Your next RBT applied to three other clinics too

Picture an RBT on a Sunday night, looking for more hours. She opens Indeed and finds a page of openings within an hour's drive: part-time and full-time, in homes and in centers. She picks four clinics and applies to all of them before bed.

On Monday morning the first clinic writes back. The message uses her name and knows which job she applied for. It's friendly and plain, and it tells her what happens next. By lunch she's traded a few messages with their recruiter, who comes across as organized and is straight with her about the hours.

The second clinic writes back on Wednesday. The third, on Friday. The fourth gets to her a week later.

Before pay or the drive has even come up, she has a favorite. It's the clinic that found her first and made her feel wanted. The other three aren't out of the running. But each of them is now selling against a clinic she already likes, and the later they show up, the harder they have to lean on pay and charm to win her over.

Most clinics I talk to underestimate how many others she's hearing from.

She's choosing you too

A lot of owners assume a good wage is enough. Post the job, offer a fair rate, and the right people will come. That works when candidates are easy to find. RBTs, BTs and BCBAs aren't. Every clinic within her hour's drive is trying to hire the same people, so she holds the cards. If she doesn't get your job, it isn't a big deal. She has options.

So while you're deciding about her, she's deciding about you. She wants a clinic she can depend on, one that will keep her caseload full and pay her on time. She also wants to feel wanted. Your first reply is the first evidence she gets either way. A quick, clear message says the place is run like a business. A week of silence says something too.

BCBAs have even more choice. Plenty of them would rather work for themselves, which makes part-time BCBA roles even harder to fill.

The usual thinking is that pay closes the hire. I think the first reply does more of the work, and it's the part you fully control.

A late reply turns a hire into a sale

I learned this from the wrong end. When I was recruiting and got busy, or wasn't organized enough, some candidates had been hired somewhere else by the time I reached them. The ones I did reach had usually heard from other employers already, so I started every conversation behind. What should have been a quick yes turned into a sale. "Oh, I thought you'd get back to me sooner" was a line I heard a lot.

One candidate stays with me. The job I was hiring for had the hours she wanted and paid more than anything else she'd applied to. I didn't get back to her for three days. When I finally reached her, she told me as much: the hours were perfect, the pay was the best she'd seen, but she hadn't heard from me, and in those three days two others had.

The best pay didn't save that hire. Three days of silence lost it.

That's why I'd watch a different number. Clinics that track hiring at all usually track time to hire. I'd track time to first outreach: how long it takes from an application landing to the moment someone at your clinic writes back. An RBT whose hours dropped this month can't wait long to find out whether you're interested. Get that number down, keep the replies professional, and you'll fill seats faster, even if your time to hire doesn't move right away. Later in the series I'll get into the first reply, including the 24 to 48 hours I hold clinics to.

Fast now pays off later

Speed also pays off with the candidates you don't hire. Say she takes another clinic's offer. A few weeks in, the hours aren't there. A case ends, or the shifts she was promised never show up. If she had a good experience with your recruiter, she doesn't go back to Indeed. She writes to the person who treated her well, because she knows your clinic takes hiring seriously.

That matters in ABA, where RBT turnover can sometimes exceed 100% annually (L.E.K. Consulting, 2025). Some of the RBTs who turn you down this month will be looking again before long. You want to be the first name they think of.

None of this wins every hire. It moves the odds a little, one candidate at a time, and when everyone is hiring from the same short list, small edges add up.

Somebody has to own hiring

Here's what I think most clinics get wrong. Hiring gets done by whoever has time, in the gaps between sessions or on a Sunday night with the laptop open. Plenty of ABA owners are BCBAs themselves, and every RBT they supervise needs supervision for at least 5% of their monthly service hours (some payers require more). Hiring competes with that for the same hours. It usually loses.

Even a full-time recruiter isn't enough if nobody covers for them. I once took three days off. When I got back to my desk, the leads I'd marked as the best ones hadn't been contacted, or had barely been contacted. I know I lost hires in those three days.

When hiring has no owner, you spend your weeks putting out fires. Cases get staffed with whoever is free, instead of the right RBT for the right child. Families notice. They're paying for consistency, and I think most parents would take an RBT who's consistent and okay over one who's excellent and gone in a few weeks. Every RBT who drops off a case costs you a little of your name with that family.

So give hiring an owner. Make one named person responsible for it, with a fixed block of time every week whether or not anyone just quit, and a backup for the days they're out. In a bigger clinic that might be an office manager or an HR lead. In a small one it might have to be you. Put it on the calendar and protect it the way you'd protect a supervision session.

Your next RBT is applying somewhere on Sunday night. So who at your clinic writes back on Monday morning?