You are not just filling a seat. You are choosing someone who will define your culture, shape your patient experience, and either strengthen or strain your team.
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The cost of a wrong hire in private practice is not just financial, though that cost alone is significant. Replacing a specialized healthcare professional can run as high as 200% of their annual salary. 30% of all new hires leave within their first year, accounting for 40% of all healthcare turnover. Recruiting a physician can cost between $180,000 and $250,000. Brandon's position: stop hiring to fill a seat. Hire someone who will change the game.
Private practices using structured assessments to identify ideal team players, focusing on traits like collaboration and adaptability, reported a 31% reduction in staff turnover compared to those without targeted hiring criteria. (Source: MGMA)
Brandon draws directly from Patrick Lencioni's Ideal Team Player, a book covered in Brandon's five favorite leadership books for private practice owners. The framework centers on three core virtues that, when all present in a single candidate, produce someone who elevates everyone around them.
Humility is the single most indispensable attribute of a team player. Humble candidates are quick to point out the contributions of others and slow to claim their own. The most dangerous hire is someone who is hungry and smart but not humble. Brandon's term for this profile: the skillful politician. They know how to appear humble while operating from pure self-interest. They are the hardest to detect in an interview and the most damaging to your culture once inside.
You can be confident and humble at the same time. Humble does not mean timid. It means being willing to fall on your sword, own your mistakes, and clean up your messes. That is what Brandon models for his team every day.
Hungry team players want more. More responsibility, more learning, more ways to contribute. They are self-motivated and define success in terms of the team's outcomes rather than their own. Hungry players rarely need prodding to push toward the next goal.
Here is how Brandon tests for hunger: when two referred candidates came in for interviews with no research done on the company and no preparation, that absence of hunger disqualified them immediately regardless of their skill set. If you want the job that badly, you spend 30 minutes learning about what you are walking into. That is hunger.
Smart in this context does not mean intellectually gifted. It means people-smart. The ability to read the room. To understand what is happening emotionally in a group. To ask the right questions, listen actively, and engage with others in ways that build trust rather than friction.
Brandon would rather have someone with no skills and the right character than exceptional skills and the wrong character. Skills can be taught. Attitude, integrity, and the hunger to earn those skills cannot be installed after hire.
This means moving beyond what a resume shows. How do they handle being put on the hot seat? Do they research the company before walking in? Do they show up with a willingness to earn their place, or with an assumption that their background entitles them to it? The more confident someone is in who they are, the easier it is to put them in an uncomfortable situation. Confidence under pressure is a character trait that interviews must reveal, not assume.
The most revealing information about a candidate rarely surfaces in a formal interview setting. Brandon's recommendation: move the assessment into the real world. Take a finalist candidate to a store or out to lunch. Observe how they behave outside the controlled environment of a conference room. Give them unexpected questions. Put them in situations they did not anticipate. Watch whether they lean in or shut down. This is the grocery test, and it reveals character in ways that rehearsed interview answers never will.
Identifying ideal team players is not just a hiring exercise. Assess every existing staff member against the humble, hungry, smart framework. Not to create a culling exercise, but to identify who needs development, who is ready for more responsibility, and where culture gaps actually live. Include character traits alongside technical requirements in job descriptions. Create interview questions that reveal the three virtues. And invest in cultural integration, not just task training, for every new hire.
A lack of teamwork in the office is worse than being short staffed. The goal is not to hire people who need a job. It is to hire people who believe in what you believe.
For the structural framework that turns great individual hires into a cohesive high-performing team, read our post on defining your team approach. And if you need a hiring process built from the ground up with the right criteria and documentation, our fractional HR services are designed to make that happen.
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