Tales From The Trenches: Hiring (4/24/26)

Hiring shouldn’t feel like a weekly emergency, but in many ophthalmology and optometry clinics it does: outdated job descriptions, endless resumes, interview no-shows, and the temptation to grab the first person who seems “good enough.” I’m trying a new format called Tales From The Trenches, and I’m sharing practical hiring lessons I’m using right now with eye care clients so you can shorten the chaos and raise the quality of your team.

We start with a truth most practice administrators learn the hard way: the front desk is more than a front desk. It’s the intake point for future technicians, opticians, billing team members, and even research staff. When you hire great people up front and train them well, you build a talent pipeline that supports the whole clinic. That also means the person managing the front desk needs to be one of your strongest hirers and trainers, because their decisions ripple across staffing, patient experience, and culture.

Then we get tactical about recruiting. I explain why a small spend on sponsored job posts can dramatically improve applicant flow, especially if you want experienced local candidates instead of random out-of-state applications. I also talk about reference checks that actually provide signal, why asking for former supervisors can “self-filter” weak candidates, and how keeping a warm pipeline helps when resignations stack up unexpectedly. I share how an applicant tracking system like Breezy HR makes it easier to revisit strong past applicants and fill roles faster without cutting corners.

If you want hiring to stop stealing your calendar and start improving your clinic’s results, hit play. Subscribe, share this with an eye care leader who’s hiring right now, and leave a review so more clinic teams can find the show.

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This episode is brought to you by Seasoned Advice HR, where I help eye care clinics to hire, retain, and manage better — helping you get Better Results Through People. Learn more at seasoned-advice.com. 

Contact me directly at mike@seasoned-advice.com 

Get my free HR and leadership downloads here: https://www.seasoned-advice.com/signup-for-free-downloads

Transcript

Welcome To iCare Leadership Live

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Greetings and welcome to iCare Leadership Live. This is the podcast for iCare leaders who want to level up their leadership, create better cultures, and improve the financial results of their clinics. Now let's join the show.

Introducing Tales From The Trenches

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Hey everybody, this is a new concept I'm trying with the podcast, uh, and I'm calling it Tales from the Trenches. And you know what this is all about is is really talking about stories from HR or stories from ophthalmology and eye care, um, things that I'm working on right now that might be applicable to what you're doing out there, or maybe some things that I have learned along the

Why Hiring Drains Your Time

SPEAKER_00 0:48

way. And today's uh episode is gonna be about hiring. I've been doing a lot of hiring lately, a lot of recruitment for uh the clients that I work with, and I love doing this work. It is one of the things that it seems to take a lot of time, it takes a lot of your time out there. If you're a practice administrator, you're spending a lot of time looking at job descriptions, or maybe not even looking at them and just sending them out there without updating them and uh reviewing resumes and trying to figure out like who is worth talking to, and then actually making time to talk to them and scheduling that out, and sometimes they don't show up, and and you feel like a lot of your time gets wasted, and and the other problem that happens is you start to get frustrated, and you might cut your process short because you're so busy, and because you are just frustrated with people not showing up, and and the first person that's kind of has a pulse, uh you're gonna want to take them. And so I want to just talk about some lessons I think that I've learned when it comes to hiring, and hopefully that will be

Front Desk As Your Talent Pipeline

SPEAKER_00 2:11

helpful to you. Um, and you know, lately I've been doing a lot of recruiting at the front desk. And the reason that I have a particular client that's having a lot of needs at the front desk is actually a good problem because they are promoting from within. And unfortunately or fortunately, depending on if you supervise the front desk or not, the front desk team is often the one that gets tapped for other roles in the office. You know, the best people get pulled into clinic, or they become an optician, or they uh move into the billing department. It's just it's the the thing about the front desk is it's it's the easiest place to get your foot in the door, and so then it becomes the easiest place to springboard into other things because and a lot of people, you know, you know everyone at the front desk, and so the clinical manager is gonna know who they are and is gonna find out that Joni is really great, and gosh, shouldn't we hire Joni for our you know entry-level technician position? We can train Joni. I mean, she's so awesome, and then that happens in the optical department, and then maybe um even I've seen research um grab people from the front desk. So, you know, hire great people at the front desk, and you need to get whoever is managing your front desk needs to be your best hirer and your best trainer because they are the person that is the intake valve for the whole clinical staffing in a way. Because if they hire great people and they train them, they train them on how the clinic works and the financials and teach them the big picture of the clinic and do a job picking people with good character, then you no two things happen. One is you you you make it easier to staff other positions. You know, hey, we need a tech, let's hire Sam. He's awesome, he's at the front desk. And then the other thing is when that person that is really good at hiring for the front desk, when Sam does transfer out to another department, that manager can say, Hey, no problem, I'm great at hiring, I can find somebody quick, I know what I'm looking for, we're always hiring, and I'm good at determining who is a good fit and who's not, and we have a very good process that we follow. And so I love being a part of that. I've been doing a lot of I've helped been helping a lot of my clients with that work right now, uh, because it is time consuming. But I'm starting to see, you know, one new manager that I have that I'm working with is is, you know, we're getting on that same wavelength where I think she's learning, like, hey, this is what's good, this is what's not good. Uh, and when it comes to hiring. And so getting really fast at that is

Spend Small To Improve Applicants

SPEAKER_00 5:19

important. Another thing is uh spending money where you have to. Um, I've been working with a few clients doing hiring, and what really matters, what really impacts your applicant flow is your willingness to spend money, and not a lot of money. I'm not talking about a thousand dollars, two thousand dollars. I'm talking about a hundred dollars, maybe more like two or three hundred dollars, to improve your applicant flow. To get, instead of getting Randos applying from out of state, which sometimes those people are okay, to getting experienced technicians in your local area noticing your job. If you want to get better quality, sometimes you just absolutely have to spend money. And you can usually tell within a day or two of posting a job if it has the traction or not. Sometimes it has loads of traction and you never have to spend money, but a lot of times it doesn't, and you need to sponsor that job. You need to sponsor that job. And a lot of times, indeed, we'll try to give you a number to spend, and you don't need to spend that amount per day, and you don't need to spend it as long as they want you to. Um generally, I go for a week at a time. I'll spend $30 to $50 a day, depending on the job, for about a week, and we'll see how it goes. And a lot of times that's exactly I've almost never has that not been enough. Now, maybe if we're looking for a marketing director or you know, a new head of operations or something like that, that might not be enough. But spend money, spend money, don't be afraid to

Reference Checks That Actually Matter

SPEAKER_00 7:05

do that. Um, check references, check references. And you know, I realize that people give um they give only the good reference they're not gonna give bad references to you, but actually sometimes they do, sometimes they do, and if you push them and you say, hey, I need former supervisors, and they give you that person's information, that person is like, you know, this guy was just okay. Or we kind of had some issues. And see what you can find out, see if your current staff can find out anything. Maybe they used to work with that person. Um, I I recently had a situation where a current employee really cared about her job, and she told me, hey, I'll see what I can find out. I used to work at this office, they they looked around, they found out, they asked some questions, and it wasn't really a great reference. What came back wasn't super helpful. You have to listen to that. You have to listen to that. That's valid information. Um and I think I'm a believer that just asking, asking for the references will help weed people out because they know if they don't have good references, if they've been kind of a loser and haven't done a good job, then they're they're gonna they're not gonna have good references and they're gonna not even apply, or they're gonna just ghost you after they give you their reference information because they know that they're not gonna get good references back on them. And so just asking for the references matters. It it matters.

Build A Reusable Candidate Pipeline

SPEAKER_00 8:48

Um, and then the last thing I'll say is you never know when someone will quit on you. You could be in the middle of a recruiting for a job, and then all of a sudden two more people leave. And then you've got to figure out, you know, is there other people in this pipeline that I could that I could bring in for an interview? Do I need to look at some of the people that applied last month when I was recruiting for this job? And so having a system that allows you, or a person who is your recruiting person, that you can that you can say, hey, uh Mike, can you see if we've had any recent applicants that would be good for this? Because that's the fastest way to fill a job is to talk to someone that you've already talked to and say, Hey, we just had this opening. I know that you didn't get hired for that other job, but what about this job? Would you be interested in that? Um I've had I've been doing a lot of that lately. I've been because I have a very good system that I use called Breezy HR, and it's great for going back into old uh applications and finding people that you know would be good. And so I I use it a lot for that.

Hiring As A Culture Lever

SPEAKER_00 10:05

So all this is to say is uh hiring is super important and you need to be really good at it. And if it's taking up too much of your time, uh reach out to me. Uh I love to I'd love to help iCare businesses with hiring, whether it's a front desk or a research coordinator or an optometric technician or an office manager. Uh there's something really fun about connecting a great person with a great job. And if you don't want help, then then you know figure out a good process to get good at this because it's the biggest opportunity to change the trajectory of your clinic. Every hire is gonna take you up a little bit or take you down a little bit, or maybe even a lot, right? Um, but in your culture. So that's the show today. This is Tales from the Trenches. Uh, I think I'll keep this going. It's it's kind of fun. Um, if you have any feedback for me on the show or ideas, I'd love to hear them. You can reach out to me at mike at seasoned-advice.com. See you on the next episode. Well, that brings this episode of iCare Leadership Live to a conclusion. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show on your podcast app and share it with someone who would value the content. I promise to bring you more guests and content to help make you a better eye care clinical leader. I also invite you to subscribe to my HR newsletter for iCare Leaders. You can find information about that at seasoned advice.com. Now go out there and lead with confidence.