You Can't Out-Recruit a Broken Culture: Why Your Provider Recruitment Strategy Is Failing

Are you a clinical director spending every non-clinical moment reviewing resumes and conducting interviews, wondering why you can't fill those open provider positions? In this solo episode, Jill Steeley reveals an uncomfortable truth: your recruitment problem isn't actually a recruitment problem. You cannot out-recruit a broken team environment. If you've tried increasing salaries, expanding your recruiting radius, hiring expensive recruiters, and nothing is working, this 15-minute episode will change how you approach both recruitment and retention.

The Vicious Cycle

The trap clinical directors fall into: Broken cultures create recruitment emergencies → Recruitment emergencies prevent culture repair → You get stuck recruiting instead of fixing the environment → Positions stay unfilled or quickly turn over

You can't fix the environment because you're desperately filling positions. You can't keep positions filled because the environment is broken.

If This Sounds Familiar...

You've probably tried:

Increasing the salary
Adding sign-on bonuses
Expanding your recruiting radius
Posting everywhere (Indeed, LinkedIn, specialty job boards)
Hiring expensive recruiters (who don't always deliver)

And yet:

Your position is still open, OR
You fill it and within a few months that person is leaving again

It's Not Your Fault (But It's Your Responsibility)

The reality most clinical directors face:

You inherited this team. You didn't create this culture.

You probably walked into:

High turnover before you arrived
Longstanding personality conflicts
A previous director who checked out months before officially leaving
An already messy situation

What happens three months in:

The veteran nurse who undermines every new hire
The provider who constantly complains but never offers solutions
Provider team won't see enough patients
Front desk staff who've formed their own kingdom and resent changes
Tense environment creating constant backfilling needs
Always in recruitment mode, never getting chance to fix culture

The promotion reality: You're a strong clinician with great technical skills who got promoted. On paper, exciting: more influence, better compensation, chance to shape better patient care.

The reality: Team dynamics are way more complicated than you anticipated.

Why You Can't Out-Recruit Your Way Out

Reason #1: New Hires Absorb the Existing Culture

What happens: When you bring someone into a toxic or dysfunctional environment, they don't change it. They get changed by it.

The pattern: That nice, idealistic, energetic provider you just hired? Give them 3 months with your negative veteran staff and watch what happens.

Only two outcomes:

They adopt those same cynical attitudes to fit in and survive
They leave because it's uncomfortable and goes against their values (becoming part of your turnover statistic)

Reason #2: Good Candidates Sense the Dysfunction

The reality: High-quality candidates are interviewing YOU just as much as you're interviewing them.

What they're watching during site visits:

How your staff interacts
Tension in the air
Passive-aggressive comments (to each other or to the candidate)

What really good candidates do: They decline your offers. And you won't really know why.

What they'll say:

"It's not a good time for me to leave my current position"
"I have another offer on the table"
"I just don't think I want to move to your state/area"

(But the real reason: they sensed the dysfunction)

Reason #3: Recruitment Fatigue Prevents Strategic Action

The problem: Every hour you spend in recruitment mode is an hour you're NOT spending on culture transformation.

What eats your time and mental energy:

Every interview you conduct
Every reference check
Every onboarding/orientation with a new person

What you should be doing instead: Investing that time and energy in addressing the root issues on the team BEFORE you start recruiting again.

The trap: You're treating symptoms instead of the disease.

Jill's Real-World Example

The situation when she was recruited as FQHC CEO:

One-on-one meeting with the medical director:

Hadn't recruited a doctor in 5 years
Hadn't recruited a dentist in several years
Medical director convinced it was: salary, schedule, job market (all external factors)

What Jill discovered after a few months: After interviewing staff and observing the culture, she sat down with the medical director again:

"This is not an external recruiting problem. This is because the culture here is very tense and very toxic. New people are going to feel very unwelcome because the current staff has been unhappy for a very long time. There's this undercurrent, this attitude that this is not a good place to work."

What changed: Once they addressed those attitudes and the toxic culture, their recruiting abilities began to stabilize almost immediately.

What they DIDN'T change:

Salary (stayed the same)
Provider schedules (stayed the same)

What DID change:

Retention improved
Recruitment improved
They were recruiting into a healthy culture

Strategic Culture Repair: The Three Foundations

This must happen BEFORE your next recruitment cycle, not after.

Foundation #1: Clear, Non-Negotiable Standards

What your team needs to know: Exactly what behavior is acceptable and what is not.

NOT this: Vague value statements on the wall (integrity, ethics, customer care)

THIS: Actual behavioral standards with consequences

Where most new clinical directors get stuck: Trying to keep everyone happy instead of establishing boundaries and clear expectations for performance and behavior.

The truth:

High-performing team members WANT standards
They want to know toxic behavior won't be tolerated
Your best people are waiting for you to address your worst people

Foundation #2: Transparent Communication Rhythms

Broken teams operate on: Gossip and assumptions

Healthy teams operate on: Structured, predictable communication

What this means:

Regular team huddles with clear expectations, agendas, and next steps
One-on-ones where you actually have hard conversations and address performance/behavioral issues
Decision-making processes people can understand (even when they don't agree)

The result: When communication is transparent, dysfunction has nowhere to hide anymore.

Foundation #3: Quick, Decisive Action on Culture Violators

The hard truth: If you have someone actively poisoning your culture, every day you delay addressing it is a day you are choosing that one person over the rest of your team.

Yes, it's uncomfortable:

Hard conversations
HR processes feel slow-moving
Worry about being short-staffed
Concern about patients going without a provider
Who's gonna pick up these patients if this person leaves?

But here's the reality: Keeping someone toxic in the culture is way more expensive than any vacancy or needing to move patients to a different provider. Full stop. Every single time.

The cost comparison: Keeping someone toxic = More expensive (directly and indirectly) than any vacancy ever would be

The Good News: What Happens When You Fix Culture

When you fix these three foundations and become a healthy culture, recruitment becomes exponentially easier.

Your Job Postings Attract Better Candidates

Your health center now has a healthy reputation in the community

Your Staff Become Natural Recruiters

When providers and staff are happy, they naturally start recruiting people they know:

Other providers
Nurses
Dental assistants
Support staff

They'll start telling people how great it is to work at your health center.

Your Interviews Go Better

Candidates sense the positive environment during site visits:

Friendliness in the air
Staff with great energy
Excitement around your health center

Your Retention Improves

People who are happy want to stay.

The shift: You're not just filling positions anymore with anybody who will take it. You are intentionally building a team.

Jill's Results After Culture Fix

What happened within a year: Providers were contacting them asking if they had open positions, wanting to join the team

What happened within a few years: Received the Employer of Choice award

What changed: Fixed the culture, and everything else followed.

Key Timestamps

[00:01:00] The recruitment problem that isn't really a recruitment problem
[00:03:00] It's not your fault (but it's your responsibility)
[00:05:00] The vicious cycle trap
[00:07:00] Reason #1: New hires absorb existing culture
[00:08:00] Reason #2: Good candidates sense dysfunction
[00:09:00] Reason #3: Recruitment fatigue prevents strategic action
[00:10:00] Jill's real-world example: 5 years without recruiting a doctor
[00:12:00] Foundation #1: Clear, non-negotiable standards
[00:13:00] Foundation #2: Transparent communication rhythms
[00:14:00] Foundation #3: Quick, decisive action on culture violators
[00:15:00] The good news: What happens when you fix culture
[00:17:00] Introducing the Clinical Director's Survival Guide

New Resource: Clinical Director's Survival Guide

(Launching in January)

What it includes: A guidebook walking you through exactly what to do in your first 90 days as clinical director

You'll learn to:

Assess your inherited team
Establish non-negotiable standards
Quickly identify who's poisoning your culture
Create foundation for sustainable recruitment and retention
Manage your own clinical responsibilities (including seeing patients if applicable)

Bonus resources: Specifically for clinical directors who inherited challenging team dynamics

Get notified: Sign up at jillsteeley.com