Recruiting ads for BCBAs and RBTs,
measured in hires, not applications.

The real bottleneck

For most ABA providers, hiring is the growth problem

Ask an owner what's keeping the clinic from growing and you rarely hear "not enough inquiries." You hear that there's a waitlist, that two BCBAs are carrying more supervision than they should, and that the last RBT posting produced forty applications and one person who showed up to the interview.

Meanwhile the entire ad budget goes to client acquisition. More inquiries into a clinic with no open capacity doesn't produce revenue. It produces a longer waitlist and families who call someone else while they wait.

Hiring is a lead generation problem wearing different clothes

A candidate is a lead. There's a search, a click, a landing page, a form, a follow-up call, and a long gap before anything becomes real. Everything that makes a client campaign work makes a hiring campaign work, and the mistakes are the same mistakes.

The difference is who you're bidding against. For "ABA therapy near me" you're competing with every provider in the county. For "RBT jobs" in a specific town you're often competing with nobody running search ads at all, because your competitors are posting on job boards and waiting.

What candidates actually type

Three groups search, and they need different handling:

• Credentialed clinicians looking now. "BCBA jobs," "RBT jobs near me," "behavior technician jobs," often with a town or "part time" attached. These are the clicks worth paying for.
• People finishing supervision or coursework. Worth reaching if you hire new grads and are set up to supervise them. Worth excluding if you aren't.
• Researchers. Salary comparisons, exam prep, certification requirements, coursework. They click, they cost money, and they'll never apply.

That third group is where recruiting budgets quietly disappear. Terms like "RBT practice exam," "how to become a BCBA," "BCBA salary," "RBT certification" and "40 hour training" belong on the negative list before the campaign goes live, not after a month of spend.

Target by commute, not by city

City-level targeting is the wrong shape for clinical hiring. A technician will take a job twenty minutes away and turn one down forty minutes away, regardless of which municipality it sits in. Radius targeting around each clinic or each service area, sized to a drive people will actually make, beats a list of town names.

Home-based and center-based roles also need separating. A candidate who wants to drive between homes in a defined area and one who wants a single building to report to are different people, and an ad that doesn't say which it is wastes both of their time.

Put pay, caseload and drive time in the ad

Clinicians compare roles on a short list of things: hourly rate or salary, how many cases, how far, how much supervision, whether benefits and PTO are real. Ads that stay vague collect applications from people who disappear once they learn the answers.

Being specific up front lowers application volume and raises the quality of what's left, which is the trade you want. A handful of serious applicants beats forty that your intake coordinator has to sort through. Several states require a pay range in the posting anyway.

The landing page: one role, one form, nothing else

Most clinics send recruiting clicks to a careers page listing every opening, or to an applicant tracking system that asks for a resume upload, a cover letter and work history before anyone has talked to a human. Both leak candidates badly.

A recruiting landing page should cover one role, answer the short list above in the first screen, and ask for a name, a phone number and a credential. Full applications come after a conversation. On mobile, where most of these clicks happen, a resume upload is a dead end.

Track to hires, not applications

Google's bidding optimizes toward whatever you tell it to count. Count applications and it will find you people who enjoy applying. The stages worth sending back as offline conversions:

1. Application submitted. The only event most accounts track.
2. Phone screen completed. Filters out the unqualified and the unreachable.
3. Interview attended. Where no-shows show up in the data.
4. Offer accepted.
5. Started, and still there at 90 days. The point where the hire was worth something.

Importing those back into Google Ads, with values attached, is what turns a recruiting campaign from a cost center into something you can compare against a placement fee. It also surfaces an uncomfortable but useful pattern: the keywords that produce the most applications are frequently not the ones that produce hires.

This doesn't replace your job boards

Indeed and the ABA-specific boards still work, and the referral bonus is usually the cheapest hire you'll ever make. Search ads cover a gap the others don't: the clinician who is quietly looking, hasn't made a profile anywhere, and types a job title into Google on a Sunday night. Reaching that person first is often the whole advantage.

Keep hiring and client campaigns apart

Same account, different campaigns. Separate budgets, separate conversion actions, separate landing pages. Put them together and Google will spend wherever conversions are cheapest, which is usually hiring, and your family inquiries dry up without anyone noticing for weeks.

It's also worth keeping recruiting out of Performance Max. Broad automated placements are a poor fit for a search this specific, and the reporting won't tell you enough to fix it.