Can a new healthcare practice launch with hundreds of new patients booked in the first month?
Yes, and Zed Williamson has seen it happen.
Williamson, founder and CEO of TrackableMed, a medical marketing agency focused on accelerating patient demand, shared the story on a recent episode of The Modern Practice Podcast and explained the key role of intentional hiring and systematic team building.
He also offered his best practices for hiring the right team members for your practice.
Laying the Foundation for Successful Hiring
Hiring success in healthcare begins long before the interview, according to Williamson. It starts with culture. “Everyone has a culture,” he explained. “What you have to understand is: What does your culture believe? What are the standards? What are the guardrails?” Answers to these questions will inform every part of the interview process.
Define Core Behavioral Values
Rather than focusing on generic corporate values, establish core behavioral values. These are observable actions that bring value to an organization. This means looking beyond what should be table stakes for healthcare organizations, such as patient-centered care, compassion, integrity, safety, and the like, and emphasizing how these values actually play out in the workplace.
Williamson suggests that practice owners and leaders list things their employees regularly do to move the organization forward. These actions might include the specific ways clinicians and staff extend extra care and compassion to patients or how they solve problems rather than compounding them.
“Then,” he said, “when you’re interviewing someone, you tell them, ‘Look, this is really important to me, and there are some non-negotiables as part of this organization, so I’m going to read these to you.’”
Communicate Requirements
In Williamson’s view, the traditional hiring approach is fundamentally broken. Both hirers and candidates often focus on what Williamson calls first-order consequences: employers want everyone to want to work for them, while candidates want every employer to offer them a job.
Instead, hirers should look for reasons not to hire a given candidate to counteract the natural bias towards favorability. After all, it does no one any good to hire someone who isn’t a good fit.
Interviewers should clearly define the skills, knowledge, and experience requirements of the job at hand. Of course, these will vary with the role, whether it’s a patient-facing scheduler, a back-of-the-office billing manager, or a clinician.
From there, the interviewer can craft specific questions to verify those qualifications. For example, is a candidate’s communication style and preferences a good match for the organization? Can they juggle competing demands when things get hectic? Are they comfortable using technology to manage electronic health records?
Crafting Interview Questions That Reveal Fit
Beyond the basics of whether a person has the specific skills and experience they need to do the job, structured, insightful questions are key to evaluating healthcare candidates fairly and effectively for cultural fit across clinical and administrative roles.
Use the Four-Question Process
A four-question framework can help you assess a candidate’s ability to handle high-pressure patient-facing situations and lower-key back-office roles while maintaining professionalism and empathy.
- First, ask candidates to imagine life a year in the future, when joining the company was their best career decision. What makes working at the company great for them in terms of how they are making a difference in the lives of patients and their family members?
- Next, ask them to envision the opposite scenario. What made joining the team the worst decision they could have made? This question can reveal the kinds of situations, responsibilities, and environments the candidate dislikes.
- Now, turn the questions on yourself. Start by sharing your vision of what would make a given candidate a fantastic hire after one year, painting a picture of their positive impact on the practice and team.
- Finally, answering the second question yourself, share what would make you see this person as the worst hire you could have made in terms of behaviors and impacts that would make them a poor fit.
“Think about the expectations that have just been set for that person, the clarity in the role,” Williamson said. “You get people who lean in and go, ‘Please hire me.’ Or you get people who are like, ‘I’m getting out of here.’” Either way, both the candidate and the hirer break out of their traditional job-interview roles to think of the bigger picture.
Avoid Generic Questions
For best results, skip vague inquiries in favor of questions that reveal specifics about what you need in your team members, such as HIPAA awareness, scheduling reliability, or teamwork under pressure.
For example, instead of asking “How do you handle confidentiality?” try, “Walk me through how you’d respond if a patient’s relative called requesting test results.” Replace “Are you reliable?” with “Describe your process for managing schedule changes when multiple patients need to be accommodated at once.”
Spotting Red Flags and Ensuring Cultural Alignment
What candidates don’t say often matters as much as what they do. Watch for cues in tone, attitude, and explanations that reveal signs of misalignment.
Identify Subtle Inconsistencies
Pay attention when candidates’ examples don’t quite match their claims about key healthcare competencies. For example, a candidate might assert a commitment to patient privacy but struggle to describe specific HIPAA safeguards they’ve implemented. Or, they might highlight team collaboration skills but share stories that show them working in isolation.
Prioritize Cultural Fit
Clinical and administrative expertise can be developed. But alignment with your practice’s core values may be harder to correct after someone joins your team. To make the right choice, consider how potential hires respond to scenarios involving rushed patients, stressed colleagues, or competing priorities. Their instinctive reactions may reveal whether they’ll reinforce or strain your team’s dynamic.
The Ripple Effect of Great Hires
When you hire with intention, the impact goes far beyond day-to-day tasks, starting with team members’ first day on the job, as in the example Williamson gave on the podcast. The practice he worked with hit the ground running, with 400 new patients registered even before opening its doors. “Anything is possible if you build the system to do it,” he said
What’s more, a better-run practice treats patients more effectively, creating a virtuous cycle that inspires teams to do better, which in turn leads back to more effective treatment. As Williamson put it, “Really, we’re helping patients lead better lives.”
Listen to the full conversation with Zed Williamson on The Modern Practice Podcast.