Picking up where last week's episode left off, Lisa walks listeners through the free Hire Slow Checklist step by step, turning "hire slow" from a mindset into seven concrete moves any group practice owner can use for their next hire, whether that's a therapist, an intake coordinator, or a clinical director.
What You’ll Hear:
- Why slowing down your hiring process isn't hesitation, insecurity, or overthinking, it's intentionality tied to the clients you serve and the team you're building
- How to get clear on your non-negotiables (licensing, availability, experience) before you ever post the job, including the cover letter trick Lisa uses to screen for attention to detail and genuine interest
- What a screening step can look like before the first full interview, and why she revisits her own process about every five hires
- Why she uses the same structured, scored questions for every candidate in a role, a practice an employment lawyer recommended at one of her retreats
- The case study and role-play options she's used to see how a candidate actually thinks clinically, not just how they answer in the room
- Her own six-plus week onboarding runway, including why a new hire's bio and video go on the website two weeks before they see a client
Resources Mentioned on this Episode
- GPC Hire Slow Checklist.pdf
- Group Practice Connection, referenced for the full Intake Coordinator, Therapist, and Clinical Director interview guides, plus the post-interview debrief and scoring tool www.grouppracticenetwork.ca/the-group-practice-connection
- Listener feedback invited by email: lisa@grouppracticenetwork.ca
Reflection Prompts for the Week
- Where in your last hire did you skip a step you wish, looking back, you hadn't?
- What would a screening call or case study reveal about a candidate that their resume never could?
- Is your onboarding process actually a checkpoint, or just a welcome mat?
- Of the seven steps in this checklist, which one is missing from your process right now?
Meet the Host: Lisa Catallo
Lisa is a Canadian psychotherapist, group practice owner, and business coach with over eight years of experience leading a thriving, values-driven practice. She works with therapists who are ready to step into their role as confident, ethical, and intentional leaders—without burning out or getting buried in the day-to-day.
Lisa’s coaching focuses on building sustainable group practices through efficient systems, effective leadership, and a deep respect for time and energy. Her approach is calm and encouraging, offering grounded guidance that helps therapists move from overwhelm to clarity—so they can lead with confidence and purpose.
Whether she’s supporting someone just starting to grow a team or helping a seasoned leader reclaim their role as CEO, Lisa brings a blend of insight, structure, and heart to everything she does.
When she’s not coaching or connecting with therapists, you’ll find her hanging out with her children and grandchildren, reading, walking by the water, or dreaming up new ways to make business feel a little lighter.
Connect with the Host:
Website: www.grouppracticenetwork.ca
Instagram: instagram.com/grouppracticenetwork
Facebook: facebook.com/grouppracticenetwork
LinkedIn:www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-catallo
Loved this episode? Let’s take it a step further.
Grab the free Time + Energy Audit for Group Practice Owners to get super clear on where your time is going—and what it’s actually worth.
And if you're ready for consistent support, connection, and access to done-for-you tools? Come join us inside Group Practice Connection—the membership designed to help Canadian group practice owners lead with clarity and confidence.
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00:00:00
Lisa Catallo: Welcome back to the Empowered to Lead podcast. This is a place for clinic owners to be empowered as a leader, as a business owner, to connect with other people and to have the skills that we need to do this job well. And so, if you listened in last week, you'll know that I started a conversation about that statement: hire slow, fire fast. And we've been focusing in on how to hire slow. And so today I have a checklist for you. It will be in the footnotes, and I'm going to walk through it here with you. So if you've got pad and paper, you want to take some notes. If you're near a printer, you might want to go and print this out as we're walking through the checklist. For those of you that are watching online through YouTube, this is what it looks like. So a very clear checklist. Some of the things that you want to look through your interview process to see how you are matching some of those recommendations, where you might be needing some extra steps in there. I wanted to make this really practical for you, so here we go. When you think about slowing down your hiring process or your your recruitment process. This doesn't mean that you're procrastinating or you're hesitating or insecure. It means that you are intentional, and each of the steps in your interview process is related to the clients that you are serving, the kind of person you want on your team, and the kind of person that you want to lead, because really, what we need as and want as business owners is longevity. We want therapist retention, and if we're just going with our gut or you know winging it every time we do an interview, that actually doesn't feed into a really good relationship that's going to last as long as possible. So it can also feel like it's costing you time that you don't have. So you're like, "Hey, Lisa, I need to bring somebody on, or "I don't have time to do all these steps. But I would actually argue that this is actually the fastest way to stop repeating
00:02:26
expensive, non-effective recruitment of therapists. So, I want to encourage you to use this checklist the next time you're bringing someone onto your team, whether that's a therapist, an intake coordinator, or a clinical director. This checklist can be applied in any of those roles. Roles. So first of all, get clear on your non-negotiables before you post the job. So what do you need for licensing or association? What kind of degree are you adamant that they have, or are you okay if they have a diploma or a different kind of training? What kind of availability do you want and need? So most of us know that if you offer an evening or a weekend, you're going to fill up sooner, but that may not actually fit with your ideal client. So spend some time looking at your inquiries, the role that you're wanting to fill, and what that availability would look like. What kind of experience do you want to have? One of the things that we're facing in the market right now, especially for counselors, is that it feels very saturated, and it's hard to get experienced therapists to join your group practice. So, what are you willing to negotiate on? Are you okay taking a new grad? And if so, are you prepared for the extra attention and support that they need? If not, are you willing to wait this out and have a slow process. Know what you won't budge on, and versus the nice to have in there. And you want to decide that before people start applying. You want to make that really clear in everything that you post. Of these are the non-negotiables, so that there isn't any confusion or oh my goodness I thought this was a good fit but they're missing this kind of thing. Number two, I would encourage you to run a screening step before you actually step into your first full interview. So this looks different for different personalities. I've used different forms of this as we've gone and tweaked it. So that's also one thing that you want to know. While this is a checklist, this is
00:04:49
tweakable.
00:04:50
I would say you want to come back and look at your interview process about every five hires to make sure that it's actually working with where your business is at. Right now, with where you are as a leader right now, so what can you use as a screening step? You can use a short call. You can have a written question or two that catches an obvious mismatched early, and it protects everyone's time, yours and the candidates. One of the things that you can do too is in the listing. So whether it's Indeed or on your website, say if you're going to submit your resume, I want this in a cover letter, or I want this title in the subject line. So are they paying attention to detail? Do they actually want to be with us? Because actually, in my request for a cover letter, I ask them to say, "Why do you think you'd be a good fit for Panorama? What is it about us that fits for you? And so they have to look more at us as opposed to just send out an application to every group practice in the area. The next part that you want in your checklist is an interview that has structured, scored questions, and this is something that an employment lawyer shared with me at one of my retreats that I ran. Shared with us at the retreat that it provides consistency across your interviews. It also catches in the moment how that felt or how well they answered that question. So this isn't just a friendly chat over coffee. You're using a consistent set of questions asked the same way and rated the same way for everybody that you interview for that role. You can tweak those questions to match what you see on their resume or what you're looking for. You can reword it a little bit, or you can add a question or skip one. But I would say you want to have your template. These are the core questions that we're asking in every interview, and we have a ranking from one to five, and that's just in a little table through Word, and we circle which number it feels like in their response for that question.
00:07:15
You want to add a case study or short role play. So step number four is what's another step to know how they work clinically? So you want to watch someone think through an actual scenario or an intake or a treatment plan. Maybe if you're hiring for an intake coordinator, a tricky client call that could also be for a therapist, and that tells you more than a polished answer ever will. So, what does this look like? You can send a case study ahead of time and ask them to send you a document. One of the things, as I was talking through that with a group practice owner recently, is like, but then you don't know if if that's AI that answered. So, how would you make sure that that is a true answer from an applicant? You can have it so that we used to do this between our interview. So we did the the short interview or like the standard questions, and then here's a case study. Please take 1520 minutes to answer through the questions that we have of how you would work with that, and then we chatted that through. You can ask for a video. So hey, I want you to have a friend with you, and this is the presenting issue, and then do a short mock session. You can get really creative with this part and just really pulling out some of that clinical approach. Number five is check your references with questions that get you pertinent, not perceived information. So ask about how they handle a hard week or a mistake, not just whether their last employer would rehire them. Although that is a good question to ask, you know, what is a stressful situation? Do they need more support in a certain area? Would you hire them? Those kinds of questions can be helpful in the reference, and always using the same questions again with your reference checks. Number six would be score your interview before you compare your notes with anyone else.
00:09:30
So make sure either you're using that ranking or you've got a different way of tracking how did I feel about this person. What's a concern? What is my read on them? And then I forgot to suggest this earlier, but I would suggest having somebody else in the room with you to do the interview with you. So before you compare your notes between each other, know your impression, and then have that conversation, and then. You want to build an onboarding runway, so you are so excited. You've got this new therapist, and Kay, let's get you some clients. What is the process that you want in place in order to know that this is a good fit? So you like they presented well in the interview, but now you get into things and it takes them 10 days to reply to you, or you know they they don't really do well on the bio, or they're not going through your material, or asking questions or answering questions the way that you would like them to. You want to have another filter in here. This is crucial for setting them up for success for your clinic, for your clients, and for your team. So plan onboarding processes and your meetings with them on purpose instead of just okay here see some clients away we go. So my onboarding process looks like we have Waybook. You can have a document. You can have an onboarding process through Google Classroom or Monday. There's lots of ways to have onboarding documents. So here's our procedures. Here's how you know how to do your invoice, how to arrive a client, what our mission, vision, and values are all of those things in there. I want them to read that before we actually meet. I want them to meet my admin, and so I have a set number of questions for my admin to ask, so that they know when a client calls in, who does this person work with, who do they not work with, what is their personality like. I want them to submit all of their paperwork. So make a list of the paperwork that is due, and know your deadline for when that's due. Who is it
00:11:50
going to? Be really clear for everybody who needs to receive that paperwork. We say that they need to have their bio, and I include a video on our website for two weeks before they start seeing clients. This allows for clients, prospective clients, to see them on the website, and also helps my admin as they're making recommendations to say, like, this is a real person, not just take me at my word kind of thing. It also shows me how responsive they are to our requirements and our timeline, and so that's another filter, a screening in the higher slow part. And those are some seven steps. Obviously, you fill them out a lot more than just 15 minutes, but create your processes. Know who's responsible for which part of each of these steps. Keep them standard. Review them on a regular basis, and use this checklist as you review that. Make sure you know what's missing and what could be filled out? I would encourage you to join us in the group practice connection if this is something that you really want to develop. That you're wondering if your process is as thorough as it could be, because I have I have interview process for the different roles for your admin, for your therapist, for a clinical director. I've got a vibe check for after the interview that goes into this a little more fully, and then your community of group practice owners where we talk about some of these things. Oh my goodness, I didn't listen to my gut. Or what does higher slow mean with this person? What does fire fast mean with this situation, and so the people who are in there have really enjoyed the support, bouncing ideas off of each other, learning from each other, and expanding how your in this case how your hire slow process would look. You can find that on the website.
00:13:59
I'll also put a link in the show notes. I would love to have you join us. I hope you found this tool really helpful. I'd love to hear your feedback. If you think there's anything that you learned from it, or maybe you do a little bit differently that I can learn from you, you can email me at lisa at grouppracticenetwork.ca. Thank you for joining us, and we will see you next week.