Top 10 Ways to Hire Good Psychiatrists

10) Have a mission. Good doctors will take less money if they believe deeply in the mission of the institution and more importantly of the people who work there. 

9) Pay people for their work not their title;

8) Increase the amount you pay truly productive doctors and measure their productivity with a mixed model (which includes the quality not only the volume of their work).

7) Outcompete your competitors: it’s better to spend more $ on a good doctor versus the legal/HR/institutional and human costs of trying to salvage patient care when you're understaffed or poorly staffed;

6) Use Kaiser’s “golden handcuff strategy": if you want to recruit a good doctor, give that doctor a significant "signing-bonus” that he or she has to pay back if he or she doesn’t stay for > than 3 to 5 years.

5) Stop overworking good clinicians; recognize that good clinicians tend to work harder than other clinicians because of their conscientiousness combined with higher referral volume and lower no-show rates. Bad psychiatrists tend to have higher no-show rates and subsequently less work.

4) Tell the truth. If you’re hiring a doctor to to staff a clinic that has structural or staffing problems (e.g. most healthcare clinics in America), tell the doctor what the problems are (= informed consent) before that doctor decides to accept your offer;

3) If you’re in California or Oregon and can't attract psychiatrists, outsource your staffing to Traditions Behavioral Health (TBH) rather than pay a locum tenens company for inconsistent results. Gary Hayes hires good doctors, pays them well, and has high retention rates;

2) Create a non-hierarchical culture of kindness. The Secretary is as important as the CEO;

1) Test your psychiatrists with clinical vignettes and clinical questions about these vignettes before hiring them; this can help to identify psychiatrists who have lapsed on continuing medical education and/or have low compassion or low conscientiousness.