Episode 85 New Tools to Improve Retention & Recruiting with Dr. Jacob Bradley

https://psyctalent.com/retain-assessment/

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Transcript

Jonathan: 0:30

My guest today is Dr. Jacob Bradley. Dr. Bradley has his doctorate in OBM and is the founder, CEO, and executive recruiter for Psych Talent. His firm specializes in ABA recruiting for BCBAs, psychologists, SLPs, OTs, operational positions, leadership positions, and much more. He lives in Appleton, Wisconsin, and he is still an avid Green Bay Packers fan. Welcome back to the pod, Jacob. It's great to see you, dude.

Jacob Bradley: 0:55

Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you. Good to be back. All

Jonathan: 0:59

right, Jacob. So it's been like a year since we've chatted on the pod and, you know, recruiting was such a challenge a year ago, and I got to say, it feels like it's even harder now. So this is nuts. Help. Give us a lay of the land here. what's the state of recruiting an ABA right now? And how has it changed as we chatted a year ago?

Jacob Bradley: 1:17

Yeah, well, it, the way it changed is it's the same, but only worse since, uh, since a year ago. So I think that's probably not going to come as news to most of the listeners here, but. What we're seeing in the ABA space is that the demand for services far outpaces the supply of BCBAs. So, there's a shortage that we've got. The BACB put out their annual jobs report, and it shows that just to meet current demand, we need to have two times the number of BCBAs, or just over two times the number of BCBAs. in the field just to, uh, just to meet the open jobs that are out there. So there are currently more job openings than there are BCBAs in our field. So it's a, it's a tight market.

Jonathan: 2:07

So what are some of the biggest challenges that you see ABA providers having in recruiting right now? Yeah. So

Jacob Bradley: 2:14

there's the two big challenges are your BCBAs and then your RBTs, behavior techs. The BCBA recruiting, it's, there aren't Nearly enough of them. This is impacting company's ability to grow, impacting the length of wait lists, things like that. So we're seeing that just gets tighter and tighter and more and more companies are coming to us saying that their job postings aren't, aren't producing any clicks or any candidates from them. And, uh, really have to turn to active outreach to find those people. Then on the other side with behavior techs, there's a little bit more reason for optimism with the behavior techs because behavior techs, it's not a defined pool of candidates that you're working from. With BCBAs, there's a very definite number of BCBAs that exist um, and then there's, you know, 10 to 20 percent more added every year with new, um, certificates. But with behavior techs, you can actually go outside of ABA and get people who have maybe never heard of ABA, never worked in the space, and recruit them in. So it's... There, there isn't a hard ceiling on the number of behavior techs that are available because you can, you can create them in house or BCBAs to create them in house. It just takes four years. So there's a little bit more room for optimism on the behavior tech recruiting front.

Jonathan: 3:39

Well, Jacob, have you seen like of the ABA providers who are doing this really well? I mean, I know there's no silver bullet to just. Blanket solve the recruiting problem. But I mean, what, what strategies and techniques are they using?

Jacob Bradley: 3:52

Yeah. So there are companies that are doing this. really well. The key is, the key difference that we see in companies who do this well versus those who don't do it well, is how they treat the recruiting function in their team. Do they take an HR approach to recruiting, which has been the standard approach to recruiting that almost every industry has taken? Or do you take An active approach to recruiting and really treat it more as a sales and marketing function of your company and use sales and marketing strategies to reach out to your candidates, to BCBAs and bring them in. So the companies that take this more online marketing approach. To it and this active outreach approach to it do far better than those who take more of a traditional HR post the job Ask around see if you know anyone and you hope someone comes in

Jonathan: 4:47

So I like this a lot and and when you describe sales and marketing, this is not like the sleazy salesman This is like an active recruiting team that is focused on building relations Not just actively outreaching but like building relationships trying to provide value. Is that right?

Jacob Bradley: 5:01

Right? Yeah, you're not you're not Just out there slinging jobs, right? You're not a sleazy sales person. You're someone who's, you've got a good mission for your company. You're doing really good work for these kids and their families. You know, there's a huge need there. And there's also BCBAs in this field who want to be doing that. So it's a matter of going out and actively finding those people and starting the conversation and relationship with them and building it up just like you would through a marketing and sales process into a conversation about working for you instead of about buying something. So that's, I mean, that's the big difference, but you see the strategies are pretty similar. You still have. You're recruiting candidate funnel, just like you'd have a marketing funnel. You have different activities at each layer of the funnel. On the top of the funnel, you're going to be doing a lot of outreach and getting as many people as possible in there. Then use your funnel to warm people up and then engage, like build that relationship, have the conversation and you see where you can go with it. It's, you know, posting jobs. Just by themselves and hoping, putting all your eggs in that basket, hoping that people apply for it. There's not enough to see it and they're being actively recruited anyway. So most BCBAs don't even have to go to a jobs board to, to find what they're looking for. You need to go out and find them.

Jonathan: 6:18

This is really important, this idea of a funnel. And I just want to paint a picture for the audience. I mean, imagine a literal funnel. That's like, um, you know, an upside down triangle. And you think about the number of candidates you get to apply and then that gets winnowed down to a number that meets some basic criteria that you'll follow back up with. And then there's certain number that actually show up when you invite them to a first round interview and then it gets narrowed further. So there's this like narrowing process. Do you have any metrics, Jacob, or like benchmarks around, what does good or great look like in that funnel process?

Jacob Bradley: 6:50

Good question. The top of market funnel is. That's a difficult one to get, you know, a solid number on. It's going to be different for, for each company, I think, and really depending on what your outreach is and what you consider, you know, is a view top of funnel or is the first action top of funnel. But what we see is from. Candidate conversations, at least for our company. to BCBA starting somewhere is a 10 to 1 ratio. So we need to have 10 interviews of BCBAs for every one placement that comes through. So we see about 70 percent of the interviews that that we have. You'll get to move forward in the process. You might consider a broad strokes fit. And then typically it's candidates that lead the process, not companies that disqualify candidates. Because candidates are typically in two, three, four different interview processes at the same time. And we see across the industry, it's about a 50 percent offer acceptance rate for BCBAs. So if you think You just how many BCBAs you need to get two offers out to get one hire. For most companies in the a b a space, it's, uh, it's, it's tight all the way through the the end of the funnel. So just because you have from the top of the funnel doesn't mean they're not in the top of five other funnels at the same time. And that's where, you know, the only magic ingredient in this process is speed. Uh, can you get them from top of funnel to bottom of funnel? quickly and without skipping any of your quality steps. So instead of you don't skip your second or third interview, you still do your full diligence. You just try to skip all of the days in between all those interviews. Instead of saying, Hey, we're going to take two, three days to consider if we're going to make an offer, have that decision making process figured out where you can all meet right after the interview and make that decision because then you can get them to the last stage of your funnel while they're still in the top stages of other companies funnels. So that's, that's the only secret sauce that we know of to really, help beat the competition. And that is once you've got them in front of you, can you move through quickly while still being fully diligent on hiring the right person?

Jonathan: 9:01

We were just looking at this data in our strategic planning, um, and But you know, over the last, gosh, I think it was like six or eight months at Ascend that is, we had an 85 percent acceptance rate. And I, I want to just echo what you said. So yeah, I mean, it's good, it's good to hear that we're like a little bit above, uh, um, you know, our field's average, but, um, it's like table stakes that you've got to be as absolutely as efficient as possible. And, um, I mean, tell me what you think of this, what we've found over the last few years as part of our magic sauce is just make the interview process actually really hard because most. ABA providers are solving for getting through quickly and get an offer. Whereas to differentiate, certainly we're going to drive home our values. Certainly we're going to ask them to be interviewing us. Certainly we're going to be telling our story, like all of those things. And when we make it that much harder, there's like a perception that it's a more valuable position. But I are your thoughts on that? Is that a valid

Jacob Bradley: 9:55

strategy for ABA providers? Well, you know, it seems to be working for you guys. Now tell me, how do you make it, how do you make it harder while still keeping the speed intact? Yeah.

Jonathan: 10:06

The kinds of questions we ask, we do a lot to ask them about, how they have approached something based on their prior experience, as opposed to just like theoretical questions of what would you do in this situation? It's like, tell me about a time that tons of ours start like that. we've got, we have a whole variety of people like all up and down, from colleague BCBAs to clinical directors to, you know, VPs that interview them and we'll ask different kinds of questions and then we intersperse our values. We're very repetitive about describing out values and putting questions in the context of those values. Those are some of the ways we do it.

Jacob Bradley: 10:41

I love it. Well, so you're, you're probably doing a couple of things. You do it kind of panel style interview as well, right? You're, you're doing back to that. Yeah. And that's, that's key to it, you're still able to get that amount of number of interviews or that number of conversations and touches still in a shorter period of time, and you're getting people to be bought in on your mission and values, which is a huge distinguishing factor for employers. And I'd recommend any employer in this space. To be really good at understanding why and how you're different from other ABA companies. Especially in your mission and how you implement or live out your values. And the way you do that is by having very specific examples of how you live them out. Because every ABA company says we're a mission ABA company, big on values, big on culture. And when we're talking with companies, when we're onboarding them to working with us, we spend an hour with the companies going through mostly those types of questions. What makes you different? Give me some examples about your culture. And if they can't come up with concrete examples about why they're different, how they're different, we can't go talk to candidates about that. So it's gotta be something else or, you know, Hey, we're really good at growing people's careers. Awesome. How do you invest in people? How do you grow those careers? Who's moved up in your company? How many people have done this? And if you start to ask yourself that as a leader in an ABA company, and you have some really good concrete examples. That needs to be something you're sharing with your candidates. And if you're looking through that and you can't really think of good concrete examples. Well, that's just a, you know, a good opportunity to say, Hey, how do we start implementing some of this and actually making these changes that we become the company that we want to be. And that BCBAs want to work for. We're, we're seeing quite a bit of that, you know, being a decision making factor, especially in BCBAs wanting to leave. a company. Um, so BCBAs can be paid very well, but in a company that doesn't live out the values that they talk about. And those are the BCBAs that we're typically able to help find a different company to work for.

Jonathan: 12:46

Yeah. It's a great point. I mean, I think every ABA provider says we're mission driven and we live by our values. And, and I think at some point, as leaders in the field, we have to stop and say, hold on, we're not so special. That a candidate can see, we have to go out of our way to help them see why we're special. And to your point, how

Jacob Bradley: 13:02

exactly, exactly. And there are ABA companies who they don't pay, they can't pay really well. They don't pay really well, but they have really good other features about the company. If we have a real family field to us, and here's three examples of that. And here's, you know, so and so had a family situation. So we just gave her an extra week of PTO. No questions asked. and said, we're going to help you through that. And then we adjusted her schedule when she came back. So that's a concrete example that we can go and take and say, Hey, this is how they live out this family value that they have. They're not the highest paying, but you know, if you go there, you can be treated well. And when something happens in your family life, you're not just a number on a spreadsheet to them. you're a person, you're gonna be treated well. So that, that's a huge differentiator. And there are a lot of BCBAs who Who want to see that and want to go to a place where they can experience that because there's, it's not just ABA, but in, in healthcare in general, it's very, very difficult to actually go out and build those things into the way that, that you operate into the way that, that your team operates. There's just so many things set up naturally that are kind of getting away of that. And it really needs to be a top of mind focus for the company to actually do those things out.

Jonathan: 14:17

Well, let's get tactic on some of this, this idea of actively outreaching. Um, and what does that look like when it's done? Well, is it like sending LinkedIn in mails and needed mails? Is it other stuff? What, what are you, what

Jacob Bradley: 14:28

are you doing? Yep. So Indeed and LinkedIn, great places to start. If, if you, if you have not done any outreach at all, your first step is you should have someone on your team, get LinkedIn recruiter light, you know, the full blown recruiter packages, LinkedIn recruiter light, and start Targeted searches and reaching out to people. And you have to understand that your numbers are not going to be great. It's about a 10 percent response rate when you reach out cold on LinkedIn like that. So you got to send out 10 messages to get one back. And then the most common reply is no. Uh, and then you do get some yeses. So there's, there's a lot of work to be done, but you can start there. That's really easy to do. other steps are looking outside of LinkedIn, going to Indeed and you can do the same thing. you can go onto the BACB website and see, Hey, how many people are in my area? You know, am I finding them all on LinkedIn? Am I not finding them on LinkedIn? There's no way to contact them really. That's appropriately anyway, through the BACB. So, don't go spamming them through that, but see if you can find other people that you can reach out to and go on that road, once you get a bit more advanced, you need to start getting into email marketing and drip campaigns and things like that to take all of the BCBAs you've ever interacted with, who have ever applied for a job for you. And you keep yourself kind of front of mind there. And when the time comes and that person's life. Where they need a new job and say, Oh, that's right. I got that email from, from Susie at ABA company. let me check out that opportunity. And that's where you have an in that no one else had. And before that person goes out and looks at a job board and starts applying, you're right there. And anything you can do to make the communication back very easy, where they don't have to fill out an application, they just need to. Reply to an email, reply to a message to set up a call with you and use that conversation as the thing that you're going to qualify with instead of

Jonathan: 16:25

application. You know, Jacob, someone referenced this recently to me that we are no longer in an age that currency, is it true that money is the currency? The true currency is attention because we have so many things that are distracting us. And so how do we even get someone's attention in the first place? But speak a little more to that. Like, one, is that your experience? And then two, if it is how do you differentiate and actually get someone's attention?

Jacob Bradley: 16:52

Right. So getting someone's attention is, it's not an easy thing. And keep in mind, if you're recruiting someone, the type of content that you're up against, is not just what else is out there in the recruiting space, but what else is out there on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and all these things. Uh, and unless you have a really good content team and content strategy, you're probably not going to compete with what they're already interested in. So the approach that you have to take is get in front of them and in other ways, ways that they might. Uh, expect it more. So one way is through texting them. So if you think about a LinkedIn response rate or open rate and email open rates are quite low, the upper single digits, you know, low tens, something like that. But a text campaign, if you get their number validly and everything, I mean, it's like a 98 percent chance you're going to see that text. Which is huge, right? I mean, you see every text that comes up on your phone. There's no text that comes on your phone that you don't see. So that's another way to, to get in front of them. And as long as you're not spamming them, being obnoxious about it, but you have a legitimate opportunity and this is, could be a legitimate interest to them. That's a great way to reach out to them and at least get their eyes on it for literally two seconds. That's about how long you have before they decide that they're not interested or it could be something they'll think about. And then multiple points of contact. You can't just say, Hey, I sent an email or I sent an email or I sent a text and then you get back to me. Of course they did. Right. Do you get back to people who you don't know who messaged you once or text you once? No, but if you go through with a coherent message for that person and it's personalized and you get in front of them three, four or five times. Chances of them getting back to you are much, much better.

Jonathan: 18:41

Let's pivot to, RBTs. And I know Psych Talent doesn't specifically do RBT recruiting, but what are you seeing out there around what's successful? Or even like some of those funnel ratios, do you have a sense for those? You

Jacob Bradley: 18:52

know, I am not as in touch with the, the metrics on the RBT recruiting side. I know that it's not great, but the RBT recruiting strategy is different. Then BCBA recruiting. BCBA recruiting, again, it's, it's a defined market. You can find out if someone has a BCBA or not very, very quick. And you know, if they have a BCBA, they are potentially qualified for your job. With RBTs, the majority of people that you're going to hire, most companies are going to hire are not RBTs when you hire them. They are people who will be behavior techs for you that you will train and have them become RBTs. As the field gets larger, there's more RBTs that you can hire as RBTs, but if you need to bring on people. In mass, you need to be looking out into the local talent population, people that could be working at an Amazon warehouse or a convenience store or the front desk at a dental office or at a daycare. Daycares are great. Um, parapros at schools are great. Those people who have already had some experience working with young kids and know how to interact with them, that's, that's a great starting spot to look for. So you need to be much more in tune with that with young kids. That level of the talent market. So it's a lot less targeted in your searching and it's much more volume. how can we get as many people as possible into our funnel and then have a good way of qualifying them and disqualifying them in that process. All

Jonathan: 20:11

right. So that gets us to maybe what I am most excited to talk about in this conversation, Jacob, and that is, your new retain assessment that you've recently released. You and your partners have built it, release it. So tell me more about this, dude.

Jacob Bradley: 20:28

So a year, year and a half ago, Jonathan, you and I talked and we're talking about the turnover problem in ABA. And I had mentioned just from my background in business psychology that you could build selection assessments that predict work outcomes. Usually it's performance. So it's really common for maybe large companies, large international companies to do this for their sales team. So you can improve sales performance just by hiring people who are better at selling and looking at aspects of their personality. And so we said, well, I think we could probably do that with retention in ABA where we could get better at hiring the right people who are likely to stay. with your company and stay in the field and good at screening out the people who are likely to leave in the first few months of working with you, which is one of the biggest pain points that the entire industry has. It's because we're bringing so many people from outside of ABA into the field and they think that they could be good at it and they think that they will like it, but they actually aren't good at it and don't like it and choose to leave. And they leave early on is what we see. So, we went out and spent the past year or so working with two other industrial organizational psychologists to build an assessment that actually predicts retention in ABA, specifically to solve this problem. So, we're at the tail end of that. It's in the tech, build up phase. The assessment is done. It's just getting put into platform right now. And should be ready to go by May.

Jonathan: 21:55

What have you learned? And full disclosure, Ascend is one of the beta testers on this, but what did you learn about those qualities that tend to lead to higher retention, especially up front those critical first 90, you know, 180 days?

Jacob Bradley: 22:08

Right. So we, the way we built out the assessment is it's a personality assessment, which I know for a behavior analyst can be. Something that, that makes you pause for a second, like, Oh, is this, is this real or not real? Uh, it is real. It's a really robust science that we're basing it off of. It's very evidence based the way that our assessment is developed. The way that we went out and did it is we created a personality assessment with several hundred questions, gave it to a test group. Of 1200 people and had them take the assessment. And then we went through and statistically analyze all the responses and saw what answers and questions correlate with each other. And we found that there's five different groupings. That correlate with each other. And this is a very common finding in real personality psychology. that's statistically based is these five groups come up and they're the different factors of personality. So we found those and we did our, reliability study to make sure that it's a good measure of these things. It measures it over and over and over again, and we have a good reliable measure. So we took that and whittled it down from the 200 some questions that we had down to about 40 questions. And that's all that we need to actually find out those five different factors, uh, from this assessment. So we took our 40 questions and we went out and worked with a few different ABA companies and got about 350 participants who are, behavior techs, RBTs, and BCBAs to participate in this and take the assessment. And then we correlated the assessment scores in the different categories, the different factors. With work outcomes and the biggest one being retention. How many days are they employed with the company that they're working for? And so we were able to see that certain outcomes on our assessment, certain scores in our assessment actually predict how long someone stays with. The company is retained by a company. It also, we found, predicts burnout, especially well in BCBAs. So this, the same assessment predicts retention and burnout, and then also job satisfaction. We're able to predict all three of these, or BCBAs and RBTs. So we've got a pretty robust assessment. That's going to hopefully when we launch it, help a lot of companies reduce turnover at that behavior tech level, and then burnout in BCBAs.

Jonathan: 24:36

All right, so I'm on the edge of my seat and I don't want you to spill the secret sauce, but maybe start telling me what are these like five groupings generally of different factors of personality and what are the other insights about kinds of questions or things you're learning about someone that could predict a burnout or retention or job satisfaction?

Jacob Bradley: 24:53

Yeah. So, so each of the five different factors that, that we came up with out of this assessment, they each weighed differently on predicting each outcome. So each outcome. Has like a specific formula. That's the secret sauce for how the question responses, uh, predict that, that outcome. So it's a different combination for each one, but we have things like, agreeableness is a huge factor of people's personality, but the more agreeable they are, the more likely they are to stay longer with your company, the more likely they are to have less burnout, the more likely they are. To, to have higher job satisfaction. So that's one that we kind of see the same shift across all those factors. And then we have other aspects that, uh, you know, competitiveness is another factor where, it's helpful predictor of, retention. And burnout, but not of job satisfaction. So we have these different factors that kind of map on differently to the categories and the assessment software takes care of all that in the back end and just shows you percentile wise where each candidate falls. Are they better than 70 percent of the candidates taking this assessment in the field at being resilient against the burnout or likely to stay with you a long time or likely to enjoy their job.

Jonathan: 26:08

Can you define. What agreeableness is?

Jacob Bradley: 26:13

So, uh, yeah, good question. So agreeableness, has to do with, being able to go along with someone else's idea and being able to follow through with, other suggestions and other directions. so there's other aspects to it, but that's when it's most work related and relevant here. So if you... If you had someone who's disagreeable, they're going to be someone who doesn't want to go along with the plan. Someone who, who kind of kicks back against the plan of action or the direction that someone else puts in place. So we want someone who's higher in agreeableness. They're also typically more friendly. we would suspect that they're better at interacting with kids than someone who's highly disagreeable. So that's one example.

Jonathan: 26:55

I know that the caveat here that you describe is like for any personality assessment or any tool you use, use this as one of many data points in the interview process. Exactly. That kind of the idea,

Jacob Bradley: 27:06

right? Yeah. The way that selection assessments that are validated work are is as a key data point in the decision making process. only very few circumstances should they ever be used as like a rule in rule out, checkpoint in your hiring process. There's only very few assessments that are ever designed to do that. And this one is meant to be done after you've screened that candidate. They fit the location. They fit the general pay. They get a little bit what the job is, but they haven't been interviewed clinically yet. You give them this assessment before that clinical interview. So in that clinical interview, the person who's doing that interview can see how likely they are to stay with the company, how susceptible they are to burnout. in ABA, and if they're likely to enjoy the job, their job satisfaction score. The other thing is that this retain assessment, gives customized interview questions based on their scores, so that the person who's doing that interview, if this person, let's say, has a high retention score and a high job satisfaction score, but a low burnout score, they're very susceptible to burnout, it's going to give you a list of questions custom for that candidate. about their susceptibility to burnout, actually based on the factors of personality that led to them having the low burnout score. So you're going to get this, this list of questions you can go through so that you can make a good judgment call on Is this someone that we think can overcome this? Or do we think that it's maybe different than what the score said? Or does this confirm the high susceptibility to burnout so you can make the best choice for your company?

Jonathan: 28:41

So were there any findings from the assessment that surprised you or that you didn't think would be important or you thought were important and then turns

Jacob Bradley: 28:49

out not? So the two other researchers I worked with are completely outside of ABA, but they work in building these types of assessments. And the finding that we all independently came across that was the most interesting, we kind of called it the jaded factor. It said the longer you're in ABA, obviously the more susceptible to burnout you are. The less likely you are to stay with one company for a long time, and the less likely you are to have job satisfaction. So, all three of those scores tend to decrease. as a factor of how long someone's been a BCBA. So that's this jaded factor that we found or kind of came up with. So it doesn't predict everything completely, right? Just that factor alone, just the, how long they've been a BCBA, but it really is telling, and it matches up with a lot of the narrative that we hear on social media and hear at the conferences and hear maybe within our own teams about burnout and about how new BCBAs feel like they're becoming. worn out, so to speak, and that's proved out in the data.

Jonathan: 29:58

Dude, so like, what the hell, Jacob, unfortunately, like, you know, that absolutely rings true. and what I hear out in the field, the question is like, is our field ever going to solve, not just the recruiting challenge, right? But this flip side of it that's so important is the retention challenge. And what has to be true for us to get beyond where we are

Jacob Bradley: 30:16

now? Exactly. So the retention challenge, you can break down the causes of retention or the causes of turnover for someone into a few different buckets. One is, and this is one that's talked about the most, is what are the company policies? What is the company culture like? What are the company factors that influence retention? Turnover. And those are real, right? Pay probably has a relationship to it. The benefits, the work hours, caseloads, those things have real impact. But then there's the person's individual life situation. What's their family situation? And what's the health status of their in laws, right? I mean, that has an impact with some people making a decision to leave the company. All of these outside factors that are just about their life. But then there's this third causal bucket. Who is this person? Is this someone who is likely to be successful in this field? Are not likely to stay in this field or not. And that's what our assessment is all about. It's all about predicting using that causal bucket and predicting there on, do we have the right people in this space? And that's really helpful at the behavior tech level, because you're bringing people who have never been in ABA before, only been in ABA for six months or a year. And. they don't know enough about ABA to know if it's the right fit for them, or they might not know about themselves enough to know if it's the right fit. And our assessment's pretty good at helping companies make that decision and make better hiring decisions at the front end so that the people you are hiring stay around longer and reducing retention or reducing turnover and boosting retention just through a better hiring process. And we picked that because it really is the simplest way, the easiest way to reduce turnover in ABA. is just through a five minute assessment on the front end and making a better hiring decision. And you should be able to see turnover change pretty quickly in your company. It's hard to say you shouldn't also focus on the company culture stuff, but that's a much heavier lift, right? To go through a full culture assessment or engagement assessment and get that feedback and prioritize. Hey, uh, here's what we need to focus on in our company. You change a pay scale, implement this type of system, change our benefits, and how do you change company culture? That that's so difficult to actually do. It's a worthy and noble cause. But it's not a lever you can readily pull and make a change in retention and turnover in your company. But this assessment on the front end is something you can do right away. It's plug and play. It's five minutes of the candidates time. And you look at a report sheet to help you make a better hiring decision.

Jonathan: 32:51

So Jacob, if you and your partners are just ridiculously successful with this retain assessment, what is our ABA field going to look like in five years?

Jacob Bradley: 33:00

Well, that's why we set out to build it is so that we could be really successful in impacting the field in this way. So we would hope that we could reduce. Turnover by a third with our assessment. So it's not that part isn't proven out yet. I'm going to get to the next point here, but that's what we think we can be in that ballpark. And we're going to continuously improve our assessment and add on a couple of other things into the selection process so that you can be hiring the right people and be very confident that everyone coming into your company is someone who's likely to stay in your company and not likely to leave. In the first few months, and you have that huge impact on, on, you know, client care and have that huge impact on culture and that huge impact on your bottom line, frankly.

Jonathan: 33:47

and one of the things, you know, I'm, I was in economics and Asian studies major in college, so I love everything economics and I like to zoom back to like the macro picture and one factor, um, I love your feedback on, but generally in recessions, you have the unemployment rate go up. So people are looking for work. Health care tends to be more recession resistant, right? We always need health care in exactly the last demand. So, um, we, and there's lots of talk these days, right? About a potential recession. What would happen, you think, in our field if there was a recession? Is that good for ABA providers

Jacob Bradley: 34:22

and for recruiters or bad? So when you have a recession, what you typically see is that there are fewer jobs. This is just across the industry or across the economy as a whole. As you see fewer job openings because fewer companies are hiring and they're hiring fewer people. And it really switches who has the upper hand in, uh, the talent acquisition relationship for a long time, it was companies have the upper hand and this is going back 15 years ago, right? When people were, there were more people looking for jobs and there were jobs available. But in the past, about 15 years for our whole economy, and then certainly in ABA, there are far more job openings than there are people to fill them. So just like you said, you know, healthcare has this inelastic demand. ABA is the probably going to be the same way. Uh, just because there's a recession doesn't mean that there are fewer kids who need services. Um, just because there's a recession doesn't, it doesn't take away the, the payers don't disappear out of the space. Um, so you still have the demand, you still have the payers in place. So we probably won't see a huge drop off in the demand for hiring BCBAs and you won't see. Uh, a huge immediate change in the supply of BCBA here, so I would expect this trend to continue. What's interesting is that with, uh, with nurses, when a recession happens, there are actually more nurses come into the workforce because there are many nurses, if you just think about the demographics of nurses, right, skews females, skews younger, uh, there are a lot of nurses who are outside of the workforce, maybe at home, um, taking care of your kids. And when a recession happens and their spouse. You maybe loses a job or the promotion isn't there anymore and you see, you know, inflation happening in prices go up and up. So that family budget is stretched. So there's the need for that second income earner back in the family. So the nurses, the nurse population actually increases during a recession, a little bit because these nurses come off the sidelines, so to speak, and back into the workforce. So the times when we've seen that relationship of demand for nurses to supply of nurses change the most over the past few decades is actually during the recession is when they come back into the workforce. So perhaps there'll be a similar effect, uh, in ABA, right? We know that demographically. Workforce is 85 percent female, younger. So there definitely are BCBAs who you could find themselves in that same situation. Um, it's not one that we're, we're hoping for. I wouldn't put all the eggs in that basket, but it's a reality that we've seen play out in nursing, the healthcare space. And there's enough similarities to think that. Something similar to that could happen in ABA.

Jonathan: 37:21

Well, that's okay. I totally get your point. Let's not be rooting for recessions for a lot of reasons. Um, and I mean, just, just think of this. I can think of many recessions that I've been through over the course of my career, let alone my life. Right. but even the Recessions we've had recently, to your point, it's been like 15 years since we truly like it, the great financial crisis, right? The great recession. That, but our field is even newer, at least when it comes to Medicaid and insurance reimbursement, even newer than that. So much of our field hasn't yet seen this, but that's interesting that maybe there's going to be this similar nursing effect, um, where maybe more BCBAs come back into the workforce, but I guess we won't know. Right.

Jacob Bradley: 38:00

So another thing happened 15 years ago with the last recession, I don't think it was caused by the last recession, but, the doctor shortage in healthcare has been around for decades and decades, and there are ways to solve that problem. You convince more people to become doctors, you make it easier to become a doctor, easier to pay for school to become a doctor. Um, those things tried and it still wasn't enough. So what did they do? They gave nurse practitioners the ability to do some things independently. doctors didn't all love this, like the American Medical Association wasn't a fan of this move because there's different training requirements involved. But the payers liked the move because it decreased the cost of a lot of different services that they had to provide. And, the governments liked the move, generally speaking, because it increased accessibility to services. By just having a larger pool of providers who could do something. And maybe in the future of ABA, something like that takes place. I'm not picking a side of that battle, but that is one of the ways that healthcare has tried to solve the physician shortage problem. And it could be a way. That, uh, it's tried to be solved in ABA. And again, it wasn't the physicians who went out and did that. The physicians didn't want that to happen, but it was, uh, insurance companies and, the government together who really drove that. And of course the nurses were in favor of it generally. So a change like that, you could be coming if, if we continue to see this shortage of. ABA providers, an increase in cost of delivering care, and no relief on the horizon talent wise at the BCBA level, just volume, you know, numbers. Something like that could be coming our way in ABA.

Jonathan: 39:46

Well, let's pinpoint that further. I mean, could this mean that like the time potentially of the BCABA, so the expansion of, ability to get bachelor's level with like then lower requirements to, you know, to get the certification means we can expand services. Um, but it's interesting, would it, it would have to take recessions to do something like that and to create innovation.

Jacob Bradley: 40:08

Right. it makes sense on, on one end, right? When you see the recession happen, you see a bunch of your otherwise available resources go away. So you have to be creative in how to solve the problems. And yeah, it could be something like that The other thing I've been thinking about it is just through the technology that is available and becoming available in the healthcare space that might be able to, with some clinical quality measures and checkpoints in place, be able to scale. BCBA's reach or a BCBA D'S reach, if there becomes a differentiating factor with that doctorate level certification, which you currently, there really isn't. And it can create a space for BBC ABAs to, you know, take on more work and with some really good clinical quality. Uh, metrics and checks in place and the processes in place, there might be a good clinical case for, for doing that and expanding reach that way.

Jonathan: 41:08

Well, and here's where this pattern recognition comes into play is that to your point 15 years ago, like we couldn't just grow more doctors. There's only so much you can do to have more graduate and. PhD programs and to get more people into the workforce. So it feels the same way in, in ABA. I don't think we can just by decree say, let's get more BCBAs.

Jacob Bradley: 41:30

Right. so we're seeing this, uh, in the field now where we want more BCBAs and there are more grad programs putting out BCBAs. But we also hear the complaints of maybe the old guard, maybe CBAs, that the quality that's coming out of grad school isn't the same as when they went to grad school. And maybe some of that's real. Maybe some of that is, yeah, everyone always thinks the generation behind them wasn't quite as, tough or trained as tough as they were. Um, but there could be some actual differences there. And our field is so young. The, the field of ABA Uh, at least clinically is kind of in its teenage angst years, rapid growth, lots of changes to the body. It doesn't know what to do with itself, but there's other industries that have gone through this and come out the other side and been okay. So I think that's where you go to look and say, Hey, what other private health care industries? have gone through this kind of growth, have had this type of professionalization take place, have had the clinician shortage, what do they do to solve it, have had to figure out compliance and clinical quality on the fly during rapid growth, during huge demands, and what have they done to help solve some of these problems? And there are some good solutions to many of those problems, but Yeah. No one can set their fingers and just instantly create more high quality BCBAs. If only it were true.

Jonathan: 42:49

Right. If only. Well, Jacob, what's one thing every ABA business owner should start doing and one thing to stop doing?

Jacob Bradley: 42:56

Yeah. I don't know if this meets every company, but there's a lot of companies in the ABA space who are in growth mode and looking to open up in new markets. And It's interesting being a recruiting company. We hear where these companies are going next and we hear a lot of the same places over and over and over again, right? So for a while it was Phoenix. Everyone was going into Phoenix. And then North Carolina is another one. Everyone's going north to Texas. Because we hear again, There's a provider shortage, right? There's all these kiddos who need services. Which is true, but it's not that there needs to be more and more ABA companies in this space. The provider shortage is at the BCBA level. So even if you're successful in moving into another, um, another region, you might not actually be expanding the care in that market because you're not bringing talent into that market and all the talent is currently employed somewhere. So you're shuffling the deck a little bit. And that's not to say you should never go into a new market, but. We hear so many times that these same places and thinking. Be talent forward and talent first in your expansion strategy and be thinking about how is it I'm going to get the providers in that space and how accessible are they? And can I get people to move there? And having that approach is really key. We saw a lot of you, some bigger name, larger. ABA companies have to close down different markets in different states. And we're going to see more things like that as the industry grows. It's just a natural course of events, but this is one of the causes of them is too many companies going into one area, limited resources, and the number of BCBAs that are available and not everyone. Can staff themselves and provide the services that are in that area. So you're going to see some more, companies backing out of the markets. So that would be, maybe in a sentence, be talent first and talent forward in your expansion strategies.

Jonathan: 45:04

You know, what's really important to me about that, Jacob is to your point, it's the shortage is not at the organizational level, it's the individual level. So an organization who does go into one of those geographies and Specifically focuses on either a importing BCBAs right from other maybe talent glut markets or be super importantly growing from within. That's a huge value in the

Jacob Bradley: 45:27

field. That's huge. Right. And I highly encourage any company out there and there's a lot doing this. Set up a program where you're providing a career path for your behavior techs and maybe kids who are in the, local college to become BCBAs through your support, through your tutelage, and while you're paying them. That is one of the best long term strategies you can have, and then when you have that BCBA who's brand new. Guess what? They already know how you do things clinically. They already know your culture. They're already bought into what you're doing. They're not coming in cold with having a BCBA, but maybe not being trained clinically how you want them trained. This is a great way to set that up long term. And if you grow them, right, you're doing the whole field of service by you're shepherding new people into that. BCBA position.

Jonathan: 46:20

Truer words have never been spoken. Uh, I love it. Jacob. Hey, Jacob, where can people find you and Psych Talent and this Retain Assessment

Jacob Bradley: 46:28

online? Yeah. So you can find our website is psyctalent. com, P S Y C talent. com. And if you go to psyctalent.com/assessment, you'll be able to find a landing page for our retain assessment. If it's, you listen to this after it's launched, you'll be able to get in touch with us there. If you listen to it before we launched it, you'll be able to join a wait list and we'll reach out to you but there's one other thing I want to offer to people, listening here. Our goal with this assessment is to actually solve the turnover problem. We can't solve all of them, but we can solve a big chunk of it. And to do that, we need good data. On how well this assessment works. So we're very confident. It does predict retention. It does predict burnout. It does predict job satisfaction. We know that, but the question we want to be able to answer, and it's really the question every company is wondering is. how much does it predict, uh, can it actually predict this 30%? We think we can be approaching that, that ballpark, or is it something less than that? And we're going to continuously be innovating on this to grow it and grow it. So, uh, listeners to this podcast, if you want to come in and participate. in a study with us using this assessment, launching it and having us do a deep dive into turnover in your company at the behavior tech level, helping you track those numbers and seeing how effective this assessment is in your company. So you can see if it's getting you the ROI you want and actually solving the problem. We will give you a good discount on the assessment. If you're one of the first ones to sign up and participate in that study, if not be available for full price, we know it works. We're confident in it. But this will really help us to further solve that talent problem and really help the industry as a whole.

Jonathan: 48:12

Yeah. I love it, Jacob, that you're bear hugging these intransigent problems. So thank you for all you're doing for our field, dude. Awesome. are you ready for the hot take questions? And you've got the, the round

Jacob Bradley: 48:23

two set. Cause this is your second time on the pod. Let's go. Let's try. All

Jonathan: 48:29

Smurf would you be? I would,

Jacob Bradley: 48:32

I would probably be a Papa Smurf. Papa Smurf. he's always heading the direction for all the other Smurfs and you're sometimes getting irritated. The Smurf shenanigans, which can, you know, reminds me of the, I've got four kids and it's your Papa Smurf in the house.

Jonathan: 48:50

I love it. Which element on the periodic table do you most identify with?

Jacob Bradley: 48:55

I don't know. This is a tough one. I would guess maybe, maybe helium. I've got high hopes and, I raise up and sometimes I spread myself thin, but, if I can tame myself in a good space, I can lift a lot.

Jonathan: 49:08

All right. Well, if someone locked you in a chair and forced you to watch for 24 hours, a terrible soap opera marathon, which would it be the love boat or Dallas?

Jacob Bradley: 49:17

I don't think I've seen either of those soap operas, which is probably a good thing, but I would pick whichever one just has the crazier plot resolutions, the crazier, you know, deus ex machina, solving up the, oh that whole season was a dream, oh that's my evil twin. So the one that has more of those that I could get, so I get a kick out of it. You know,

Jonathan: 49:37

I'm going to answer Dallas for you and, uh, the who killed JR at the end, but I, what's the most played song on your Spotify or Apple music for 2023?

Jacob Bradley: 49:49

Oh yeah, this is a good question. So I'm not a big music listener myself, but, I've got my son loves very specific types of classical music. So, uh, A Little Night Music by Mozart. You know, the dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Listen to that on repeat and he gets all excited about it. So, that's probably my most played song of the year.

Jonathan: 50:12

I love classical music too. Can I just tell you, you know what movie stands the test of time is, um, uh, Amadeus.

Jacob Bradley: 50:19

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, right. It's so funny when you get to the song in front of the guy. In front of the guy who wrote the original song? I don't know, I think it

Jonathan: 50:35

would be better if he did this, yeah. What's your 2023 word of the year Jacob?

Jacob Bradley: 50:41

Um, maybe it's a compound word, it's problem solving. Yeah, we're a growing company, so there's always problems to solve in a growing company, but it really is focused on what are the talent problems in ABA that we can be solving. We think this turnover one is a great one for us to be doing right now. Later on in the year, we're going to focus on hopefully getting some good talent and compensation data for the industry so people can start benchmarking themselves accurately in the space. So problem solving is my 2023 word.

Jonathan: 51:07

Right on. Well, Jacob, thank you so much for coming on the pod, dude.

Jacob Bradley: 51:10

Awesome. Thanks, Jonathan. It's been great.