Pros
Flexible schedule and remote work.
Cons
I was hired part-time (24 hours per week) with a goal of four BCBA hires per month. A few months later, leadership revealed that only 11 BCBAs had been hired across the Phoenix and Tucson markets during the entire previous year. Honestly, that one statistic alone explained more about the role than any onboarding document ever could.
The position relied almost entirely on outbound sourcing due to limited applicant flow, which meant spending months contacting hundreds of clinicians in an incredibly competitive recruiting market. When this predictably failed to produce a steady stream of interested candidates, the response was rarely to revisit assumptions about the market. Instead, we entered a fascinating period of organizational evolution in which every recruiting challenge appeared to generate a new tracker.
New scorecards appeared. New spreadsheets appeared. Existing spreadsheets somehow produced additional spreadsheets. Meetings were held to discuss the trackers, followed by meetings to discuss the outcomes of the meetings discussing the trackers.
Leadership frequently encouraged recruiters to become more “creative.” After spending months contacting hundreds of clinicians directly, brainstorming sessions gradually expanded into discussions about where BCBAs might eat lunch, whether recruiters should visit competitor clinics, and whether recruitment flyers should be placed on cars in clinic parking lots.
I appreciate creative thinking. However, it was difficult to reconcile these conversations with the reality of a highly specialized clinician shortage. There were moments when it genuinely felt like we were only a few brainstorming sessions away from hiding recruitment flyers inside Panera bread bowls and hoping a BCBA would discover one while enjoying a nice bowl of soup. At times, these discussions felt less like recruitment strategy and more like a group of otherwise intelligent adults moving one step closer to attempting to capture a BCBA using an elaborate cardboard box propped up with a stick.
Priorities changed constantly. New initiatives appeared with great urgency and then quietly disappeared. Goals shifted. Expectations shifted. Action items shifted. Entire meetings seemed to exist solely to create additional meetings. There were times when I left a call genuinely unsure whether we had solved a problem or simply created three exciting new problems to discuss the following week.
Communication was often unclear, expectations were not always applied consistently across recruiters, and many recruiting challenges seemed to be viewed as evidence that recruiters needed to try harder rather than evidence that there might be a statewide clinician shortage.
I left this company with valuable recruiting experience, a deeper appreciation for the challenges facing healthcare recruiters, and the lingering suspicion that somewhere in Arizona, a Panera bread bowl is waiting to fulfill its destiny as a sourcing strategy.
