Fun fact: One of our competitors burns through receptionists at a rate of about two per year. They post their job ads on their Facebook page and they post it on Craigslist, and they offer $15 an hour. On the other hand, we talked to a local tech college that trains medical assistants and were told that graduates from their program are expecting $17-$18 an hour and we were assured that at $18.50 an hour they could give us plenty of candidates. Average for the county is $19 (not entry level, across all experience levels).

Note that $15 an hour is for untrained receptionists, while $17 an hour is for candidates with a 2-year AS. A receptionist can answer the phone. A medical assistant can draw blood and do vitals. In taxes and overhead we pay about 50% more so the difference to us is $22.50/hr vs. $27.50. Our extra cost for someone happy with more skillz is about $40 a day or $10k a year on top of the ~50k it's already costing us. So. 20% premium on labor for quality, skilled labor.

And for four years now, they've been hiring new receptionists every six months.

Some recovery.

Our most recent hire? With a master's degree and $150k in student loan debt? Yeah, before we hired her she was delivering food for Amazon.