Hot take: turnover alone does not tell you whether a company is good or bad.
Every PT student gets warned about turnover like it's the ultimate red flag. "Don't work somewhere with high turnover." It's framed as the single most important data point a new grad can use to evaluate a potential employer.
As a business owner now? I think we massively oversimplify that conversation.
Hiring Is Weird
Here's the truth nobody tells you when you're a student looking at job postings:
Hiring people is genuinely hard. You interview someone for an hour or two — and then somehow you're supposed to know whether they'll fit your culture, communicate well, handle stress, take feedback, show initiative, and work with your team for years.
Meanwhile, during the interview process, everyone is on their absolute best behavior on both sides of the table. It's basically first-date energy.
Some hires become home runs. Some are clearly not the right fit 90 days later. That doesn't automatically make the employee bad. And it doesn't automatically make the company bad either.
It just means humans are hard to evaluate in 60 minutes. The communication gap most new grads carry into their first job is one of the reasons it can take months to know whether a hire is going to work out.
The Yankees Don't Have a Turnover Problem
One of the best analogies I've heard on this came from Paul Goff. He said: "Pick your favorite sports team."
I'm a Yankees fan. The Yankees turn over players constantly. Nobody watches the Yankees sign a new shortstop and says, "Wow, this organization is clearly falling apart." The same applies to the Lakers. Manchester United. The Packers.
Every successful organization evolves its roster. Why?
Because alignment matters more than tenure. The right people in the right roles outperforms the same people staying forever in roles they've outgrown. That's true in pro sports and it's true in PT clinics.
The Better Question Most PTs Aren't Asking
The question isn't "how much turnover does this company have?"
The better question is:
"Do I align with this company's mission?"
That's the real issue. Most clinics, hospitals, and healthcare organizations are actually terrible at clearly communicating:
- Who they are
- What they value
- Who they want on the team
- What "great" looks like for the role you're being hired into
And honestly — a lot of PTs don't know those answers for themselves either. If you don't know what kind of work actually gives you energy, every job will feel confusing, and every employer will feel like a potential mistake.
This is the kind of conversation we have on the podcast
The Front Row Back Row Podcast with Dr. Brian Wolfe and Dr. Owen Campbell — where we cut through the conventional career advice that PT schools push and talk about what actually matters when you're trying to build a fulfilling clinical career.
Listen to the latest episode →What to Actually Evaluate Instead
If turnover alone isn't the metric, what should you actually be looking at when you're considering a job? Three things, in order of importance:
Anyone can put a paragraph on a website. Look for whether the people interviewing you can explain — in plain English, in 60 seconds — who they serve, what they're trying to build, and what kind of clinician thrives there. If they can't, that's a much bigger red flag than turnover. You're about to spend 40 hours a week somewhere whose leaders can't articulate what they're doing.
Turnover is a number. The reasons behind turnover are the actual signal. Ask: "Can you tell me about someone who left in the last year and why?" The quality of the answer tells you everything. Defensive non-answers are a red flag. Honest, specific answers ("they were great, but they wanted to move into pelvic floor and we don't treat that") tell you the organization understands itself.
A company can be excellent and still be wrong for you. The goal isn't finding "the best clinic." It's finding the clinic whose mission, patient population, pace, and culture match the work you actually want to do. That requires you to know what you want — which is the part most PT students never get coached through.
Are you a PT owner trying to communicate your mission so the right people self-select in?
Book a Free Call →For Owners: The Same Logic Cuts Both Ways
If you own a practice, this isn't just a candidate-side issue. It's also yours.
Most clinic owners I work with can describe their patient ICP in detail but can't articulate their employee ICP at all. They know exactly who they want to treat — and almost nothing about who they want on the team. So they hire on credentials and vibes, then act surprised when alignment turns out to be the actual issue 90 days in.
The fix is the same as it is for the candidate: get clear on the mission, communicate it relentlessly, and let the wrong fits self-select out before you hire them. When it's time to hire your first employee, that clarity is the single highest-leverage thing you can bring into the process.
The Honest Take
The goal isn't zero turnover. The goal is better alignment.
Better alignment creates longer relationships, better teams, and healthier workplaces — on both sides of the desk. Turnover is just a downstream symptom of how well alignment was set up at the start.
So if you're a PT student or new grad evaluating a job: don't write off a clinic because the Glassdoor page mentions turnover. Ask better questions. Look for mission clarity. And do the harder work of knowing what you actually want before you walk in the door.
So I'm curious where other PTs stand on this:
Do you think turnover is overrated as a metric when evaluating a company?
