Running a practice
18 group practice interview questions for psychologists
Hiring for your therapy group practice? Headway discusses key interview questions for psychologists and what to look for in responses to find the right fit.
November 14, 2025
6 min read
You spent months planning to expand your practice, recruiting a top candidate, and navigating credentialing for them — only to watch them walk out the door six months after onboarding. This type of scenario happens all too frequently. A report by the National Council for Mental Wellbeing showed that turnover rates annually for mental health professionals is around 30%.
For group practice owners, turnover can be a huge hit financially, thanks to lost revenue and recruiting fees. Beyond the money, it can also feel demoralizing and possibly disrupt client care. So, how do you avoid living out this harsh possibility?
Quality benefit packages and the quality of the job posting matter, but your interview process determines whether you’re just filling an open seat or aligning with a psychologist who will be a lasting part of the team you are building. As a private practice owner, are you asking the right questions?
Key takeaways
- Hiring for your group practice requires careful evaluation of the candidate’s qualifications, cultural fit, and alignment with your practice’s vision.
- While many factors impact hiring success, thoughtful interview questions are a critical tool that will reveal suitability and support good decision-making.
- Carefully crafted questions filter out mismatches and help identify the best candidate for your practice.
Hiring for your group practice
Whether you are starting a group therapy practice or adding to an existing one, hiring the right psychologist can go a long way in determining the success of your practice. If you’re starting a practice, the hire becomes even more essential, and much thought needs to be given to the client demand, financial capacity, and overall feasibility of a hire. Plus, the impact of a new hire will be felt very acutely in the startup phases of your practice. If you have an existing practice, much thought still needs to be given to a new hire, but you may have more financial capacity, established systems, and organizational maturity to draw upon and help manage the impact of a new hire.
Headway can support group practices in a significant way. Insurance credentialing and billing, consistent payments, an EHR, and an admin view of your clinician’s schedules and productivity are some of the ways that Headway can help run a group practice. With the extra simplification around administrative tasks, you can free up your time to focus on more important things such as hiring the right psychologist for your team.
There are some things that you must keep in mind when hiring for a therapist in your practice. First, you want to think about the ideal profile of a psychologist that matches the culture, demands, and clinical orientation of your practice. Second, think about your recruitment strategy and where you will reach the right psychologist for your practice (e.g. Indeed, professional associations, Linkedin, local meetups). This includes developing an effective job posting. Next, you want to define the interview process, including the number of interviews, team members who will be involved in those interviews, and how decisions will be made. It’s essential to determine the type of information that you’ll seek out and how you’ll make decisions based on that information.
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Key questions to ask psychologist candidates for your group practice
There are some key themes and questions to help get honest, detailed answers that can lead to the right psychologist for your practice. The questions are organized into seven themes that cover essential areas you need to understand about a potential hire. Use this as a framework, but adapt them to meet the specific needs of your practice.
Education and training
This gives a chance to understand the candidate’s educational foundation, their capacity to translate theory into clinical practice, and their commitment to ongoing learning.
1. Can you describe the focus of your graduate training and how it has shaped your clinical identity and approach?
Look for: Supervised experience and an ability to incorporate theory and coursework into tangible clinical work.
2. Please tell me about your postdoctoral training or any continuing education and how it informs your daily clinical practice.
Look for: Specific theories or techniques they can name and explain. Consider vague answers as red flags. Specific answers like “I learned how the DBT TIPP skill can be applied and I use this frequently with clients who are experiencing high levels of distress” display a practical understanding.
3. What are you most excited about learning through continuing education and how do you hope to incorporate that into your clinical work?
Look for: Actively pursues ongoing training and level of excitement about the topics they describe.
Clinical experience and competence
This gives you the best chance to understand the level of clinical skill of the candidate. If your clinic is hiring the psychologist to conduct assessments you will want to pay particular attention to this capacity.
4. (Present a case vignette) Can you please walk us through your approach to assessment, understanding the client’s concerns, and developing a treatment plan? Walk us through your thought process for making these decisions.
Look for: Detailed level of insight and skill with their assessment and treatment decisions.
5. Can you walk me through your process of a psychological assessment from start to finish? Please include how you select and interpret specific assessment tools and incorporate the findings into your clinical decisions and treatment planning. Feel free to use a case you have worked on in the past as an example.
Look for: The candidate's capacity to list specific assessment tools and interpret those results appropriately.
6. What specialty areas do you have and how long have you worked with those populations?
Look for: The adequate level of experience you are looking for and alignment between their areas of specialty and the clinical vision of your practice.
7. How do you address cultural and contextual factors in your assessments and treatment approaches?
Look for: Awareness of their own cultural blind spots, examples of how they have adapted interventions for different populations, and ongoing willingness to research and consult when working with unfamiliar cultural contexts.
Theoretical orientation and approach
This theme allows you to explore the theoretical lens of the candidate and how well they can apply those theories in clinical practice.
8. Can you describe your theoretical orientation and how you tailor treatment approaches to each client’s needs?
Look for: An ability to translate theory into practice, clinical versatility, and openness to multiple treatment approaches (unless your practice focuses only on a particular modality).
9. Please provide a case example and how your theory guided your conceptualization and treatment decisions.
Look for: Clinical experience through case presentation and capacity to make effective treatment decisions.
Ethics and boundaries
Ethics are guiding principles of practice, and ethical dilemmas are inevitable at some point. With how pervasive ethics are to therapy practice, it’s important to see how a candidate thinks about ethics and how they make ethical decisions.
10. Describe a time you faced an ethical dilemma. How did you handle it?
Look for: Understanding of APA ethical guidelines, solid ethical reasoning, and how they consult with peers or supervisors during ethical dilemmas.
11. How do you think about professional boundaries with clients? Please give an example of a time that you had to enforce boundaries.
Look for: Understanding of professional boundaries and dual relationships as well as the capacity to enforce those boundaries.
Communication and interpersonal skills
The ability to communicate well and relate to others is foundational to client work and teamwork within a practice. In addition to observation of the candidate’s interactions throughout the interview process, these direct questions can illuminate the level of the candidate’s skills in this area.
12. How do you work to establish rapport and a connection with the clients you work with?
Look for: Empathy, adaptability, ability to build trusting relationships with clients and overcome client resistance.
13. What do you value in a team and work environment?
Look for: Ability to communicate well with peers and fit into a team environment.
14. How do you handle conflict and contrasting opinions on a multidisciplinary treatment team?
Look for: Professionalism, collaboration, adaptability, openness to feedback.
Growth and professional development
This realm of questions can reveal the candidate’s self-awareness, honesty, and desire to better themselves.
15. Which of your skills do you believe are strong and which areas do you need to grow in the most?
Look for: Self-awareness, honesty, humility. This can be compared with any references that are contacted during the recruitment process to see if the answers align with other’s perspectives.
16. What areas of clinical skills or modalities are you hoping to learn and develop? What are your plans to pursue that growth?
Look for: Desire for continuous improvement and learning, excitement about the craft of providing therapy.
Personal goals and alignment with the practice
This is potentially one of the most important themes of the interview. These questions help to show if the candidate’s goals and future plans align with the mission and vision of the practice. A candidate may be impressive interpersonally and clinically, but their alignment with the direction of the practice is ultimately paramount for longevity.
17. Where do you envision your career going over the next five years and how might this role support that path?
Look for: Authenticity in describing their personal vision, areas of alignment with the vision of the practice.
18. What aspects of the practice’s mission and vision appeal to you most?
Look for: Depth to their understanding of the ethos of the practice, genuine excitement about joining the practice.
How to know if a candidate is the right fit for your group practice?
All of these themes and questions provided should elicit a breadth of helpful information about the candidate. It’s now up to you to review all of this and decide if the candidate is the right fit for your practice.
- Before the interview: Define your criteria. Evaluation should be grounded in criteria you have developed prior to the interview process. It requires forethought and organizational self-awareness to accomplish this. Developing a profile or persona of the ideal candidate can then act as a measurement tool as the interview process unfolds. Get specific: For example, list the years of experience, the treatment approaches you want them to practice, or the type of career goals you are looking for.
- During the interview: Score against your profile. Use your criteria as a guide to evaluate how well the candidate’s education, training, and specializations align with your practice’s needs and values. You can determine if the theoretical orientation, modalities practiced, and population focus match the clients that your practice serves. Ensure the candidate’s answers about relational and ethical standards can be screened by your practice’s standards of ethics, teamwork, and client care. Finally, the future vision and development path of the candidate can be overlaid with the envision path of the practice to determine if they are headed in the same direction.
- After the interview: Process the information and involve your team. Make sure to take time to adequately consider the candidates and their answers. Avoid making a rushed decision based on first impressions alone. If your group practice already employs trusted clinicians or managers, it can be very beneficial to have those team members be part of the interview and decision-making process.
Headway for is built for group practices
Ultimately with the right preparation, criteria setting, interview questions, and discernment process, you can hire a psychologist who is a great fit. The interview process is highly significant and can require a significant amount of mental and emotional energy. As a group practice owner, you need the majority of your capacity to be focused on building the best team and caring for clients.
Headway is built to support your group practice with built-in documentation, scheduling, and insurance billing. Let Headway take on the administrative burden so that you can devote yourself to hiring lasting candidates and providing top-quality care.
Expand your group practice with Headway
Headway streamlines group onboarding and admin duties so you can scale your practice faster with less hassle. Ready to get started? Book a call with a group practice consultant today.
This content is for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute clinical, legal, financial, or professional advice. All decisions should be made at the discretion of the individual or organization, in consultation with qualified clinical, legal, or other appropriate professionals.
© 2025 Therapymatch, Inc. dba Headway. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced without permission.
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