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Why Rotations Are the New Job Interviews

Oct 17, 202619 minute watch

Clinical rotations are more than a graduation requirement they can be a student’s first real opportunity to connect with future employers.

In this episode of Exxat-ly, Rachel Grubb discusses how rotations are becoming an important pathway to employment in healthcare. She shares insights on how students can stand out, what employers look for, the role of professionalism and soft skills, and how feedback can help students build lasting career opportunities.

You’ll learn:

  • Why rotations are increasingly viewed as job interviews
  • How rotations can lead directly to job offers
  • What qualities employers value most in students
  • Common red flags that may impact hiring decisions
  • How students can build professional relationships
  • Why applying feedback quickly can make a lasting impression
  • Tune in to discover how students can turn clinical rotations into meaningful career opportunities.

Transcript

Welcome to the Exactly podcast. My name is Broo Macintosh and I am your host. Um, and today we're going to be talking about how clinical education is just not not just a valuable learning experience, but also how it can lead to first jobs.

Um, I'm joined today by Rachel. Um, and Rachel will tell us a little bit about herself in just a second, but I have to call out that she has a very very unique um, uh, background where she is both over talent acquisition as well as clinical education. So, she's the perfect person to talk to us about this topic. So, welcome Rachel. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Thank you, Brooke. Um, my name is Rachel Grub. I work for Therapy Partner Solutions. I'm their senior director of talent. And so that includes both hiring of all of our licensed professional um positions, but also anything university relations and student placements. And it has been such a joy to connect those two worlds. I'm a physical therapist myself and also um was in the education space.

And so really learning and understanding the students and the the new generation of therapists that are coming out and entering the workforce. It's just been so wonderful to see them go from being successful students to then successful employees.

That's awesome. So, you are not busy at all with all these different hats that you're wearing, right? You're you're just hanging out all the time. I have a wonderful team, which is great. That's awesome. We we all need backup, don't we? So, um you know, if we're we'll get right into it. So, if we're just going to kick this off, why do you think that the clinical education portion of education has turned into the first job interview?

I think I look at it two from two perspectives. I think it's a great opportunity for the student to see if it's somewhere that they would want to work. They're deciding so many different things. Um, for physical therapists, I'll speak to that just because that's my experience too and and probably what I see the most of. um but they they're trying to decide what setting they want to be in and then what patient demographics and patient populations they're wanting to serve. And so by them coming and doing clinical rotations um at one of our sites, they're going to start to kind of narrow down like what are they passionate about? What do they like? What do they not like? And and so I think that part of it is really the student evaluating is this the place that I would want to work? And then I think we have the flip side of that for us. It's we have a student that comes in and we're like we really see that they are a great um person that we would love to work with every day. And so those relationships can start, you know, when they're a first year in their first rotation, the

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