I had a clinical rotation at a PBR contracted facility while still in PTA school. During my rotation, the clinical education coordinator at Powerback had a mid-rotation and end of rotation check in with me (and I assume the same for all students on rotation), the coordinator informed me that my clinical instructor had told them I would make a good addition to the company once I graduated, and asked if I was interested in being kept in the database for future job opportunities. I said yes at the time, and got regularly sent emails with job openings throughout the end of my schooling. My school hosted a career fair for the PTA program, and I spoke with the regional director running the Powerback booth. She had heard from me from my CI and recognized me before I could even introduce myself properly. We had a friendly and relatively casual chat about the company, opportunities for work in the region, and my ideal clinic setting. Before I moved on the next booth, I gave her my resume at the career fair, and she gave me her contact info saying she would be in touch soon. That career fair was a Tuesday, and I got an email and phone call from her by Thursday of that same week. She set me up with a recruiter, and had already spoken to a clinic director about me to pose me for a PTA position within 15 minutes of my address and at the exact type of clinic setting I wanted. The clinic director reached out to me directly, we set up a phone call to get to know each other and set up an in-person interview/tour of the facility. The clinic director checked in with my regularly before the scheduled visit. When I came to the facility, it was made indirectly clear that the job was mine if I wanted it as everyone had already been discussing me since my time as a student and had been eyeing this open position for me since they believed my personality and career interests aligned most within this clinic and the director + clinicians there. The clinic director made it clear she was excited to welcome me if I so chose, and assured me I would be given support and a ramping period as a new grad. The interview was not difficult nor were there any psycho-babble trick questions about the type of fruit I would be. I was asked about conflict management, an anecdote about a difficult patient, what I viewed as priorities in physical therapy with patient care, what I valued most as a potential employee in terms of job description/benefits/company culture, and career aspirations as I gained experience in the field. The clinic director was also very open, kind, and straight forward. She did not ask any shady questions to try and find reasons to discriminate against me, and she allowed for back and forth conversation vs a question-answer dynamic. After the in person interview/tour, she remained in contact with me and the recruiter I was assigned began communicating with me more aggressively (aggressive in a good way to make it clear they wanted me). The original recruiter was eventually changed when I mentioned to the clinic director that the recruiter was not being very helpful with some of my questions. The clinic director had the regional manager reassign me, and I learned that recruiter was no longer going to be working with the company because they did not want to put off potential employees by that recruiters lack of professionalism as I had almost been. The new recruiter was much better, and very shrewd when it came to negotiations. During this process, I was interviewing for other jobs as well. I had three competitive jobs offers, more offers as well but only three I was seriously considering, and the recruiter/Powerback were agreeable to allowing me a decent amount of time to consider my options since this was all happening in the midst of my last clinical rotation as my time in the PTA student program was coming to a close and it was at the same time as the Thanksgiving holiday. After some offer negotiations, using the three different offers to my advantage, I made my decision in early-mid December to accept the offer with Powerback at the position hand picked for me. The offer was pending official graduation and licensure. Of course, I passed and everything was set in stone. The recruiter turned my case over to the human resources department. I was sent all the on boarding paperwork and completed that with help of HR. The clinic director kept regular communication with me throughout all of this.
My interview process was likely different than most since I was still a student when it started. By the time official interviewing/job searching happened, I was already being considered a future employee by the company. I highly recommend going to your school’s/program’s career fairs and making the most of each of your clinical rotations, even if you don’t think you’ll want to work there at that point in time. It’s never going to hurt you to be wanted by companies and have the power in saying no thank you.