Including information about housing, schools, churches and community lifestyle will help attract a candidate who will need to consider relocating to your community. Spend a little time and visit some successful companies' Web sites; click the link each provides about job opportunities to get an idea on how to implement your own opportunity. Of course, you can include all posi-tions on your team in your recruitment brochure and on your Web site.

Recruitment

Now it's time to begin the recruitment process. Post your opportunity with all of the appropriate chiropractic colleges and link the posting to your Web site page. The post should be continuous. Never give up!

As you receive inquiries or resumes, acknowledge instantly that their interest has been received and is under consideration.

Screening

Contact the candidate by telephone and conduct a "sensory" screening by asking appropriate open-ended questions to get a "feel" for the candidate and to see if they are worth further consideration. This component of the screening process should only take about 10 minutes. Use a simple checklist to "record" your initial perceptions of the candidate for later review.

This is your quick-screen protocol to weed out those associates you perceive are totally incongruent with the your brand of chi-ropractic. If they are not congruent with your brand, they will not function well in your practice, pure and simple.

Request a printed resume and current color portrait from each of the candidates who passed your initial screening process. Send a letter to those you are not considering any further to advise them of their status. After receiving the formal resume and color portrait from candidates who are still under consideration, initiate a series of telephone interviews, focusing on specific patient care philosophy, adjusting techniques, scope of patient care, compensation expectations and their general expectations in the short-term and in the long-term. (Included in this process is screening by other members of your team.)

Have your office manager and your insurance staff conduct a telephone interview. Employing an associate is a group project, as the associate will be spending a significant amount of time with everyone on the team, not just you.

After completing this process, if a candidate has still made the cut, they are invited to visit you and are required to bring their spouse. It is appropriate to reimburse travel expenses and the visit should be for a couple of days. This stage of the process will include having the candidate be interviewed face-to-face by the entire team and by you.

As part of the process, the candidate will follow you around as you care for patients and perform your normal daily tasks. But here is the one critical component that is often ignored or overlooked during the screening process: dinner with the candidate and their spouse with you and your spouse. You will learn more about this candidate during dinner than you can during the formal screening process. My advice: watch the spouse!

Profile

If the candidate makes this cut, then your next step is to secure the following:

• A personality and behavioral analysis report
• A background and licensing report
• A credit report

Each of these reports will provide additional screening issues that might have been missed during the verbal and in-person in-terviews.

Employment Offer

Once you have completed the screening process, and if the candidate is congruent with your brand of chiropractic, you are ready to offer employment as an associate in your practice. Read my above recommendations carefully; do not offer and imply employ-ment until you have completed and reviewed all of the previous elements of the recruitment process.

When you offer employment, prepare a letter of employment including your compensation package and the responsibilities of the position offered in detail, and the scope of your internship training program and how to attain permanent employment status.

After reviewing the job offer, the candidate accepts the position and acknowledges the requirements and responsibilities by dat-ing and approving each of the documents provided. When the position is accepted, you submit your associate employment agree-ment for approval along with the effective date of employment.

Editor's Note: Next month, we'll look at the particulars of your associate agreement, training procedures and protocols, and some cautions.

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Lawton W. Howell is the founder and chief executive officer of WellnessOne Corporation, a chiropractic alliance marketing group based in Las Vegas. Direct questions and comments regarding this article to 877 WELNES1 (toll free), send an e-mail to , or visit www.growmypractice.wellnessone.net.