Tom Bowen has been in the optical industry for nearly four decades. A founding principal of Williams Group, Practice Coach, Optometric Consulting Systems, and the Silvermark Agency, he is now the founder and CEO of Thrive Practice and Life Development, based in Roca, NE. To learn more about Thrive, head to this month's #EBConvo.

We checked in with Bowen to hear more insights, and here he shares information on the paradigm shift from “hiring” to “recruiting” in landing and keeping great staff.

The question is almost like a broken record in these times..."Tom, am I doing something wrong? Why am I having such a hard time keeping staff?! And what should I be doing differently?!”

The question is certainly nothing new, right, colleagues? It’s not the challenge of getting and keeping great people that’s the so-called new normal about which we hear every day. Rather, what seems NEW about this normal is the extremity of this challenge, which is an extent unparalleled in my decades of this conversation.

That largely caught us off guard, and why wouldn’t it? Just a little over a year ago, we were told to brace ourselves for unemployment most of us have never seen and the country hasn’t seen since the Great Depression (if even then). Forecasts of 40% unemployment abounded in daily news, and who can forget impacts like the stock market avalanching in response? Amidst the panic, I specifically remember thinking and even saying to clients as we looked for silver linings, “Well, if that’s all true, at least it’ll be a lot easier to hire great people...” Little did we know a year later we’d be experiencing the polar opposite.

So what happened? How did we go from heavily predicted mass unemployment to an unprecedented tendency for our staff to be vivaciously recruited by neighboring business from about any industry; and along with that, unprecedented challenge getting suitable candidates when we’re hiring? And is this the new normal about which we’ve been hearing so much?

Well, colleagues, it appears to be at least the current normal, for the next couple years, anyway, and likely beyond. I’m just hearing it from too many practice owners and managers to believe otherwise. So it’s high time we evolve our offense, and our defense, to deal with the new game of business.

To those ends, I believe in a first things first approach, and here it is: The present normal is about recruiting, not hiring.

Hiring is about the job description, specifically outlined duties, etcetera. It’s about how much the job pays, the benefits, work hours, and PTO. It’s about required experience in the industry or from other positions that qualify a person. It’s about that first and second interview where we ask about strengths and weaknesses, what they liked or disliked about their last job, and other questions for which they can rehearse answers and perhaps even trick you into believing they’re accurate. Then we onboard and train them, only to have them hop the next train to a next job stop.

Recruiting is different, colleagues. Recruiting is about searching out and winning over talented people who are a fit with our team and patient cultures (two different things) and are fully capable of quickly learning and running our offense.

If we’ve worked on this together or done workshops with your team, you’ve definitely heard me say (for decades but more intently now than ever) recruit for purpose before position. This has always been the more productive way, but in these times, it’s more important than ever to realize and practice it. We need to put behind us the days of marketing a set of job specifics and seeking thus experienced staff who often think they can hold us hostage with that experience and we’ll simply grin and bear their not being a team player (because they know they can have the same position in another practice tomorrow and just keep hopping the job trains!).

And so I ask the million dollar question...What good is it to hire the most experienced and technically capable person in the world, the person who can land here and actually be doing the job tomorrow, only to have them buck our culture, stir the pot, and hop the next train a few weeks or months later? A colleague JUST THIS MONTH had this exact thing happen, and luckily...no, strategically...we went ahead and put the person on the train instead of waiting for them to hop one on their own!

It's high time to be done with that madness, colleagues. It’s time to recruit people that align with who we are and how we want to serve as the very first consideration. It’s time to lose the traditional hiring questions and replace them with recruiting conversations—like sharing our culture statement over a cup of coffee and inviting them to comment in detail about that and let the conversation take us where it should. They simply cannot rehearse answers to trick us into hiring them with such a strategy. A person has to and will get real in a big hurry in such a conversation, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to accomplish—getting real about who this person is and how they fit with what we’re deliberately striving to be and do.

Can you imagine what it would be like in the practice five years into this philosophy, this method, of recruiting? Can you imagine a group of team players playing together because the culture is what makes them tick, rather than studying Indeed.com posts during lunch?

Of course, we realize at some point we talk about the job. But this new normal is much more about recruiting to the VISION, the MISSION, the CULTURE, the RELATIONSHIPS of the practice and team. The job is something they can literally get anywhere right now, and probably even seek the highest bidder. It’s about getting people switched on, not about whether they know how to do the work on day one. I realize the latter is so tempting (and if they do happen to have experience and can do the work today, all the better!). But whether or not they have experience to do the job day one is simply not the game changer of the present normal, nor the next normal after that, and I suspect it never was.

“But if they don’t have experience,” a logical colleague might ask, “when can they actually contribute and be productive?

IMMEDIATELY! ...Like today! Have you noticed part of the present normal after all the adjustments we’ve needed to make the past eighteen months is just going with it? Can’t have our live meeting? Then let’s ZOOM it. Don’t know how? Figure it out. Don’t have enough trucks to make deliveries? Rent some from rental car companies that aren’t renting to “normal” customers right now (even if it says "Budget Rent a Car" on the truck like my UPS delivery guy’s truck today!). Not perfect the first time? Learn as you go and improve. Clearly figuring it out as we go is an observable part of the present normal in most workplaces, and why would our workplace, given the challenges for all small businesses right now (certainly including our practices), be any different?

That’s not to say we don’t cover our bases. Patient care is more important than the average product or service; this we know. Our patients expect and deserve a level of excellence as consumers in our practices. So let’s be the team on its toes and making that happen, even when we have new blood on the team. Let’s be the team that’s "all hands on deck," supporting and helping the “newbie” get it done, and helping them get better at doing so with each passing day—all while the teammates and patients love the new person! We all know how important training is, so let’s have daily training in whatever doses and in every way we possibly can, in addition to new team members learning on their feet, but let’s not put the effort into someone that’s already looking at the train routes out of here. It’s time we stop the madness

Along with this paradigm shift, let’s also recruit in nontraditional places (as well as the traditional, of course). For example, an opportunity that arose during the shutdowns was recruiting people from the food and drink space. Many of these workers lost their jobs, and when we recruited them, an encouraging percentage of these individuals learned they really like serving customers (patients) in something as meaningful and life-impacting as patient care. And we learned we really appreciate the way folks from hospitality circles interact and take care of people. A very difficult time was made vastly less difficult for everyone involved, and as I look around right now, I can’t help but wonder if we’re headed right back there again. And perhaps again. And possibly again after that. Amidst the challenges, are we identifying and pursuing opportunities that come with them? Are we shifting the paradigms.

The present normal is full of wild cards that make a diagnosis of the longer-term new normal difficult and unpredictable. My guess is at some point, folks will again need to work in order to make a living, and even value and be glad for their jobs. But I also estimate there will have been long-term and perhaps permanent influence on staffing our practices. Some of that will be negative. The long-established tendency of people to job hop will have been made vastly easier (even encouraged it seems) by the present normal and the job search specialists it produced. But the clear opportunity here is to shift our hiring/staffing paradigm. This is the perfect time to realize, as I believe we could have all along, that we should recruit people for purpose rather than (or at least before) position. We should seek to know real characteristics, instead of hearing rehearsed fibs told in an interview full of traditional questions and trickery.

There will always be with small business ownership, especially in health care, the challenge of landing and keeping great people. Nothing new there, colleagues, and not going away. But there is in this time an opportune paradigm shift as we observe staff turnover of epic proportion to a mindset of recruiting a team of people that align as individuals with our culture; and who have notable tendency to stick with something and someone because that’s who they are and how they tend.

All this being said, we certainly need to pay and benefit our staff the very best we can. And, of course, more than ever, we need to be managing practice metric outcomes with full team participation, and have team bonus programs actively and currently based on those outcomes as they are clear and present (instead of outdated bonus programs that have become nothing other than added/expected compensation). There are and will be others aggressively trying to woo team members—finished products of the excellent training and experience you’ve given them—away with dollars and benefits. At times, they will be successful in that. It is hard, after all, to blame a worker for accepting a job that represents considerable advancement in a family’s financial wellbeing. I’m convinced, however, based on my experiences in these times with so many of you, an opportunity exists to improve our likelihood of having the right people in the right positions and having them for longer durations. To do so, we have to shift our paradigm from “How well can this person do this job today?” to “What is the character of this person and her/his tendencies, and how does that align with our culture?”

They say necessity is the mother of all invention—I believe that necessity is neigh, and it’s time to reinvent HIRING as RECRUITING; and think of purpose before position. Let’s pick it up there with some specific interpretive human capital recruiting and retaining strategies in Part 2, friends!

If something here has struck a chord, shoot Bowen an email or give him a call: tbowen@mythrivecoaches.com or 402-794-4064.