Building Your Team: Recruiting, Hiring, and Training for Success ft. Amy Hane
In this episode of the CareCraft podcast presented by Panacea, Amy Hane, founder of Long Term Liaisons and Pivotal Liaisons, discusses the intricacies of recruiting, hiring, and training staff. Amy emphasizes the importance of knowing candidates for a long time before hiring, the benefits of hiring through internships, and why she avoids hiring friends.
Key Takeaways
Amy’s unique approach to hiring offers valuable lessons for care managers looking to build a reliable, compassionate team:
Focus on Long-Term Relationships: Amy prefers hiring people she has worked with or known for years, as it provides insight into their character and work ethic.
Value Non-Traditional Recruitment: Amy rarely advertises job openings. Instead, she relies on professional networks, referrals, and interns to find potential hires.
Use Paid Shadowing for Real Insight: Shadowing allows candidates to experience the role firsthand and gives Amy’s team a chance to evaluate their fit in a real-world setting.
Prioritize Character Over Experience: Amy looks for qualities like empathy, intuition, and drive, which she believes are crucial for success in care management.
Stay Organized with Candidate Information: By keeping a detailed file of potential hires, Amy is always prepared when the need for a new team member arises.
Through her thoughtful approach, Amy has built a team that not only meets her agency’s needs but also shares her dedication to quality, compassionate care. For any care management professional, her insights into hiring, onboarding, and team-building provide a roadmap for success in creating a team that truly makes a difference in clients' lives.
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Transcript
[00:00:04] Ariadne: Welcome to the CareCraft podcast presented by Panacea. Today, we're going to be talking all about recruiting, hiring training your staff, and I'm super excited to have Amy Hane on for that conversation. She founded Long Term Liaisons in 2011 after recognizing the challenges that aging populations and their caregivers face, and she has a background in mental health hospice and home health, meaning that she has extensive knowledge of all long term care services and resources.
And in addition, she also founded Pivotal Liaisons which offers a business consultation to fellow care managers to help grow and elevate their practices. So thank you so much for joining us, Amy. I also will say that you have described hiring as a superpower of yours. So that sets us up for a good conversation.
[00:00:54] Amy: A superpower. Thank you. Did I use that word? I don't know if I did or not, but I'll take the compliment, I guess.
[00:01:01] Ariadne: Yeah.
[00:01:01] Amy: Thank you.
[00:01:02] Ariadne: Yeah, let's maybe just start from the beginning and a little bit of introduction about yourself. Like, when did you start growing your team with long term liaisons and really refining your, your hiring and recruiting process?
[00:01:17] Amy: So I started growing my team within about a year to a year and a half of being in business and the first person I hired was a nurse who I had known for several years and I actually met her when I was a home health social worker back in 2004 and she was a privately hired caregiver for a patient of mine and his wife and I saw a lot of promise in her.
I saw herself put herself through nursing school and I told her. When you finish, I will hire you and I think in hindsight that set. the scene for me to prefer to hire people that I have known a long time. So really I met her in 2004 and I probably hired her in 2012. So I had all of those years to watch her really develop as a person.
She's not that much younger than me. She just had kind of a different start in life. And so her career developed at a later age. But I knew what sort of person she was. She had done private caregiving for those patients and then for some other patients of mine that I had referred to her as a home health social worker.
And I just, I knew she'd be good and she'd be loyal and she still works for me to, to this day. That's incredible. Yeah. So I think it was a proving ground for me that it's great to. Know someone as well as you can for as long as you can before you actually hire them. And also, they're not your good friend.
I like her, but we met each other through work, right? I'm not, and my staff will tell you, I don't ever want to hire somebody who I consider to be a good friend, because I want my friendships to truly be friendships, and I want my work relationships to be work relationships.
[00:03:11] Ariadne: Yeah, a little bit of separation is good. So what is your hiring process now?
[00:03:17] Amy: So now if we have the ability and or the luxury to hire someone who we have known, and I say we, I see my meaning myself and my management team to somebody we've known for years. Right. We've worked with them. We refer to them. Maybe they work for a hospice company or they work at an assisted living or they work in an attorney's office or something of that nature.
That is ideal because we have interfaced with them and they know what we do and the level of interaction and communication that we require out of them because it shows them what we do and our standard. That is most ideal. If we can identify somebody like that. I've also find found that hiring a student intern can be helpful.
And we have a young lady now who became an intern a few years ago, and we initially hired her thereafter while she was still in school part time as an administrative person, and now she is a full fledged employee, and she's about to become a certified care manager. So that's been a great process for us, too, because we get to.
Basically, teach them care management and train them in our way because our way is not necessarily another care manager's way. So those to me tend to be the two best ways to acquire, to identify screen kind of informally. Informally interview people either by working with them in another entity in another role or having a student intern and seeing them interact.
As to whether they would be a good fit for your team.
[00:05:12] Ariadne: So are you always hiring? Like, you always have kind of open positions and you're evaluating if someone's a good fit.
[00:05:19] Amy: We are always evaluating, so we do not advertise. I don't put anything on LinkedIn or Indeed, nothing like that. Never, never, never. I have used a recruiter, a local recruiter one time and it worked out okay.
The lady actually did want to come work for us, but she wanted to be part time and we changed our mind in the middle of the process and thought we really want somebody full time. And so that did not work out. She was a pretty good fit though. So yeah. And when I first started my business, I thought it would just be me.
I would be a solo practitioner, and here I am now with currently 11 people on the team, including myself. Some are full time, some are not. Most are employees, a couple are contractors. So, but my, but I, and my director of care management, and I would say my director of operations are always thinking about people we come in contact with, and I keep a very detailed file about potential.
Employees are contractors. I have their resume. If I actually get more than their resume, I create a folder about them. If I actually hire them, I move that folder somewhere, right? Very organized. I keep notes about when I talk to them. I put all those notes in there so that I can go back and look or my.
Management staff can go back and look about when did we actually talk to them? What do we talk to them about? How did it go? So yeah, again, I think we're always looking. I say, I wish there was just this wonderful bucket of people out there who had the same work ethic, work ethic as me and what I perpetuate throughout my staff.
That are educated correctly and have the skills and that I could just pluck out of the bucket. Right? But there aren't there aren't but you have to keep your eyes open.
[00:07:24] Ariadne: Yeah. So, how long did it take you to develop the process that you're using now? And specifically, what are some of the skills and traits that you look for that have changed over time as you're going through that recruiting process with a candidate?
[00:07:41] Amy: So, it was probably about. seven or eight years ago that I decided that I wanted to have someone's shadow with me. And that was a way to, if I had not worked really directly with them. So in other words, the first lady I hired and they actually have another nurse that works for me. I worked with both of them through home health, right?
I was able to know what sort of work they did. But I'm thinking about my director of care management who's now been with me seven, almost eight years. I decided I wanted her to shadow, and I would pay her to shadow, I wouldn't pay her what I'd pay her as a care manager, but I would pay her because I wanted to show her, A, I value your time no matter what, and I started that then, or I might have started that with one other person before her who I didn't hire.
That proved to be very helpful because even though she was a hospice social worker, and I had worked with her on one or two cases, it had not been a long. relationship. So she had come highly recommended to me and I thought, okay, I like her. I've seen her do a little bit, but let's let her ride along with me.
Let's let her go into the patient's home, the client's homes with me. Let me see what she thinks, right? So it's really a working interview. Before I spend a lot of other time to talk about benefits or lack thereof in these small businesses, right? And pay, just let's see who you are and what you're about and let you see who we are and what we're about, but we'll pay you for it.
Because if you already have another job and you have to take time off from that, I think it's only right whether you're getting paid there or not to show you, hey, we respect you enough to give to give you some money for the time that you're spending with us. Right? So that is when I started that shadowing and I have used it ever since.
[00:09:43] Ariadne: And it sounds like that shadowing happens very early then and in the process with the candidate. It's not like the last thing that you're doing before writing an offer
[00:09:54] Amy: because I believe. Why have it be the last thing instead of almost the 1st thing? So the 1st thing is really, let's have a conversation and send me a resume.
Right? And then around the time they're shattering, we're also checking references. So that's kind of a concurrent thing. My typical model for hiring somebody is months. I'm managing long term liaisons and pivotal liaisons. We have a lot of clients and they're needy as most care management agencies are.
And you have to sandwich all that, all that human resource and personnel work in amongst all of your other work, right? And so it takes me a while, but also just takes me a while to really think through. Them and their situation and what I think about them and then talk to my director of care management, talk to my director of operations about what do y'all think?
And they don't just shadow with me. So one lady that we're thinking about hiring right now, she shadowed with me. I knew her from years ago when I had a client who lived in her nursing home. She reached out to me on Facebook in the last three months and said, Hey, I'm Would you be willing, do you remember me?
I said, yes, I remember you and she was good. Right? And so I talked to her. I had her shadow me and then I had her shadow with my director of care management. We haven't even hired her yet. We would like to, but she's got to work out some things with child care. So we're just kind of waiting because right now there's nobody else.
That we think is the right fit. So instead of putting ad out there and spending time going through all that, I just wait. And I tell people we have a waiting list. I have four care managers. I have nurses. I have what we call associate care coordinators, which are care manager assistants. Basically, I have admin staff and we all are working and we're working hard and we're very busy and we're not going to take on clients that we can't serve well.
So we just tell people we have a waiting list. If she comes on board, great. If she doesn't, I will find someone who fits the bill. I will not hire haphazardly.
[00:12:20] Ariadne: It seems like very wise words because I'm sure, you know, the consequences of a bad hire are You know, twice as long in terms of actually resolving that as well for the team.
So what are the, I guess, do you have do you have a job description with, like, key skills and, and criteria that they have to meet that you're kind of checking off in this process? Or is it more on an ad hoc basis with where you see, you know, the needs of your clients and, and their individual unique skill sets?
[00:12:51] Amy: Well, we have some basics because if I'm looking to hire a care manager, okay, who I would like to get certified through the Aging Life Care Association, they have to meet certain criteria, whether it's experience or education. Okay, so as a general rule, yes, I have some specific criteria about that. Other than that, it's great for them to have experience that we think is important.
So if someone has been a nurse in a hospital and they can qualify educationally and even experience wise to get CER experience wise to get certified. But they don't really know the resources in this geographic area. Let's say the way myself and a typical home health social worker would, or a hospice social worker would, then they're not necessarily somebody I'm going to say, Oh, wow, great.
But if we meet them and we think that, or if we're meeting with them and we think that their personality, their intuition, their drive, is what's going to fuel this process more so than do you know every non medical in home care agency in our geographic area. That is more important than do you know every single one.
Because we can tell you every single one. You know, we can tell you who we work with and who we have worked with in the past and who we're working with now and the pros and cons. We can train that. But it's the ability to understand how to be I call it the middle hub of the wheel as a care manager, how to be that and how every, all the resources go out from us to understand that and get it.
So when I had been in business for four years, I hired a business consultant who's actually an attorney, an accountant and just a minute, we use A book by Gino Wittman called Traction. I'm holding it up so you can see it. They won't see it on the podcast. Are you familiar with it?
[00:15:04] Ariadne: I think I've heard the title. I have not read the book.
[00:15:08] Amy: Okay. So we use this as our guide. I did not use a business consultant when I first started business. I did not have a business plan, but I was fairly successful and I hired him four years in and he had us create this. So we created our values, our mission, everything. And we use a system that we started then to keep us on track.
So we work on our business every month. We have two different meetings. My management team and I to keep us on track to dues and goals and these sorts of things. But one thing he taught me from the book, so I have to give credit to Gina Whitman, is that you use a framework called get it wanted capacity.
When you are, when you are assessing whether someone would be a good fit for your business, but also when you're reviewing them for a yearly review, a personnel review. Get it, want it capacity and you use a plus or a minus or a plus and a minus. So do they get what your business is about? Do they understand what your business is really about?
Do they want it? I said part of our assessment is their motivation. Do they, what do they want it? And do they have the capacity to do it? Some people get it and want it, but they don't have the capacity. They either aren't for me, detail oriented enough, and they're not going to get their documentation in in time and I'm a stickler about that, but they might really get in and want it.
But if they can't do the documentation piece that they don't have the capacity for the job. So, for instance, When we have somebody shadow, I will tell them, okay, I want you to write the case note for the three clients we just saw. They don't have access to my software at that time, but they can just send it in a Word document or a note.
A, I get to see a writing sample, right? Hopefully they didn't use any sort of AI, but I get to see how they see the situation. So maybe we've talked about it, but how do they write their note? That's part of the capacity piece. Are they going to be able to perform to the level that we require. You can train some of that, but you can't train all of it.
You can train some of the get it because you can do some more education. You can try to motivate for the wanted piece. But not necessarily to the extent that you really want an ideal person to get it one and have the capacity from the get go that I would, if I was assessing someone, I give a plus in every one of those categories right off the bat to me.
That is the ideal candidate.
[00:18:09] Ariadne: Going back to what you were saying more towards the beginning, it seems like you do balance on your team having individuals that are earlier in their career, where I presume there is more of that training just necessary versus individuals that are more experienced and, and you're expecting them to come into the role with all three of those, like get it, want it, their capacity is like, Almost perfect, right?
Let's say, you know, without needing needing extensive training on the job.
[00:18:39] Amy: Correct. And so when you have somebody like that, right, then really what you're teaching them is our way. If they get it, they want it and they have the capacity. Okay, they've been in maybe as a social worker for many years in this area and I keep saying social worker because I'm a social worker, but I've got a great nurse right now who is also a care manager, but yeah, and then you're able to really look at, okay, they've got all of those traits.
We just have to teach them how we do it. How we go about the process, how we bill, how we choose to interact, how we document if they have all the other pieces.
[00:19:24] Ariadne: How many people do you try to onboard at once, or it sounds like it's a very precise?
[00:19:31] Amy: I tried to onboard two at one time. They were both being hired part time to be what was called associate care coordinators, which are like care manager assistants.
And they were both go to work two to three days a week. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Now they both did fine, but it was really hard for me and my staff to do that. It was too much. Too much, too much. One of them was still with us and she, this is a retirement job for her and she's a couple decades older than me and she's got a lot of experience.
The other hadn't really worked in our field, but she was a nurse actually. She ended up leaving. Not because it wasn't a good fit. She just really did a change in life and a grandchild was on the way and she just decided she wanted to do something different. Right. But yes, I will tell my director of care manager.
Like, we're bringing a student intern on right now. And I'm not going to be in charge of my director of care management is because she's also a social worker. But that we have to get that in place. And then if we were going to hire this other person, we're thinking about hiring, we would want our student intern basically on boarded because there's a lot that goes with that, even though you're not hiring them.
If you're going to do right by a student intern, you have a lot you have to teach and we would need several months to do that. Then we would bring on a new care manager if we were ready and she was ready.
[00:21:01] Ariadne: Got it. So one at a time.
[00:21:03] Amy: Absolutely.
[00:21:05] Ariadne: And what does that training and onboarding process look like when you do have a new person joining the team?
[00:21:12] Amy: So they have shadow. So they've seen us in action and we've seen them in action. And then what we typically have them do is Once they've been hired, they shadow with us as well. So they'll shadow with a bunch of different staff, but now they're getting paid a higher rate than the shadowing. Right.
Right. And we are introducing them then as a member of the team. We are not necessarily telling the clients that they're seeing. That this person will be their care manager or their nurse or anything like that. And by the way, when we have somebody shadow with us before we hire them, we always get permission from the client or the family member to do it.
Okay. But once they're hired, and we just take them with us, right? And then we were riding in the car together and we're talking about everything. We're getting them to write the notes because now they have the access to the software. Right? And we, it takes us about three months. For them, for us to feel comfortable giving a care manager a case on her or his own.
In that first month, we have an orientation checklist of certain items that we need to make sure they know. Now, how do you submit an invoice correctly to get paid? Have you been trained on the software and all these different pieces of the software? Have you read and understand the policies and procedures that includes, you know, the dress code and all that sort of stuff.
And after approximately 30 days, we go through that with them and we'll say, even we even have a little test that we give about the software program. Okay. If I wanted to find such and such for this client, where would I go? Because it tells us how proficient they've become with the software, for instance, right?
And after about 3 months, They are then ready to do work on their own, but they're still going to need a lot of hand holding and Direction and a lot of that has to do with what they did before they came to us. So again, if you were a nurse, maybe a discharge planner as a nurse, you might know some things we don't know, but you might not know a lot of what we need you to know.
Okay. But the first month or so they don't really don't do anything on their own in person. They might do a little bit of behind the scenes work on their own. So maybe some phone calls. Setting up some appointments but as it may be an email to a family, but we really, I would say, hold their hands because I'm, again, I'm very particular.
I want them to represent long term liaisons exceedingly well and you can't do that unless you have continued to have been told and shown this is the way, this is how we do it, this is how we do it.
[00:24:09] Ariadne: So those first clients that they. Would get to manage on their own. Is that typically like an existing client that you're transitioning from another team member to them?
Or it's more like those individuals on your wait list that that are just kind of engaging with long term liaison?
[00:24:26] Amy: It can be a combination. That's a great question. First of all, we're not going to give a new care manager. Let's say a case for him or herself. That's really in debt. So they're going to get easy ones.
That's They're going to get an initial assessment, and it might all be all we have to do is an assessment and recommendations and they very well are going to have within the 1st, 3 months. Somebody else go with them and be there, but they're also going to have us if a report is required afterwards. Go over all the resources, every recommendation that they're making, and make sure they're on the right track.
That could be, and in that case, that would be a new client, right? They might get current clients that were phasing off of one care manager to another because that care manager who was already in place is too busy, but we are going to choose easy ones. And in our world, there aren't a lot of easy, but there are simpler cases.
So if you have a really demanding family member, a really demanding client, difficult personalities, a lot of moving parts with maybe they're at home with 24, seven care, and they also have hospice. And they also have a, I've got one right now with a trust officer and a guardian. You are not giving a new person that case.
There is too much to manage. But you're going to give them maybe the, the client whose family members hired us and the son lives out of town and the mom lives at an assisted living and they really only want a visit once a month or every other, every other week. And they want an email after each visit.
And we're really just checking in. Right. And we're dealing maybe with the DLN a little bit or the administrator or dietary or something like that. But the needs are not intense. That's where we start.
[00:26:23] Ariadne: And it sounds like a lot of individuals have. Stay with your organization for a long time, but also grown in their responsibilities in the organization.
So how do you measure their success over time?
[00:26:36] Amy: So my employees have a yearly review formally, and usually after six months with new employees, I have a review with them. And I use that get it, want it capacity form. And we have a bunch of different parameters that we look at, which are included in our policies and procedures.
So how do we assess? Timeliness, quality of work, quantity of work, professionalism, dress, we have a whole list, right? And they know they're going to get reviewed on that. That is what we use formally. We also, because we're people, people, right? We're not numbers people necessarily. We're not engineers.
We assess and figure out how well they're doing really by a lot of conversation with them, observing how they're doing, feedback from them. So as the owner of the business, Several years ago, I started a check in meeting with every staff member once a month and some of my staff members two times a month, and that was actually an idea I got from a group I was in with other care managers through Aging Life Care Association, and it's very helpful, and that check in meeting really is about What's going on in your personal life as much as you want to share?
So are you buying a house? Are you, is your kids graduating in order? What's, what are some monu, some pivotal things happening that might be affecting you positively or negatively? And then we talk about clients, right? Now, I have a director of care management as well. I still do those meetings, but she and I swap off some of them.
So they're having that with me still as the owner and the person that they've known to have done that with them for years. Because I do have a lot of long standing employees and the director of care management. So that is 1 of the ways I think we. We keep in contact with them, and we also are able to gauge when it's time for their yearly review as to their development.
And I'm thinking about our care manager right now, and she's been with us just about a year or a little over a year. And she's a nurse, and she became a certified care manager back in the spring, I think it was. And I was just telling her before we went to the conference a few weeks ago, I said, wow, you have really developed.
She has really found her voice and is able to tell family members how it is. And when she first started with us, and we were expecting, we were not expecting that in the very beginning, but once she got assigned to some cases, right, she needed to do some of that. Because that's part of the reason we get hired, right?
To help people manage their expectations, if nothing else. And she would say, wow, you guys actually say that to family members? And we would say, yeah, we do. We're here to tell them the truth. Reality and she has come a long way in that and I'm really proud of her. So in meeting with her in those check in meetings, my director of care management actually meets with her every week.
You really get a chance to see their development and coach that. And it's not just coaching. Well, how many assisted livings can you tell a family about, right? It is, how do you choose that assisted living? And then how do you tell the family member or tell the assisted living in a diplomatic but professional way, you're not the right fit.
And this is why.
[00:30:15] Ariadne: That's awesome. And I mean, this has been a fantastic conversation. Just last question, what is the one take away that you would want other care managers to have as they think about building a team for the long term success?
[00:30:32] Amy: I want them to take away that if they are able to not fire under stress or duress, okay, if they, if they will wait, if they will be patient, they will have way less turnover and much more longevity.
Yeah, that's what I want people to take away. And you have to be able to tell people you have a waiting list, which I tell my staff. I just said this to one of my staff today, the clients and their family members, because it's an emergency. For them does not make it an emergency for us now have do we sometimes take a client who we think is just going to be like, a 1 time consultation to help them out and no, we can't provide ongoing services.
And do we tell them that we know we can knock out the assessment? Yes, right. And we solve their problem and we do a service and they'll tell other people that we were kind enough and accommodating have to do that. But when we recognize there's a client, it's really going to need ongoing services and we don't have the bandwidth.
We put them on the waiting list. And I would rather do that and I would rather wait to hire the right person at the right time so that we don't have to have that waiting list, but I do have the waiting list when you tell people that they will say it's a good problem to have. And it is because I have it in part because a lot of people need our services, but because I don't rush to hire.
[00:32:09] Ariadne: That's very sage advice, right? Because it goes hand in hand, the better quality people you have. The more your business can bring in in terms of clients as well. so much, Amy. It was wonderful having you on and I really hope to have you on in the future as well. I'm sure there's so many other things that we could talk about as far as team building and culture building go, but really appreciate it.
[00:32:34] Amy: Thank you so much. It was my pleasure.