The “how to’s” of the technician recruitment process

The first of a five-part series on recruiting, training and retaining technicians.

By James D. Dawes, MHA, CMPE, COE

In my vision care consulting business, I continuously hear from my clients that the lack of quality technicians proves to be a rate-limiting step in the growth and development of their practices. Given the aging demographics and incidence of eye disease in our country, we no doubt have a need for more optometric and ophthalmic technicians. But how do we find and recruit them, and how do we differentiate ourselves from the competition?

In this article I will discuss the topic of recruitment; I will address how to differentiate your practice in my next article in the series. I will be using the word “tech” to describe the broad category of ophthalmic and optometric technicians, scribes, diagnostic testing specialists and laser operators.

DECIDE HOW MANY TECHS YOU NEED

Examine your schedule template if you are at full capacity. Depending on your patient flow and diagnostic-testing processes, you can determine how many techs you need per day to see a full schedule of patients. Then, you can extrapolate that across all doctor templates and locations. That will give you the number of techs you need to be “fully staffed.”

Now, you have to take into account your annual turnover ratio. Turnover ratio is the number of technical staff leaving the organization in the last 12 months divided by the average total number of technical staff employed over that time period. If you have a 20% turnover rate, you have to assume that you will lose 20% of your technical staff in the next 12 months either through voluntary or involuntary terminations.

Therefore, if you are fully staffed at 25 technicians and you currently employ 20, you need five more to be fully staffed; in addition, you must assume that 20% of those will leave and need to be replaced — so your actual need is 5 + (25 x 20%) 5, or 10 required technicians.

I find that many practices have no idea how many techs they actually currently need. If your practice needs 10 techs and your historical recruitment process has yielded five new techs per year, you need to invest additional resources to hit your target.

KNOW YOUR RECRUITMENT RESOURCES

Now that you know the number of technicians to recruit, you must look at your techniques. There are limited numbers of trained and qualified technicians in the market. So, where are the most effective places to fish? Fortunately, digital recruitment is relatively inexpensive, so I encourage practices to put as many lines in the water as possible.

Of course, we have resources such as the industry job boards, digital recruitment sites, industry specific recruiters, community training programs, LinkedIn and local digital “help wanted” tools. Those traditional mechanism are popular fishing holes with a lot of competition.

In part two, I will talk about differentiating your practice, but first, let’s examine one of the most overlooked and underutilized tools in your recruitment arsenal — your current technicians and employees.

TURN YOUR TEAM INTO RECRUITERS

Recruitment through your existing team members is one of the most effective mechanisms for finding great candidates and long-term employees. If the lack of technicians is a rate-limiting step for the growth of your practice, why shouldn’t you put recruitment at the top of mind for every team member in the practice?

Do your team members know of the positions for which you are recruiting? Are your team members incentivized to bring in quality candidates? Do your team members know the process for applying for a position within your organization? Are your team members actively searching for co-workers to join the team? I recommend rewarding team members $250-$500 per employee they recruit to the organization (assuming the employee stayed for a specific period of time).

Give team members business cards to hand out to potential candidates with the URL for the online application process. Ask team members to share social media posts with their connections regarding open positions with links to the online application process. Why wouldn’t your team members want to help build their team of co-workers with people they like and with whom they want to work? Engage your team in building their “work family.” OM

Part 2 will address in detail how to differentiate your practice from other employers based on actual feedback from technicians seeking positions with ophthalmic practices.