Trying to Hire a New Associate?

With graduation season here, Illinois chiropractic practices are searching for new associates. This guide highlights where to post jobs, how to set clear expectations, and key hiring tips to avoid legal issues.

Referenced Links:

NUHS Job Board
Palmer CareerNetwork (Job Board)
Logan Career Board
ICS Job Postings
Independent Contractor or Employee
Unlicensed graduate

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Transcript:

We have frequent conversations with chiropractic physicians around Illinois who are looking to hire Associates. They are always looking for the best way to find them, where to look, where to post, and how to move forward. And so I have a couple of things that I want to point to, mainly because we’re really coming up to graduation season, right? We’re in that April-May time frame, and a lot of schools are going through this particular period graduation time frame. So we just want you to be aware of some things that you want to watch out for, some things that you can do to be proactive in the associate hunt, if you will.

First, a lot of the questions we get are, Where do we post? Where are some classifieds that we can that we can request? And here’s what I will tell you, there are a couple of different areas that I typically point our doctors. One, you want to make sure that you hit all of the area schools, and so the vast majority of doctors, this isn’t all of them. Of course, I would always lean into your alumni association or your school, right that you graduated from. And so you can look at their posting possibilities for their classifieds. National, Logan, and Palmer are the three schools that have the vast majority of doctors in Illinois. So I would look at each of those schools. All of them have job boards that you can post on, or career boards, or whatever they may call them. I’ll try to add some links down below just to give you access to those, but post to the schools, these area schools, job boards.

Second is you can always look at the Illinois Chiropractic Society’s job boards. They go out with our weekly news, and those go out to students as well. So that’s another place that you could look and tap into, potentially reaching the student bodies for which we reach out to. So that’s another thing. So, areas like LinkedIn, that’s another fairly popular area that you can lean into that professional side of things without going to the broader general boards like ZipRecruiter and indeed. So those are some possibilities as well. For those who have been down that route and have not been able to find a great connection. You could consider recruiting agencies. There is, of course, a greater amount of fees that are associated with that, but we hear that although they are, they can also be hit and miss, but some of our doctors have a greater success looking at recruiting agencies to help them find a great associate. There are even recruiting agencies that are very specific to chiropractic that you could look at as well. In all of these cases, make sure you do good due diligence to make sure that you’re looking at the firm that is going to mostly meet your needs for your practice and what you’re looking for.

Other things to watch for during this process of bringing on a new associate. One is, we’d encourage you to be incredibly clear in your job description. I’ve talked to a number of doctors lately who get all the way through the process. They go through the interviewing, and when they’re at that job offer phase, the expectations that they’re providing and the expectations of the candidate just don’t align. So we’d encourage you to be clear in your expectations, in your job description, to find good alignment, so you don’t spend a lot of time and energy and effort and get all the way to the end only to find out that you weren’t even close to begin with. So we would encourage you to be very clear in those processes to eliminate some of the problems that may happen later on down the road. Additionally, you want to be knowledgeable in the area of the difference in employees and independent contractors. We have some phenomenal materials out there. We would encourage you to read this is actually incredibly important. You want to get this right. The worst thing in the world you can do is bring somebody on, claim them to be an independent contractor, and misclassify them. Have to pay back taxes and fines, and penalties as well. You want to make sure you nail this and get this right. Look over our materials to be able to clearly identify an independent contractor and an employee so you can classify correctly right out of the gate.

Last is this, licensing in Illinois. We know can be a bit of a challenge. There is a delay. You’re going to hear from the department that it’s taking between eight and 12 weeks for licenses to come through. So when you’re hiring new graduates, do it with that in mind and the fact that they’re going through this licensure process, and it’s going to take a bit of time. Don’t be frustrated. You spend a lot of time making sure you hired the right candidate. This is a licensure issue. It’s not the candidate’s problem. This is just simply the nature of the beast right now in Illinois, and hopefully, we’ll see that improve in time. The worst thing in the world you can do, though, is bring on a recent graduate who is not licensed and have them begin to do those tasks that are required to be performed by a physician. You don’t want to go down that road as well. We’ve got some materials that will help you, if you have questions in that regard, as in that interim period, if you will. But. Just exercise caution in that area. Recruit, well, interview well, lay out clear expectations so there is no confusion later on, and there’s a good meeting of the minds. Make sure you classify well, nail all of these things, and you’re going to have a fantastic experience with your new associate you’re bringing into your practice. We’ll catch you next week.