Recruiting In Today’s Climate With Brian Weidner Of Career Tree Network

Are you sick and tired of the same old recruiting methods? Today’s guest has some revolutionary insights on how to move away from outsourced recruiting efforts and instead cultivate powerful internal solutions. In this episode of the PTO Club podcast, Adam Robin welcomes Brian Widener, the mastermind behind Career Tree Network. Explore the cutting-edge recruiting strategies that can transform how physical therapy clinics attract the best talent in the industry. Learn how building genuine relationships with candidates can significantly enhance your clinic’s appeal and foster long-term growth. It’s essential to recognize the pivotal role of an owner’s focus in driving recruitment success and take the necessary steps to create a robust employer brand that resonates with potential hires.

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Welcome to the show. I’ve got a good friend of mine. We’ve known each other for five years. This is my friend Brian Weidner with Career Tree Network .

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What’s up, Brian ? How are you?

I’m doing great. Thanks so much for having me on here.

It’s really good to see you. I thought it would be awesome to bring you on because we started working together more this 2024. I’ve been learning a little bit more about what you’re doing on the recruiting side. I know you’ve got some new things happening in your company. Recruiting is always a special thing for me because I enjoy doing it.

One of the things that fascinates me or really interested in hearing your perspective is that you’ve built a career providing outsource solutions for a lot of these practice owners, like building recruiting solutions and outsource solutions for practice owners. You’ve had some success with that. You and I have been talking. You’ve been telling me that you’re finding even greater results whenever you can help owners create an internal recruiting solution to help them build their team and scale their practices that way. I’d love to dive into that topic, hear a little bit more about your perspective there, and see what we can learn.

When you think about recruiting, it’s really all about relationships. It’s about the relationship that the candidate has ultimately with the employer brand, the owner, and the physical therapists at that location. It’s about building that relationship with the potential candidate that they know they like. They trust the organization and the employer brand.

We started our company in 2007. My wife’s a PT. We recruit PTs nationwide. We’ve worked with a lot of practices, all shapes and sizes. Historically, we were called in to deliver candidates. People were like, “Send me people to interview. Send me those relationships that are already formed. Introduce me to PTs to join my team.” That’s been the legacy of our company.

What we found is along the way, we’ve learned that not all PTs want to work with recruiters. We do things a little differently. We try not to play the same recruiting games in terms of some of the secrecy and different tricks and things that a recruiter might do. Ultimately, PTs prefer to work and build a relationship directly with someone at the clinic, whether it’s the clinic owner, the rehab manager, or the office manager. It’s someone who can get on the fast track and go right to the top.

We’ve been thinking about how to help our clients build better relationships with candidates. Ultimately as well, it’s a long-term play too. It’s like that quote, “The best time to plant a tree is yesterday. The second best time is today.” If you’re thinking about going out, you’re in pretty decent shape. Myself, if I have a vacation planned in the future, I might try and work out and do a little extra running or something to get into my beach body. You need a little time to build those relationships.

When a clinic has a hiring need at a certain point in time, it’s really difficult to develop relationships and deliver candidates within that short window. They’re like, “My PT gave notice. R ight now, I need candidates.” That’s challenging. Whereas if you had planted those seeds earlier or you had started your beach body workout three months earlier, then you’d have a better foundation of recruitment for your current needs.

The idea behind what we’re doing with some of our new programs is around how we can support and enhance the clinical owners so that they have that recruitment mindset. They’re able to build that recruitment function so that they can have on-demand talent and those relationships for their current and future needs, especially for growth needs as well.

That’s amazing. It’s so cool because we had a coaching call. It was me and a handful of our clients. These are some of our younger or smaller practices. I asked the question, “What’s the most important resource that you have in your business?” Some people said, “My team,” or, “My patients.” In my opinion, the most important resource in your business is the owner’s attention.

What you focus on is what grows or what improves. That’s what you’re going to make progress in. The owner’s always the problem and the owner’s always the solution. You’re always the problem. You’re always the solution. It’s amazing to hear you say that bringing the attention back all comes back to the owner. Getting them to focus on recruiting is what is going to ultimately help them get the results.

The most important resource in your business is the owner's attention. What you focus on is what grows.
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Ultimately, we’re in the business of people. As a physical therapy clinic business, the more physical therapists you have, the more people that you’re going to serve in your community. We can’t outsource the care to AI or something. We need clinicians to provide the service. Understanding your local talent pool and building relationships with your local talent pool is really central to your business.  Some PTs are willing to relocate. Some new grads are always coming out on the market, but ultimately, what is the relationship that you have with the local PTs in your community? What are you doing to support the local PT community?

That’s something that’s hard to do as a recruiter who’s across the country. You can provide a ton of value, but there’s some depth of relationship in that local pool that the owner is going to be the best person to do that. My question for you is that you work with a lot of owners. I couldn’t agree with you more. Coming back to the attention piece, getting the owner focused, you only have so many priorities. If you’re a great productive person, you can maybe have 3 in your business, but 1 of those has to be recruiting.

If you’re the owner of the business, one of those has to be recruiting. It is something that never goes away, but it gets replaced with stuff. That recruiting thing sometimes is not always the most urgent thing and it gets replaced with things that are more urgent. What are some of the things that you’re seeing that owners are having a hard time with? Why are they not focused on the recruiting piece? Is it because they are busy? Is it because they don’t have the skillset? Where’s the disconnect?

You’re right about areas of focus. Recruiting should be an area of focus. I would maybe challenge us to expand that a little bit. Recruiting makes it sound like it’s only new people externally focused. A lot of time,  maybe we don’t call it recruiting, but we’re building ongoing employee relationships because we want to focus on retaining your current staff. Maybe it’s recruiting slash relationship development with employees or something along those lines to make sure that we look at it. I see recruiting ultimately as building relationships. We always want to build relationships and strengthen relationships with prospective candidates and people who are already on our team for longevity and retention.

From a clinic owner’s perspective, the struggle on recruiting is that when they’re fully staffed it’s not on their mind. If you feel like your clinic is fully staffed, you might have growth hires in the future, but there’s not an interest to always be recruiting. There’s this illusion of, “I’m fully staffed. My team isn’t going anywhere. I don’t have any need to recruit because I’m fully staffed. Why would I do anything recruiting-wise if I don’t have any need?” That part is a struggle.

On the flip side though if you have growth hires that you want to make, people are leaving jobs. PTs are leaving jobs all the time for a variety of reasons. Also, the lead time when a PT gives notice, they’re going to give you 2 weeks notice or 4 weeks notice and it might take 3 months or longer for you to find the ideal candidate.

If you’re not always recruiting and always having some recruitment presence, when the person does give notice, when you do decide to grow, or when an opportunity presents itself for you to purchase something like another clinic down the road, you’re not going to be ready to take on that. I feel like on some level, every clinic should always be recruiting and always having feelers out there even if it’s at a minimal level.

I like when you said that because the demand for how many therapists you need to hire is constantly changing. Maybe not always constantly, but opportunities come. Opportunity equals I need to hire. Somebody quits, and that means I need to hire. If I’m fully staffed, then I don’t necessarily need to hire. Green is like, “I’m fully staffed. I don’t need to hire,” but there is some level of recruiting that should be taking place on a week-by-week basis. Maybe that’s only two hours a week. Fully staffed is green. Therefore, you have two hours a week of recruiting.

Maybe you have an opportunity coming up and you know that you’re going to need a therapist in, let’s say, six months. Maybe that’s the yellow, but maybe you need to kick that up from 2 hours a week to 5 hours a week. You have your green at two hours a week. Your yellow is at five hours a week. Let’s say somebody quit. You’re in red. You need to be recruiting twenty hours a week to make sure.

It’s important for owners to have that temperature gauge of where they are and audit that on a month-by-month basis. Where are you with that temperature? How many hours a week, and I say hours per week but you can say hours per month or whatever it is, do you need to be spending outside of patient care and outside of everything else fully focused on recruiting? Audit that process every month. That’s the thing that keeps you on top of those things instead of underneath them.

A question that someone might have is, “I’m spending two hours a week on recruiting. What am I doing during that time?” The answer could be a variety of things. I don’t know what you would suggest, but from my end, I think about building relationships with the target audience in terms of maybe you sponsor a student 5K race and you get your company logo on the back of a t-shirt for your local PT school.

Maybe you get a list of people who attended the state conference and send them a message, praising them for their commitment to professional development and sharing how that’s a priority for your practice as well. You’re like, “You’re fully staffed, but you’re always looking to build relationships with people for a growth position. If you’re open to chatting with me further, please let me know.”

The idea is around being proactive and being out there. Maybe you’re fully staffed, but it’s this idea of do you still value this relationship development? How do you go about planting those seeds for the future? It doesn’t have to be a lot of things, but when you have that foundation of activity out there that you’re suggesting, it’s going to benefit you.

Also, if you have that list or database that you might be using to keep track of those potentials, then you can follow up with those guys. You could be like, “I emailed you six months ago after you attended that conference. At that time, I didn’t have any needs on my team, but we’re growing. We have a position opening up. I wanted to reach back out to you and see if now is a good time for you to consider joining us.” You can follow up on that past communication as well which is all about that relationship building again.

I’ve been doing a lot of coaching. It’s been super fun because I’ve been spending a lot of deep thinking about our profession and the mindset of the owner and trying to help get clear on the struggles that they’re having. I’ve been using this framework to describe recruiting. I want to get your opinion on it. I see all owners that they’re the superstars of their little circle because they’re quick starters. They have a lot of ideas. They’re typically very talented and smart people. They’re charismatic in a lot of ways.

When they opened their practice, they had to learn this skill of, “How do I get people to like me? How do I get patients to like me?” They bring them in and say, “How are you doing? It’s nice to see you. Thank you so much for trusting us with your care. I’m going to take care of you. I’m going to make sure you’re happy. I’m going to make sure that I follow up with you, send you an email, and ask for your feedback. I’m going to nurture that relationship with you because I know that if you’re happy, then you’re going to send me referrals and that my practice is probably going to grow.” There’s a skill to that. There’s a savviness to that that owners naturally have.

What I’ve been saying is take all of that energy, mindset, and focus, remove it from the patients, and put it towards recruits or candidates. It’s the exact same skillset. What you do is teach your team how to do that. You’ve mastered that internal marketing and sales piece of what you do in your business. If you teach your team how to do that, you can back away and focus on the bigger vision for your company, which is the people you’re going to bring into your team.

How do you nurture them? How do you get them to like you? How do you serve them? How do you follow up with them and send them emails? How do you get referrals from that list? It’s the same exact skillset but a little bit different language. I always say to take that marketing and sales program that you have built, cross it out, and put the word recruiting on the top. You have a pretty good recruiting program too.

That’s great. I like the white glove treatment that you’re describing. When we look at candidates and potential hires, I feel like there’s an old-school mindset of recruiting and interviewing where we want to put the candidate on the spot and drill them with tough interview questions. It’s like, “Why should I hire you? Tell me about your most challenging clinical. What was the pressure situation that you were in?”

We want to try and put people in the hot seat, so to speak. That way when we interview them, we’re going to separate the best candidates and those that are able to prove themself that they’re worthy of joining our team. That’s an okay mindset if you have a lot of people applying maybe and you have a lot of candidates.

That’s not the culture. That’s not the climate. People have options.

That customer service mindset, what you’re describing, is really key. Ultimately, it’s humbling because then, that rolls into flexibility as well among the employer. It’s like, “Do I really need someone with three years of experience? If we have some with one year of experience, is that sufficient?” It’s that level of flexibility in chatting with candidates.

It’s becoming more challenging as well because PTs are not necessarily looking for the same things that they did years ago. There’s a shift within what I’m hearing from candidates among the talent pool that we’re talking with. It’s maybe that they’re no longer interested in 40 hours a week. Maybe they want 32 hours a week. Is that a possibility? W e all want to be treated well and we all want our skills to be valued. We don’t really want to go through a tough interview process. Even if you’re a rockstar, you don’t want to be sweating when you’re talking to a potential employer. I feel like your relationship approach is spot on.

That’s really key. I’ve found tremendous amounts of success with that approach. Instead of looking for limitations with candidates or instead of looking for reasons to not hire them because they want X, they don’t have this qualification, or whatever, look for possibilities. Don’t look for limitations. Look for what’s possible, Look for what you can create. Don’t hire them for where they are. Hire them for where you want to go. You can train on anything. You could train anybody to do anything.

Instead of looking for limitations or reasons to not hire candidates, look for possibilities.
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One of my favorite quotes with recruiting is, “Hire for personality and train for skill.” Find the person who has the personality. Maybe they don’t have all the credentials. Maybe they don’t have the experience or maybe they do come with some things that are going to require you to be a little bit flexible, but they have the personality for growth. They align with your culture. They’re willing to do hard things with you. You can create anything with that person. It’s really important to understand what your vision is for the company, look for possibilities, and then enroll that person in the idea of helping you go in that direction. That’s super key.

Hire for personality, train for skill.
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I do have another question for you. It’s my turn to ask the questions. You mentioned this right before we pressed record. I was like, “That’s a really good point.” I’m at this stage in my business. I’ve got three locations. I’m doing a lot of recruiting. It’s all I do for the most part, but it’s a lot. Recruiting is a lot, especially when you have 30 employees and you’re growing. We hit that point where we understand that the owner is a big piece to that recruiting success.

However, I can’t do this forever. I need to find ways to attract candidates to my company without being attracted to Adam Robin. It’s like that time when you were the physical therapist and all the doctors would write Brian Weidner on the script. It’s like, “You need to see my other new PT,” and that transition. How do you do that? How do you get the focus off of Adam and more on, “Choose my company because of who we are as a company.” How do you do that? Can you talk us through that?

You’re right. As the company is small and if you have one clinic location, ultimately, when the PT is joining your team, they’re going to be working side by side with you as the clinic owner. The relationship that you develop with that candidate is really key. The candidate may be joining because you’re dynamic and you seem like a good mentor. They’re joining to work specifically for you as an individual. That works for a period of time.

However, since you are the owner of the clinic, the real goal is for you to not be so side by side in the clinic and for you to pursue growth and let your business flourish. Over time, the candidates are going to be joining a company less because of the ability to work with you because you’re not physically there. You have how many employees who are working. You’re like, “You’re with me. You’re not with them.” That’s the same in a hospital system. Do new physical therapists join a hospital because the CEO is dynamic? No. They don’t even know who the CEO is. They never met him or her. As your company grows, the individual personalities and the individual people become less important.

Regardless of your size, I feel like that’s an important transition to take place. Even if you are a small practice with one location, you don’t want someone joining to specifically work with you. You want someone who’s going to be joining your company because what happens if you decide to open up a second location and then you’re no longer there? Is that PT going to leave because you’re at the second location? What if you get hit by a bus or you decide that you want to go part-time or whatever? You want your staff to feel like they’re connected to the company or the employer brand rather than to you as an individual.

You want the employer brand to be strong because you don’t want employees to feel that their livelihood is at the whim of the employer. You want to be part of this organized system where the owner is the one driving the bus but there are engines, steering wheels, and other things that are in place to help the owner so that it’s not the owner’s whim of, “What happens?”

We’re talking about the employer brand. The employer brand is really important because new grads or PTs in general, as they start to think, “I’m going to be looking for a new job. Where might I want to work?” They’re going to be in their head thinking, “Who are the employers that I’m familiar with? Who are the employers that I know that I like that I trust?” You want your practice to be on that mind or that mental list. They’re not thinking about, “Who do I want to go work with?” It’s, “Which organizations should I consider joining?”

The idea around the employer brand is around what’s important to you as a company. What values do you have? It is making sure that your values are listed within the job advertisements or your website and having multiple people involved in the interview process as well. If you’re the decision maker, that’s fine  for you to be involved, but you need to have multiple people so that new potential hire doesn’t think, “It’s this one guy who’s calling all the shots and doing everything.”

You want to try and think of yourself as the owner, but really, you are the employer brand. You’re the facilitator of the employer brand but there’s this larger system in place. It’s not just you. That will be a big help. Also, for stability reasons, PTs don’t want to join a small organization that’s not going to be stable. Above all, we want stability from our employer. We want to know it’s going to be consistent. From Starbucks, if I order a flat white or cappuccino, it’s going to taste the same every time that I get it. That’s the mentality with employees. They want that stability, and that all comes from the employer brand.

I’m glad to hear you talk about that because I have stepped out of the recruiting process in a lot of ways. I don’t do all the interviews anymore or any of them at all. I don’t do the offers. The thing that I’m having a harder time getting out of, and probably, I’m going to leverage you and your new program, how to generate more leads and how to generate more interviews. I still have my hands in that process. You were telling me that you’ve got a new program, or newer, where you’re helping owners create that inside their practices. Is that right? It’s some type of system where they can generate more candidate leads internally. Can you tell us a little bit about what that looks like and how that’s set up?

Sure. The program is called Engage Hire. The idea is that we can help our clients build an internal recruitment function. We can provide them with the tools, the templates, the data, and the support so that they can perform recruiter slash headhunter-type activities but they can do that internally. The backbone of it is the geo-targeted report that we create. It’s a list of possible candidates who live near the work location.

We’re using licensure data and a bunch of other data sources to come up with, “Here’s a list of the PTs who live near the work location.” My team researches those folks via LinkedIn to get LinkedIn accounts, cell numbers, and email addresses so that we can come up with contact channels. During the Engage Hire program, we’re providing templates in terms of what to say when you’re calling out to candidates or what to say within emails and texts. We’re developing with the owner and the team a system of recruitment so that they can recruit internally.

It’s a collaborative model. You mentioned you not being involved. The owner or at least the rehab manager, clinic manager, or someone at the top layers should be involved. That first level of outreach doesn’t have to be the clinic owner. It can be a front desk person or an office manager because there’s a lot of time involved with recruiting and sending out messages. We’re leveraging help from that internal person on the client team to do that first round of outreach. When someone’s interested, then the clinic owner or clinic manager would come and take over that relationship and move the candidate through the process.

The idea is  who is going to build the relationship with those possible candidates? Is it me and my team from Wisconsin or is it your team who lives down the street from the ideal candidate? As humbling as it is for me to say, it’s better for the internal clinic owner, clinic manager, or someone at the clinic site to build those relationships because ultimately, it’s going to be more effective. You’ll have that long-term potential for the future as well.

There’s not a whole lot of people in our space doing that. Especially for busy practice owners who are slammed with patient care and don’t really have the time to implement or build something from scratch, that’s a super awesome resource.

There are other resources out there. There are a lot of recruitment tools and a lot of consultants and people that will talk about recruiting. Where this program is different is that we are focused on that geo-targeted report of the potential candidates who are living near the work location. Our process has always been data-driven. In the past, my team would utilize that report and that data and make the outbound activity or the outreaches.

There’s a lot of consulting, like, “Here’s what you say when a candidate from Indeed applies for your job.” From our perspective, we do need to have Indeed and online job ads running, but at the same time, we need to do more. We can’t wait for candidates to come in. If we are going to do more, what are we going to do? That’s the idea of proactive recruiting. It’s around taking the initiative to make that outbound activity and doing it in a way that makes sense and that collaborative nature as well. It is so that the clinical owner is only spending time with the candidates that are viable.

In our profession, we have these bleeding heart compassionate people. We don’t want to be creepy people who cold call you, cold DM you, or cold email you. There’s a little bit of mindset shift that you have to get over in order to step into that place of vulnerability of, “I saw you’re a PT in the area. I want to chat.” Many of the clients I work with struggle with that. My answer to them is, “Tell that voice to shut up. Do it anyway and be violent. Go after it. If they’re not interested, they won’t respond.” There is a numbers game. You got to get more hooks in the water.

I’ve heard owners say that they don’t want to poach talent from other people. What we’re doing with recruiting is we’re planting seeds and building relationships. Someone says, “I’m retired. I’m happy in my current role. I would never leave the skilled nursing setting. You’re an outpatient clinic.” People are going to tell you different things.

You’re not poaching people. You’re trying to figure out, “Are you happy at your current position? If you were going to leave your current role, why would you do so? How is everything going? Is there any potential for us to work together down the road?” Maybe there is or maybe there’s not, but we’re trying to figure that out through the recruiting process. At least the way that my team looks at recruiting, it’s not this sleazy car salesman type thing where you’re like, “What would it take for you to drive off the lot with this car?”

It’s like, “Here is your $10,000 sign-in bonus. Go and apply now.” It’s not one of those deals. I’m on board with that.

It’s a matter of figuring out whether there is a path forward and looking at it from a place of curiosity. We’re doing our total talent masterclass, which I know you’ve been a part of. Thank you for doing that. We have Harry Ashley on. She might be someone good for you to talk with. She’s a mental health coach and business coach for positive thinking and that kind of stuff. She talks a lot about curiosity and coming into relationships with that spirit of curiosity. That is really key for recruiting.

For an owner that’s scared or apprehensive about making that outbound activity, it’s really about being curious. Is there a possibility here? Are you at a point where you might consider a new position?” Maybe they are. Otherwise, what options do we have? We’re going to wait. We’re going to post the job and wait for someone to apply or we’re going to work on our employer brand, go to career fairs, sponsor the 5K run at the PT school, and do some stuff marketing-wise that might help us

We need to go out and have conversations with the potential candidates. We know who they are. That’s the beauty of recruiting PTs. We have the licensure data. My team, we have it for all 50 states. We know all the PTs across the US. We know who they are. I’m not saying that in a creepy way, but through this data though, we know who the PTs are.

We don’t have to hope that those PTs go on to the internet, search for PT Positions Near Me, and find our job ad. We can go out and contact them and say, “I’m searching for PTs in the area. I noticed your name on my list here. I wanted to reach out and see if it might make sense. Are you open to considering a new role?”

I love the tone of curiosity. The way I often describe it is to approach it as if you have no place to get. If you approach the conversation with, “I need to try to get this higher,” you have a place to get. You turned into a creep. If you approach it with no place to get, it’s out of pure curiosity. You’re like, “I don’t have any place to get. I’m genuinely trying to build my network. If we decide that there is a place to get, then we’ll have that conversation, but first, let’s see if we like each other. Let’s see if we align on anything.”

I had one other point. What if you approached as well from a place of generosity where you wanted to figure out what you could give to your community in terms of hosting a CEU event at your clinic or sponsoring?

Send a referral.

You could be like, “I’m a PT here. What type of patients do you see? Can we help each other out with referrals?” I feel like it’s a matter of what value you can provide as well rather than like, “Do you want to join my team? When can I hire you?” You want to try and think about what value you can provide to other people, especially in the recruiting process.

I had a person in my network tell me it’s the law of reciprocity. It’s a law. If you continue to give, it’s impossible for you not to get at some point. If you focus on the giving, that’s also a very important point. Organically adding value to your list is a really powerful tool. There are so many people who need your help. How do people get in touch with you? If somebody needed to talk about working with you, how would they reach out?

Probably the best way is through our website. It’s CareerTreeNetwork.com. Otherwise, I’m on LinkedIn as well. Search for Career Tree Network or Brian Weidner on LinkedIn. Those would probably be the best ways. I’m always happy to chat. I’m not much of a salesperson, so I’m willing to chat about this without any expectation of selling you something. It’s fun for me. I’m happy to help.

If anybody wants an unbiased opinion about what it’s like to work with Brian, feel free to reach out to me as well because I do work with Brian quite frequently here. You can email me at Adam@PTOClub.com . Let’s do it again someday.

Thank you. It was a lot of fun.

Thanks. Peace out.

Thank you.

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The post Recruiting In Today’s Climate With Brian Weidner Of Career Tree Network appeared first on Physical Therapy Owners Club.