June ’26 MHD Event: From Scrambling to Strategic: Building a Therapist Recruitment Pipeline

In the current landscape of ongoing therapist shortages, practice owners and operators face increasing challenges in attracting and hiring qualified clinicians while maintaining consistent clinic growth. This session is designed to help owners, operators, leaders, and clinicians move from reactive, last-minute hiring to a proactive, strategic recruitment approach that consistently attracts therapist talent.

While much attention is traditionally given to optimizing the patient experience—through customer service, outcome measures, and satisfaction scores—this course emphasizes the importance of applying the same level of intentionality to the candidate experience. Participants will learn to implement a structured, repeatable talent acquisition process, leverage internal resources more effectively, and build a sustainable recruitment pipeline that supports long-term staffing needs.

Participants will leave with practical insights, real-world examples, and actionable strategies they can immediately apply to refine their hiring processes, improve candidate engagement, and ensure their clinics remain competitive, staffed, and positioned for growth.

Rachel Grubb serves as the Senior Director of Talent at Therapy Partner Solutions (TPS), where she has successfully built and scaled the internal talent department, including the university relations program, to meet the unique hiring needs of private practices and managed contract locations across multiple states while averaging approximately 200 licensed hires per year.

As a licensed physical therapist, Rachel leverages her extensive clinical background and experience as an educator at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga’s Doctor of Physical Therapy program to bridge the gap between students, clinicians, and business operations. Her success is rooted in her ability to adapt, operationalize, and standardize hiring processes across diverse clinic environments while addressing the unique challenges each practice faces. Rachel combines practical experience, operational insight, and a passion for clinician connection to improve patient access to quality therapy services and drive sustainable growth for practice owners and operators.

Contact Hours 1.0 Contact hour

Course Objectives

At the conclusion of this course, participants will be able to:

1. Design a proactive hiring strategy that reduces last-minute staffing shortages and supports consistent recruitment efforts.
2. Develop an interview and follow-up process that enhances the candidate experience through timely communication, transparency, and effective clinic storytelling.
3. Implement practical sourcing tactics, including referral programs, student program data utilization, and job board optimization, to attract high-quality therapist candidates.
4. Improve candidate connection and engagement by understanding individual motivations, avoiding assumptions, and fostering genuine, two-way communication.