How Do the Best Therapists Get Hired at Tribeca Therapy?: A Conversation on Our Hiring Process

As our practice continues to expand, we have dedicated time and resources towards creating a hiring process that is unique from most traditional interview formats. Our hiring process is designed to not only help us find talented therapists that are committed to growth, but also shed light on our values as a practice for those seeking to work with us. In particular, we want our prospective hires to experience firsthand our highly collaborative environment and the emphasis we place on supervision and training, which benefits both our therapists and our patients.

In order to shed light on our hiring process, Therapists Claudia Maisch and Janou Hooykaas, who both recently joined our practice, reflect on their experiences applying to and interviewing with our hiring team, as well as how the process prepared them for working at our Downtown therapy office:

What motivated you both to apply to Tribeca Therapy?

Claudia Maisch: I remember specifically looking for a group practice that embraced therapy as a political process. The discourse around mental health has become largely depoliticized, ahistorical, and coopted by corporate individualism. I come from a social justice background and it felt important to me to work for a practice that understands the political nature of therapy. My search led me to Tribeca Therapy’s website where I read through the blog posts to get a sense of the practice’s approach. I was drawn to how Tribeca Therapy was unapologetic and explicit about their politics and values in ways that other group practices I came across didn’t really share. I appreciated the intention in the language they chose, their embrace of a non-diagnostic approach, and even, how they value their workers with trainings, salary, and benefits that most traditional fee-for-service jobs do not offer. Reading through the website, I was able to get a real sense of what the practice values and how these values inform the work.

Janou Hooykaas: Like Claudia, I decided to apply to Tribeca Therapy because I got a strong sense of the practice’s values around psychotherapy. I was particularly struck by the practice’s non-diagnostic approach, its emphasis on the place of politics and our social world in the therapeutic space, and its conceptualization of what makes therapy good. I appreciated that there were pages on the website dedicated to explaining the use of language and treatment approaches and felt that this would translate to a thoughtful and intentional therapeutic practice. As I did more research, I also found that Tribeca Therapy is dedicated to training, intensive supervision, and collaboration beyond what I had seen across my job search. I believe that a well-supported team is best equipped to support patients. Unfortunately, many practices take a highly individualized approach to therapy. Despite the individualized nature of therapy, a sense of community is an essential component to growth as a clinician.

What were the first steps you took after deciding to apply?

Claudia Maisch: I started working on the responses to the general application on the website. The questions around my perspective, aspirations, and experience helped me articulate my approach to therapy and the values I aim to embody in my practice. I spent a lot of time on that part of the application because I wanted to really put some thought into the areas of Tribeca Therapy that stood out to me and wanted to demonstrate the ways I envision therapy to be a creative and empowering practice.

Janou Hooykaas: Filling out the online application required me to answer questions around my values, experience, and aspirations. This was the first time I’d been asked to reflect on some of these topics. It was a challenging but rewarding exercise to articulate a clear point of view regarding my hopes for working as a psychotherapist at Tribeca. After submitting my application, I was then asked to write a short essay about the role of intimacy in therapy.

Janou, do you think writing an essay helped you further articulate your point of view as a therapist, even before coming in for an interview?

Janou Hooykaas: Through writing the essay, I felt I was able to flesh out my perspective on an idea that, at once, is so central to the work and often gets skimmed over. Similar to how I felt writing the short answer responses on the application, I sensed that working at Tribeca Therapy would encourage me to develop a strong point of view and develop my therapeutic “voice,” which other organizations I encountered didn’t seem quite as invested in.

After the application process, there are two rounds of interviews. What were these two interviews like and what were the differences between them?

Janou Hooykaas: The interview process was different from any interview I had taken part in before. Rather than the usual prompts like “Walk me through your resume,” the first interview focused more on my values and experiences working as a therapist. While it was a more structured interview than the second, I was directly asked about the emotions I had experienced conducting therapy and it took me aback a little bit to be so vulnerable in an interview.

The second interview focused more on actual case examples, which was when I felt most able to experience how supervision might go at Tribeca Therapy. I was given a lot of constructive feedback and asked how I might have approached situations differently. It felt exposing to sit through an interview and talk about the times when things didn’t go “right,” as well as hear and apply feedback from people I just met! But, at the same time, it was so clear to me how much I would learn working at Tribeca Therapy. The feedback was deep and given with care. The interview almost “test drove” Tribeca Therapy’s supervision style, immediately highlighting the support and rigor that would come with working at the practice.

Claudia Maisch: After submitting my application, I received an email from Matt asking to set up an interview that would take about an hour. He explained that the conversation would be a bit structured, sharing that the hiring team had come up with a standard set of questions that centered around understanding my values as they relate to good therapy. I remember the interview being exactly that: a conversation about my values and approach to therapy and relationship building. We talked a lot about my understanding of power, positionality, and difference, as well as the impacts these concepts have on the therapeutic relationship. It was a pretty challenging interview, but I remember being really stimulated by our conversation and feeling like there was a lot of intention behind each question.

The second interview was equally intentional, but more focused on my clinical skills and the courageousness it takes to do good therapy. My interviewers asked me to reflect on my previous experiences in ways that really got me thinking about some of the challenges of therapy. Our conversation was theoretical in some ways but also grounded in some practical clinical experiences and examples. Overall, the interview process felt meaningful and I was impressed by how thoughtful the hiring team seemed to be about their practice.

It seems like the first, more structured interview didn’t provide much opportunity for you to ask questions about the practice. Claudia, did you still feel like you came away from that with a sense of the practice’s values?

Claudia Maisch: The first interview was more structured around a set of predetermined questions without much room for me to ask direct questions about the practice. I was told ahead of time that this would be the case so I wasn’t caught off-guard. Even though I didn’t have the space in the first interview to ask my own questions of the practice, the questions that were asked communicated a lot about the practice’s values and the ways in which they thought about therapy. After ending the first interview, I remember thinking that even that initial conversation was meaningful for my growth as a therapist even if I wasn’t invited back for the second round. The conversation itself had given me so much to think about and reflect on. 

Thankfully, I was asked back, and similar to what Janou said, that conversation challenged me to be really vulnerable about my experiences as a therapist thus far. It was a great conversation and left me wanting to work alongside folks who really cared about and organized themselves around doing good therapy. I had been on a few interviews prior to interviewing with Tribeca and felt each interview was so generic that my responses, in turn, felt ingenuine. Tribeca’s interview process challenged me in a way that felt meaningful and encouraged me to be critical and engaged.

How do you think the hiring process prepared you for working at Tribeca Therapy?

Claudia Maisch: The interview prepared me fairly well. It showed me how much the practice values self-reflection, vulnerability, and a willingness to be challenged to learn and grow. These values are fostered at the practice quite intentionally through supervision and training. The willingness to be open, to look at some really hard truths, and to allow yourself to feel all the feelings that come with that are so important for good therapy. Doing good work as a therapist requires endless learning and unlearning of how to look at and think about things along the way. This was something that was brought up in my interview and it certainly has been present in my work at Tribeca so far.

Janou Hooykaas: I feel that the interview process accurately reflected what would be asked of me both as a therapist and as a colleague. The environment is highly collaborative and I find that the culture really encourages everyone to pitch in, whether that is through maintaining the office space or contributing to discussions. My responses are rarely taken at face value and when I say something in a group conversation, I’m often asked to dig deeper. “What’s the look on your face saying?”, “How does that make you feel?”, and “Why do you think that is?” are all questions I’ve become familiar with during supervision and training. The interview process did a good job of showing what would be in store for us in terms of requiring introspection and critical thought. There are so many things that come up in therapy, whether for the patient or therapist, that often get glossed over. At Tribeca Therapy, there is an emphasis on confronting many of those things head-on and asking questions about why these topics are considered taboo or seen as unworthy of further exploration.