size of clinic, it's going to be maybe five to 10 therapists that they might be looking to recruit. So what could you invest now to make that so much easier in the future? So just unpack the math side of things. What do you think to putting the Yeah, it's absolutely one way to look at it and maybe to further nuance that, if you could spend one hour a week or $10,000 as the owner, now your rate as the owner might be more than 200 but just don't wreck our fund just yet. You could spend 10 grand to recruit someone or you could spend an hour a week and probably recruit two or three or four really good applicants yourself and have a greater degree of confidence that you're placing the right person. A recruiter, there's a time and a place. Recruiters often will compress time and they might be able to access more applicants than you will quickly. But over time, as you build out your Rolodex, or for those who are perhaps younger than 35, You can't build out your contacts database on your iPhone. You're building the skill and that's the thing, right? We're not just investing the time but we're building the skill of relationships. And again, this is something that you can't, that Claude can't teach you how to be great at relationships. You need to like, you know, iron sharpens iron. You need to get in the flesh with other humans and build those relationships, practice those skills in coaching context, etc. So I really like that analogy, Benny. Yes, if we all had heaps of cash and no time, there might be a good place for a recruiter or real niche. But if you've got more time on your hands than thousands of dollars of cash just laying around your bedroom, then I'd encourage you to get busy on the skill So Beck, let's talk senior therapists because that often comes up as like the tricky one to recruit. Often we'll hear people say, maybe I've had enough of the new grad or early career therapists. Like I've got a lot of them or I've been burnt by them just how hard it is to train and mentor them. We can talk about that at another time. But what I'm missing is a senior therapist. I really want someone to come in whether they're ripe and ready to go Or they're at a point in their career where I could work with them over 12 or 18 months and get them into a position of seniority where they mentor other therapists, supervise them, etc. That would be ideal, but I find it very hard to attract them. It's a very competitive environment. What are some of the things that you found work or that you've seen work in the clinics that you work with to attract senior therapists? And J.B., I want to get your insights on this one as well, but Beck, what have you seen work in getting those people that are maybe, I don't know, five to seven years out or more that I definitely think there's a few things that they look for. They look for a set salary for the most part and a reasonably, I'm not going to say high because I actually don't think it's overly high, in physio land, $130,000. Right, plus rewards, maybe. They're looking for pathways and progression, the opportunity to maybe give back and to mentor others. And what I have seen work from other clinics and what has worked for us is talking to the pain points for what they might not be getting in their current role. So, maybe they've been promised things and not delivered. Now, you then have to deliver on those things if you promised them. Let's not fall into that trap ourselves. Do they want more CPD, maybe they've gotten to the ceiling of the CPD that they can receive in their clinic or they're just looking for a fresh start and something to re-energize what it is that's the next stage of their career. So I think really our latest ad is talking to all the pain points that maybe the clinic feels stale that they're at or they're not progressing, maybe they're looking around at what other Clinics are doing on in their tech space and AI and wondering what their clinic's doing to keep up. So leaning into some of those things that as members here, or if you're listening onto the pod, you're progressive and you're wanting to do things differently is lean into that because there's certainly a lot of clinics who are still Jack Beck brings up a great point around speaking to the pain points. What are some of the pain points that you've seen really resonate with Yeah, understanding your ideal applicant is the game. And so, amplifying that pain, if you can articulate someone's problem, you know, clearer than they can articulate themselves, they'll attribute the solution to you, right? And so, how can we get really clear on what are the feelings, what keeps them up at night? You know, what do they gripe about in the DMs with their peers? Like, that's the sort of mindset that we want to think about, like uncover the DMs, get in behind the scenes on these things. And so, that might be – it will look different across professions. It will look different across generations, right? It might be that there's a lack of autonomy or there's too much perception in micromanagement. Maybe the – sometimes it gets really minute. People talk about pay and remuneration. Okay. So, what is it? Do they have a problem with four-weekly pay cycles and they prefer fortnightly or weekly? Do they want rewards paid on a more frequent basis? Are they looking for more in-kind or non-cash benefits? Are they looking for more diary flexibility? Get really clear on what that pain point is and speak to that. The technical term for this is like stretching the gap or stretching the tension. Really draw out that feeling of discontent for those potential applicants and then present the alternative way. And that's a really good way to Do you think it's worth covering multiple pain points? I'm wondering if this is showing up as, I don't know, a guide to understanding how to progress your remuneration as a physio or psych or speech, you know, etc. And then there's like, you know, the tech and the CPD and development, maybe these are things they download or watch or they're consuming and you're that voice, as you said, articulating the problem better than they can. Or are you saying just kind of laser in on the one pain point? How do I would highlight multiple pain points, not in one go though, not in one big comprehensive guide or one 74-minute YouTube clip, but make these micro pieces of content, slice it down and even become binge worthy, right? And so over time, these ideal applicants will binge you. They'll resonate with you. They'll go, ah, yes, finally, they get it. Someone speak in my language. Someone's put words to what I haven't verbalized. Yes. We'd do the same, Ben, and that's why where you probably see our Instagram feed, you can see that micro content coming through really subtly. And then there'll be a carousel of all of it condensed so that if someone just jumps onto that first tile, scroll, scroll, scroll. Oh, okay. Maybe I should take a little bit more of a dive into that. So if we've posted maybe four or five of those scattered across over the last few weeks, we would then bring them together, um, at one point to consolidate them as And I'm sharing screen now with, it's a little bit older, I think 2023, but this is the Australian Physiotherapy Association Workforce Consensus Report. And it has a number of findings in it. I think you can get some directional clarity over things that you could be talking about to some of those pain points, Joby, that you mentioned. Now, whether you're, there is one for speech and podiatry, they may be a little bit older, but I think a lot of these things are sort of timeless problems. But you could use something like this, especially when it's timely, to piggyback off, you know, it being circulated. There was a recent post that went through our group chats from the Physiotherapy Association page as well, talking about burnout. Post at the moment is getting a little bit of traction talking about burnout. And so I think these assets, these resources present a really great opportunity to, I don't know, leverage or piggyback off of industry reports. So what we've got on screen here is one of the findings was making a positive impact, work-life balance and financial security are key drivers of job satisfaction. I'm not sure there's much more else in life to achieve. They're pretty grandiose big things. But could we be talking about work-life balance at so-and-so clinic? Here's how we do it. And being able to publish and promote that, your version of, but it seems like maybe these are things that lead to people leaving where they're currently working. Poor remuneration and unmet expectations, back to your point. unfulfilled promises, was what you said, are the biggest causes of dissatisfaction. In this example, they said, over half of all students and graduates indicate they're dissatisfied with their career choice because remuneration is not commensurate with their expertise and skills. So, we can really use this and talk about, here's how we pay really well. in the profession or in our specific suburb or location, however you want to slice and dice it. But I think there's ways to leverage There absolutely is. And so it's about being creative around how we position things and, you know, getting familiar with the language that would resonate, not just adding to noise, but really cutting through with Just to pick up on that, what do you think is kind of the distinction there between not adding to the noise and giving Yeah, let's not repeat what is already out there. And let's not play generic games, but how can you add your two cents, your different opinion? How can you add not something that's necessarily polarizing for its own sake or controversial? No one's out here to be a shock shock. That's the last thing that we would encourage, but adding your unique perspective for someone else to resonate with. Bring your authentic self. Bring the whole of your opinion and be confident to share. Opinion isn't the right word. Bring your perspective. Share your whole perspective and let those that it resonates with come to the fore and those who don't resonate with it, that's okay. They'll be repelled and Very wise words. Beck, I know this is something you love. All things HR, creating amazing places to work. Recruitment is a big factor there. And we're going to continue on this because as we record this in mid-2026, a lot of these things are timeless. We talk about always hiring. But if folks are tuning in and they're thinking, well, I intend to hire at the back end of the calendar year into the new year, you got to start now. Let's not wait till then. And that's part of our hope and intent in talking about recruitment now, because some of these things do take a little bit of time to action and get traction. So J.B., thank you for your insights and we'll see you on another episode very