What We Look for When We Hire a Clinician, and Why It Has Nothing to Do With Their CV.

By Dr. Shar Najafi-Piper, PhD | CEO & Founder, Roya Health

The CV tells us someone can do the job. It does not tell us whether they will be good at it here, with these families, in this kind of practice.

We look at licensure. We look at experience with children and adolescents. Those are the entry requirements, not the hiring criteria. By the time a licensed clinician, licensed clinical social worker, or licensed professional counselor is sitting across from us, we already know they are qualified on paper. What we are actually trying to figure out is something harder to name and a lot more important.

We hire for curiosity first

The clinicians who do the best work at Roya Health are the ones who remain genuinely curious about why a child presents the way they do. Not pattern-matching to a diagnosis and moving forward, but sitting with the question. Wondering. Wanting to understand the family system, the school context, and the history that arrived before this child ever walked through our door.

You can hear curiosity in an interview. When we ask someone to walk us through a complex case, the clinicians we want to hire slow down at the complicated parts. They do not rush to a resolution. They linger where things were unclear, where they had to revise their thinking, where they were not sure. That quality, the willingness to stay in the not-knowing, is what we are listening for.

A rehearsed answer moves fast. It has a clean arc: here was the problem, here is what we did, here is how it resolved. A real answer has more texture. There is usually a moment where the clinician says something like, "and honestly, I still think about that case," or "I am not sure we got that one right." Those moments tell us a lot.

Tolerance for ambiguity is non-negotiable

Outpatient behavioral health care with children and families is not a clean discipline. A child comes in presenting with anxiety, and six sessions in, you are also looking at a parent who is undiagnosed and unaware of it, a school environment making everything worse, and a sibling dynamic nobody mentioned at intake. The picture keeps shifting. The treatment plan has to shift with it.

Clinicians who need certainty early and get uncomfortable when a case does not quickly resolve into a clear clinical framework struggle in this work. Not because they are not skilled, but because the work itself does not accommodate that need. We surface this in the interview by asking about the messiest case someone has held. Not the hardest. The messiest. The one where nothing lined up neatly.

The clinicians we hire can describe that case with something close to equanimity. There is always care there, but also a grounded acceptance that complexity is the job, not the exception.

How someone talks about their hardest moments matters more than what they say

We ask everyone some version of this question: tell us about a time when the work was really hard. What made it hard, and how did you carry it?

We are not looking for a specific answer. We are looking for self-awareness, and for evidence that someone has actually reflected on the experience rather than filed it away. Clinicians who can talk about difficulty without either dramatizing it or minimizing it, who can name the cases that stayed with them, are the ones who tend to take care of themselves well enough to stay in this field long-term.

Burnout among mental health professionals in Arizona is real and well-documented. It is a workforce issue, yes, and a culture issue as well. We try to hire people who already have some relationship with their own limits, because that is the foundation on which everything else is built. A clinician who cannot hold their own experience is not going to be able to hold someone else's, not sustainably.

What integrated care means for the people doing it

Roya Health operates as an integrated behavioral health practice, meaning our clinicians never work in isolation. Therapists, prescribers, and care coordinators work from a shared picture of each family. That model was built for families, and it turns out it is also better for the clinicians inside it.

Working in a team reduces the professional isolation that accelerates burnout. Clinical supervision is built in, not bolted on. When a case is complicated, there is a room full of people who know the family and can think through it together. That is not how most behavioral health jobs in Phoenix are structured. It is how we have chosen to build ours.

What we are really building

When we bring someone onto the Roya team, we are not filling a slot. We are adding someone to a care community that families in the greater Phoenix, AZ area trust, often at the hardest points in their lives. That responsibility shapes everything about how we hire.

The CV gets someone in the room. What happens in the room is where the real conversation starts.

Dr. Shar Najafi-Piper is the founder and CEO of Roya Health, an integrated behavioral health practice serving children and families across the greater Phoenix, AZ area. Learn more at roya.health.