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Pharmacy Residency Podcast


Apr 6, 2018

Taylor Klempel is the Pharmacy Business Development Manager at CareerStaff Rx - A Genesis Healthcare Company. I wanted to provide a single point of contact that a pharmacist or pharmacy employer could reach directly if they were either looking to find a job or hire for a job in the pharmacy field. Here is a link to the jobs on their website, an article I wrote about determining the job market in a specific area, and some background about the company.

https://www.careerstaff.com/careerstaffrx/

https://www.careerstaff.com/blog/pharmacy/research-pharmacist-job-market/

Careerstaff Rx understands that qualified pharmacy professionals have numerous choices when it comes to their work environment. Similarly, pharmacies have many things to consider when it comes to staffing decisions. Both want a great working relationship, a supporting, nurturing work environment and the ability to provide quality care. Careerstaff Rx has the experience and expertise to help you make the right choices at the right time.


Placing travel, local contract, temp-to-perm and permanent positions across the country, CareerStaff Rx can address the needs of both customers and employees.  Settings staffed include hospitals, retail, long-term care, consulting, mail order, corrections, industrial, nuclear, community and home health.

Providing services nationwide since 1989, Careerstaff Rx brings healthcare professionals together with the facilities that need their services. The depth and longevity of our industry experience allow us to understand the critical nature of staffing shortages that pharmacies face every day, as well as the need for each pharmacy professional to find the right fit — the right location, the right pay and the right work environment. Each staffing opportunity is managed with both a sense of urgency and a focus on quality. Careerstaff Rx offers the right mix of flexibility and stability to address the needs of an ever-changing pharmacy environment.

Full Transcript:

welcome to the pharmacy leaders podcast with your host Tony Guerra the pharmacy leaders podcast is a member of the pharmacy podcast network with interviews and advice from building your professional network brand and a purposeful second income from students residents and innovative professionals hey welcome to the pharmacy leaders podcast I'm Tony Guerra your host and today I have Taylor Klempel who was a pharmacy business development manager at career staff rx it's a genesis healthcare company he's graduate of the Boise State University and currently works in the greater Seattle area welcome to the pharmacy leaders podcast thank you Tony very much to be here well we're getting at that time of the year where a lot of students are looking for jobs and other people are looking for jobs anytime we go from you know kind of a winter to spring there's kind of renewal so I wanted to bring on somebody that knows a lot about the job market especially for pharmacists and you're an expert on that so could you tell me first a little bit about what it is you do and what makes you an expert in helping pharmacists get jobs so we're at national pharmacy staffing and recruitment company the easiest way to look at what we do is we help pharmacists get jobs so we use our resources and our connections in the industry to help you land a specific job you might be looking for and a lot of times you know we have better success than you know a candidate out looking for a job themselves and trying to go through the traditional hiring process we can help expedite that okay well a lot of times it's helpful to look from the other perspective to kind of figure out what someone wants so certainly some areas of the country are a little bit tighter in terms of job market but let's start with how does a career staffing agency help let's say a large 400-500 bed hospital you know we do everything from day of sick coverage all the way up to a full-time permanent placement so if we're going to be working with you know a larger Hospital we can help them with hard to staff positions on a full-time basis we do a lot of attorney leave coverages or if there's a high sense for every reason they need some extra help you know IAM on our upgrades we kind of handle all of that so what we do is if they reach out to us we have in most major markets across the u.s. large flow pools of candidates that we can draw upon for any of these positions so if we have to recruit specifically for this position then you know obviously we tailor our search to exactly what the hospital might be looking for in terms of their years of experience you'll set and then yeah we always go through the first round of interviewers excuse me interviews ourselves and then we try to send over our clients or potential clients the top candidates that we have so they can openly you know they only have to interview one or two maybe three people instead of you know a list of a hundred or 200 applicants that are coming through depending on which market that they're hovering in so if I'm a pharmacy director at a big Hospital normally if somebody called in sick or two people called in sick I would have to get on the phone to kind of my own phone tree but instead they just make a call to you or that's sometimes how it works yeah that's how it works a lot of times especially on the retail side the hospital is a little bit different notes are typically a little more long-term that the training curve is a little steeper but we definitely have hospitals that call us for day of coverage but yeah absolutely we have a 24 hour After Hours line so you know something usually people don't plan ahead when they're getting sick at least they shouldn't be it calls all hours of the night and we always have someone that has our after-hours phone that can respond to them you know immediately of who he might have available so yeah this we get calls like that you know probably daily for you know last-minute coverage okay so let's I'm from Iowa so we have a number of underserved counties how do you serve maybe a smaller hospital or a smaller institution that that maybe isn't in one of the larger metros you know it depends on the situation if they're looking for someone on a permanent basis you know there's gonna be there's gonna be parts of the country that are just harder to staff and and that's the reality so we've kind of seen it all we've you know hired people from out of state and we can cover travel costs on a temporary basis or you don't cover relocation costs if it is for a permanent position but you know typically we'll have those conversations with the hospital if they're in a remote area they understand that hey there's you know there's only four licensed pharmacists within you know 80 miles here and we're in contact with all of them how can you help you know a lot of times we have the resources to bring in someone from an outside city or county that can help on a temporary or long term basis okay so now let's switch back to the person who's applying for a job so I guess in my head I I thought that when I would come to a staffing company I would go to the staffing company and then we would kind of get a job in a couple of weeks or something like that but it sounds like it's a very different process where maybe somebody comes in and you build a relationship with them and then kind of we wait for an either a job to open or you kind of start looking can you tell me how that process works for someone that might start looking for a job through a service like yours the biggest thing you know we get kind of grouped in with with temp agencies and in a certain way we are but we try to you know we try to distance ourselves from that term as well because there are certain temp agencies that there are a lot of requirements and they just kind of hire whoever has a license and that's not the approach we take because we want to make sure when we're marketing our candidates to our clients that they're getting you know the best of the best so we we feed our employees as if they're in you know an internal employee so we go through the full hiring process if it's local we're gonna bring them into our office so that they can you know they can see that we're a real company and we have a lot of people that work in our office and we have a lot of fun and they can see the culture we have and there's just more of a body and from that aspect so that then when they're out in the field working for our clients and they have our name badge on you know they're respecting and honoring our company just like they would be an internal employee and I think that goes a long ways too because we get calls from directors and pharmacy managers that just you know have nothing but great things to say about our employees and you know we love hearing that when they represent our company outfield so we try to treat all of our external employees if they were on our internal staff well tell me a little bit about what it is to go looking for a job these days I I've had the same job for a decade almost so I'm I'm kind of out of the market and kind of out of the loop of how things work we actually used paper resumes I think a decade ago there was no LinkedIn I don't I think it might have been like iPhone one if there was even an iPhone so so just a completely different world so tell me a little bit about what it's what is the process that someone goes through now to to go and get a job and maybe maybe maybe their spouse move somewhere and then they had to move there what what kind of recommendations do you have for you know going through this process and and take your time going through each step to answer the second part first yes you're gonna be relocating or you know maybe a spouse was offered a job opportunity and you're gonna be you know move into a different state and you know obviously the sooner you have that information the better you know I highly recommend you know contact our company because then we can give you realistic expectations of what jobs are available in the market you're moving to you and if maybe you have more of a clinical background but you'd like to get them more of a retail side or maybe you have a you know retail background you want to get more in some specialty positions or Hospital positions or whatever the case is contact a company like us and then we can start doing some of the work on the front end before you even get into town you know setting up some phone interviews you know calling our contacts in the area so you can feel better about the transition knowing that you already have a couple things potentially lined up for when you do get into town and then just as far as you know the hiring process yeah but you know we still deal with you know paper resumes obviously they're they're coming in electronically but if we need to print them off and write on and we do even do it okay those things when we go through the full hiring process like you would anywhere else then we have to run our full background check and series of drug screens and get your mutation records and nothing different than any other company would be hiring you directly and then the best part is - most of our clients are going to need that information before you can start so if we haven't done ahead of time then that really expedites the hiring process once we've ready taking every taken care of everything on the front end okay so you talked a little bit about a float pool before can you tell me a little bit about the float pool from the employee side so you know if I'm working at maybe a major chain and I'm in the float pool you know I'm guaranteed my forty or what at thirty two or whatever it is with that with the contract but can you tell me a little bit more about the flow pool and what it's like to be in a flow pool for a staffing company we have flow pools all over the country of just employees that you know are ready to work in quite a few different settings and obviously some markets are better than others of course but what that kind of means is is exactly what you said we have we still have guaranteed you know full time positions with our company where will guarantee you full time hours and then cover all of your medical dental you know all of your benefits but you might not work at the same place every day you might work at a you know a retail location Monday Tuesday there might be a specialty clinic that needs you Wednesday Thursday or whatever the case is you might still get your 40 hours a week but you might just work different locations so that's part of our interview process we set a limit on where you're willing to commute to you and that we only send you shifts that are within that driving distance so if you have a 30 mile commuting radius and we'll make sure that we don't send you you know ships there outside of that range and you know we'll still keep you busy every day you might just work in different locations and we just have so much success with that - I know a lot of times folks that haven't worked as part of a flow field book flow pool before the beginning that can be kind of hesitant kind of thinking like oh shoot I couldn't find a full-time job I guess I'll settle for this or but that's not the case at all it's great you can get experience with so many different settings and so many different managers directors and employees and you can get experience with so many different places so what full-time positions open up you can be like you know I I want to stay a far away from that place as possible or hey I really want to get a job here because staff was great they treated me like one of their own the manager was phenomenal I could really see myself working there so it's just great to kind of get a little bit of experience at all different locations and you can't get that really anywhere else unless you're part of a flow pool for a staffing company like ours so I hear over and over again that some of the best jobs never make it to the advertisement can you tell me a little bit about jobs that just don't make it to being advertised because you've kind of already got a relationship and it goes to you and then it goes to the guys you know and kind of enough whether in the flow pool or kind of in your queue can you tell me a little bit about you know kind of that the different strata of jobs so some jobs are just like oh my gosh I can't believe a job here opened up can you tell me a little bit about how sometimes you guys are a little bit ahead of the curve on that I mean that's a great point that happens all the time and you know the reality is we have our flow pool and you know within our flow we kind of have a kind of a rating system and it's all based on client reviews we send those out to our clients after you know someone has worked at their location so we keep those all on file we ask a series of questions and you know they're rated one through five on a number of different things and so you know we have our best employees just like any organization would so when these full-time opportunities come up you know those are the first people we go to that are in our flow pool but also we keep a prospect list just like anyone in sales that's going to keep a top 10 or a top twenty target list maybe a big national account they've been trying to get you for a while you know you're gonna continuously follow up with that account until you can finally get your foot in the door well the same as with routing we have you know candidate pipelines of people that we know have phenomenal reviews they have great experience but you know what they're looking for something specific but we're gonna keep them warm and make sure that we you know show him some love every once in a while we still check in once a month once a quart or whatever it is and you say hey how's your current job going anything I can help with let me know and they might say hey I'm looking for this specifically and then yeah like you said with our relationships within the industry with you know maybe a VP or a director of pharmacy or you know a CEO at a place they might give us a call and say hey you know this no one's supposed to know this yet but we're we're making the move here or we're adding a position here who do you got for us and then those are the first people we call and it happens all the time that you get in they could offer the job and they have the job and like you said it was never advertised and ever there was never a public posting it was all based on the relationships we have with the client to give us that information and then the relationships we have with our employees or you know candidate pool so to speak or pipeline so those two relationships are how we land a lot of our positions that never actually get advertised online so it sounds like it actually goes both ways where maybe an institution is kind of inundated with you know 100 applications or even 50 applications like when you when you go look for a service you look for a referral because you're like okay well great I've got 50 that I can pull up on Google but how do I know which is the best one so tell me a little bit about how you've built relationships with the institutions so that they can trust that the people you send are the best people so we have 35 offices across the country and we do that just so we can try to have local presence and you know as a major market as we can so that we can get out and visit our customers regularly and show them how much they appreciate and it's how much we appreciate their business and we can you know we can bring those things we can meet them for luncheon and just take care of them and just know how much we appreciate working with them and then like you said if they're at a market where they're saturated with pharmacists a lot of times that sounds like a good thing I go I can pick from anyone but it can be even harder if they put out a posting and now they have 200 applicants that on paper they all kind of look the same and when we have that trust built up hey we know career staff are at they send us quality people every time because you know they take the time to really get to know and you interview their employees they're gonna give us a call and say hey we're overwhelmed we have way too many applicants do you have you know two or three that you would highly recommend that you can send us and then we'll send them over there you know their references or any reviews that we already have file from a client and then a lot of times our folks will get picked from that list because they're just too overwhelmed you don't with so many applicants and I don't know kind of funny part is the pharmacy world is is so small that we'll have references on file from maybe a couple of directors or managers and then we'll send that over to a new client or potential client and they'll be like oh my goodness I actually went to pharmacy school with you know their old supervisor bill or you know whoever it is sure I don't know that person and then they'll be like oh my goodness yeah we you know we had her for a you know four months maternity leave coverage and we just absolutely loved her you know you would be lucky to have an employee like that that thing happens weekly you know I mean it just happens all the time that not only are our relationships help me with that but we're connecting people together now and you know a lot of times people wouldn't get that experience if it wasn't for work eating you know with the company like arts so tell me let's say let's say I am you know kind of three months from graduation and I want to go look and see what jobs you have so tell me a little bit about how that works now I know you've got some jobs posted on the website but you're telling me that it's actually better just to kind of contact you talk to see what kind of the goals are how does that process work do I go to I'm in Iowa for example or in the Midwest where would I go if I'm in the Midwest to look for someone do I call someone locally do I contact you how does that work yes so you can always call us directly or you can visit our website so our main website for all disciplines is career staff but you can go to career staff our XCOM and that's where you can view all all job postings you know that we have at the moment but we also have a quick apply button that you can apply for a position with us even if there isn't an active posting in your area and then that way we have all of your information and then a recruiter is gonna get back to you within 24 hours to set up that first preliminary call and the reason that's good and even you use the example of you know in Iowa you know let's say we didn't have an active posting in your area you might be a global you know I don't want to waste my time or whatever the case is well it's a quick it's a quick application process and the first phone call is very quick and it's basically just to to start building that relationship and building that trust so begin there's a couple different things we can do from there we can actively market you to any you know clinics or pharmacies in the area and say hey I've already had a conversation with Tony I feel really good about him here's three references would you be interested in meeting with him or when an order does come through you know the first person we're going to call is the person that we have in our pipeline in that area that we've already had the first phone call out of the way so even if there isn't something open today in your market or maybe it's not something you're looking for apply anyway so we have an information file so that you'll be the first phone call or email when something does come up and we don't have to start from scratch okay well one other thing I wanted to ask so some some pharmacists are maybe a little more on the introverted side I'm a natural extrovert you sound like an extrovert somebody that has no problem being in a crowded room with a bunch of other people tell me a little bit about what maybe you can do with somebody with somebody who's maybe a great listener hard worker but going in you know promoting themselves is a really tough thing for them to do they just it's tough for them to say nice things about themselves what recommendations do you have for someone that is maybe a little more on the introverted side we deal with this all the time and sometimes the first round either is aren't always the best reflection of how someone's going to be as an employee and that's part of why companies like us exist you know to help help the candidate and to help the client as well but there's so many different positions as well within the pharmacy industry and that you know that worked perfectly for someone with that personality style where they don't need to be you know doing the consultations or answering the phones or things like that and so our recruiters are really good at asking specific questions to draw that information and it's just important to have such good references so then other people can speak for you as well some of our best employees honestly you know come from the introverted side where the first interview we're just like you know we didn't have a whole lot to talk about but I can tell that they're talented and then all of a sudden we get them in a position where you know they don't have to be speaking with the customer on a regular basis you know maybe it's a specialty pharmacy or whatever the case is and you know we get calls from the managers or directors just saying you know what a phenomenal employee they are and they just do such a great job and so that's just so important to kind of find a position that's tailored to them and maybe we wouldn't put someone you know in a retail setting where they have to do those those consultations and we have other positions that are gonna be more on the closed door and and they don't have necessarily interaction and then it kind of works best best for for both sides awesome well I've spent 20 minutes asking new questions is there anything you wanted to say that maybe I didn't ask I know we get asked a lot just what does the job market look like well you know I'm in my office right now I'm looking at a map of all 50 states you know it just it depends on where you're that I know certain areas with you know enrollment class size and pharmacy schools you know it can feel it can feel tough sometimes or may be discouraged you know I just keep applying to these places and it's just so hard there's just so much competition you know I would just highly recommend you know have a conversation with us and just see where we can help because a lot of times we can help put you to the front of the line and you know because of our relationships with the decision makers that you might not have that opportunity on your own and and just let us see where we can help and if we can that's great and if you can't we'll we'll keep in touch and until we can so I would just advise anyone that's getting ready to graduate and you maybe you heard things that certain markets that are tougher than others say let's just have a conversation and see what we can help out that's great well thanks so much for being on the pharmacy leaders podcast now this was great thank you Tony hey I really appreciate I'd love to do it again sometime sounds good support for this episode comes from goodnight pharmacology 350 brand and generic name drugs with classifications a leading resource for students in the United States United Kingdom and Australia print ebook and audiobook available on audible iTunes and amazon.com thank you for listening to the pharmacy leaders podcast with your host Tony Guerra be sure to share the show with the hashtag hash pharmacy leaders