The Chiropractic Hiring Funnel: How to Hire Great Employees and Keep Them in Your Clinic

Key Points:

• Hiring the right people for your chiropractic clinic is essential to providing excellent care and successfully scaling your business. 
• Having a hiring process in place takes the guesswork out of hiring the right people, ensuring you hire only perfect-fit candidates for your practice.
• The hiring funnel I recommend isn’t a short process, but it’s worth it to hire good people that will stick with you for the long run. 

🚨 ANNOUNCEMENT! 📢 The hardest part of running a chiropractic practice is staff management, and this starts with hiring. Here’s a capital “T” truth they don’t teach you in chiropractic school: hiring the right team is critical to your success as a chiropractic clinic owner. In fact, I consider it the number one determining factor of whether a clinic will succeed or fail in the long term. 

We like to think that it’s our skills and our integrity as practitioners that are the driving force behind our clinic’s success. But the truth is — the success of your chiropractic practice depends on more than just your skills — it’s about the team you build and how they deliver a great patient experience.

After a decade of trial and error, I have developed a proven hiring funnel that ensures only the best candidates make it onto my team. Plus, those people tend to stay with me for years to come. Let’s take a look at this funnel and how you can start to apply it for your clinic.

The Common Hiring Mistakes That Cost You Time & Money

Let’s start off with the things you don’t want to do when hiring new team members for your clinic. 

Rushing to hire when you’re desperate for help. Feeling rushed to get anyone in the job just to fill a role is a sure sign you’ll make a bad hiring decision. Proper hiring that leads to a truly great team member takes time and care.

Failing to properly screen candidates for skills, culture fit, and professionalism. You’re not just looking for the right skillset from a new team member, you have to make sure they fit in with the culture and professional standard you hold everyone to in your clinic. If they can’t meet those standards, you’ll lose them quickly and you’ll have to start the hiring process all over again. 

Not having a structured process to weed out unqualified applicants early. It’s called a funnel for a reason — you’ll have many applicants at the beginning who can’t follow basic instructions and these people must be ruled out early on in the hiring process. 

The Chiropractic Hiring Funnel: A Sneak Peek

The chiropractic hiring funnel is designed to circumvent these mistakes and find candidates who are both an excellent professional and culture fit for your clinic. 

Write a Job Posting That Attracts the Right Candidates

A generic job description won’t cut it for the kind of employee you’re looking for. You have to make it very clear what the job responsibilities are, the kind of personality and values you’re looking for in an employee, and what the potential employee can expect as compensation — including all benefits, not just salary. And yes, free chiropractic care for your employee and their family should be included as a benefit! 

The Simple “Call Test” That Filters Out Unreliable Applicants

This step is easy to skip but is absolutely crucial to hiring the right employees for your clinic. In the application, you list a phone number for candidates to call and receive the next steps in the application. When they call this number, they’ll hear a prerecorded message explaining the next steps in the process — writing a cover letter with specific details and emailing it along with a resume to a specific email address that isn’t your clinic’s main contact email. 

If they do not call this number, or they don’t follow the instructions correctly, this step automatically weeds them out of the hiring funnel. You may have some candidates email you directly with an absolutely amazing resume, but if they didn’t follow the instructions in the application, they aren’t a good fit. 

Email Application: The First Real Test

Now you have to carefully review the cover letter and resumes of those applicants who followed instructions from the phone call recording. If they did not follow your specifications for the cover letter to a T, then they aren’t the right fit. If they sent their email to a different address than the one you provided, they aren’t the right fit. If they deviate at all from your specific instructions, it’s an automatic no at this stage. 

It may seem overly critical or even harsh, but it’s important to follow through with your own requirements and only pass the candidates who display the attention to detail you’re looking for. 

Interview Stages That Reveal True Potential

The next few stages of the hiring funnel process include:

• An initial email correspondence confirming that they accept the requirements and compensation for the role
• A phone interview 
• An in-person interview

Each of these stages presents multiple opportunities to spot red flags and give your candidates chances to shine. I discuss these red flags + more in-depth questions to ask your candidates in the full hiring funnel PDF — grab your free copy now! 

Shadowing & Test Assignment: The Final Stages of the Hiring Process

If your candidate passes the in-person interview stage, you’ll want to invite them into the clinic for at least a half day of shadowing. Ideally, you would select a particularly busy day to ensure the applicant knows exactly what they’re getting themselves into. You’ll also give them a basic task to complete during this day, such as showing a patient to their treatment room, to see how they handle it and how they interact with others. 

As you might expect, this is a crucial step to see how this person might fit in with your team and how they handle patient interactions. Plus, you’re letting them experience the job before hiring them, which gives them good insight into their ability and interest in the job. If they pass this stage with flying colors, and the candidate also feels good about their on-the-job experience, you’ll be in the final stretch to making the right hire for your clinic.

Get Your Hands on the Full Step-by-Step Hiring Funnel

This blog only scratches the surface of the full hiring funnel — there are more detailed instructions, interview questions, and the full 11-step process in the Chiropractic Hiring Funnel PDF Guide, a free resource I created for anyone who wants to get hiring right the first time for their chiropractic practice. 

You don’t want to miss out on this guide! This is the best free resource I’ve created for those who want to build a million dollar chiropractic practice, and most importantly hire amazing people they want to work with every day. Download your free guide now and start hiring smarter, not harder. 

Download the Full Guide by pressing the image below!