How to hire an audiology practice manager: where to find candidates, what to look for and what to offer

An audiology practice manager runs the operations layer of a hearing clinic: the schedule, the front desk, billing follow-through, payroll, inventory, vendors and payers. You and your audiologists stay clinical; the manager makes the business run around you.

The clearest signal is where the owner's week is going. If it keeps disappearing into staffing problems, denied claims, unpaid balances, phone coverage and vendor calls, the practice has outgrown its owner-as-operations-department arrangement.

Other triggers show up as cracks rather than decisions: a second location adding coordination overhead, a schedule run by whoever has a free hour, and managerial tasks scattered across clinical staff who also have patient loads. If you run several locations, the same hiring logic applies one level up to a regional or area manager hire above your site leads.

When the first manager hire is still hypothetical, the work lives wherever it landed — with the front desk, with an assistant, with the owner after hours. That arrangement is measurable: in ASHA's 2025 audiology assistant survey, 48% of assistant respondents reported performing managerial duties such as scheduling. Respondents' reported job titles included Office Manager and Patient Care Coordinator alongside Audiology Assistant (42%) and Audiology Technician (23%).

The seat you are hiring may already exist as a set of tasks; a manager hire turns those tasks into one accountable role. Our research found no published benchmark for the practice size that justifies the hire, so decide from your own bottlenecks: time, errors, and the work your licensed staff are doing that no one with a license needs to do.

This page is the employer's view of the role. For the worker's-eye view, see the audiology practice manager career guide, and for how this hire fits the wider team, see our guide to hiring for your hearing practice.

Start from what the job is: an operations seat, not a clinical one. Testing, fitting and dispensing stay with the audiologists and hearing instrument specialists who hold the credential your state requires, no matter how senior the manager is.

ASHA's Code of Ethics draws that line from the clinician's side. A holder of ASHA's Certificate of Clinical Competence may delegate clinical-service tasks to aides, assistants and technicians only when they are adequately prepared and appropriately supervised. Responsibility for patient welfare stays with the certified audiologist. Tasks that need the audiologist's unique skills, judgment or credentials cannot be delegated at all. A manager coordinates that system; they do not sit inside it.

Our research also found no audiology-specific practice-manager certification we could verify, so do not require a credential you cannot name. Screen the record instead: teams run, schedules kept, billing followed through, budgets held.

The skills the seat needs are concrete:

• Scheduling and template design across providers and rooms.
• Insurance verification and billing oversight, including denial follow-up and aging balances.
• Payroll, time-off tracking and basic HR documentation.
• Recall and no-show programs, and the reports behind them.
• Hearing aid inventory, returns and manufacturer ordering.
• Vendor, payer and landlord relationships.
• Your practice-management software, as its administrator rather than its user.

Managers from adjacent healthcare offices — dental, physical therapy, optometry, veterinary and physician practices — are one background to screen, since the seat there runs a version of the same machine: a provider schedule, a billing queue and a front desk. Retail and optical management backgrounds are worth screening too, especially for chain-style operations. Hearing-care experience helps with recalls, benefit checks and manufacturer dynamics, but treat it as a plus, not a prerequisite.

Before you assign anything patient-facing to the new manager, confirm your state's delegation and scope rules with your licensing board. Those rules decide what non-licensed staff may touch, and they differ by state.

Recruit from three pools. The first is managers from adjacent healthcare offices, who already run a schedule, a payroll and a billing queue. The second is hearing care itself: a manager from another audiology practice or hearing aid center arrives knowing recalls, insurance verification and manufacturer reps.

The third pool is your own building. ASHA's 2025 assistant survey shows how much managerial work already happens at the desk, and a lead assistant or patient care coordinator who wants the seat knows your patients, your software and your payers. What they may lack — billing depth, HR experience, payer negotiations — is trainable, and cheaper to train than clinic culture.

Choose the title deliberately. Our research did not verify which titles employers use for this seat, so check what competing practices call it before you settle on one, and keep a clinical-sounding title off a role that is not clinical.

For a working shortlist of boards, associations and program job lists, see our guide to where to post the job, and browse open audiology practice manager jobs to see how competing practices describe the role and the pay.

Include pay in the posting where the law requires it. Washington (RCW 49.58.110) requires employers with 15 or more employees to disclose the wage scale or salary range, plus a general description of all benefits and other compensation, in each job posting — and postings made through third parties count. New York (Labor Law 194-b) requires employers with four or more employees to include compensation or a range of compensation in any advertised job performed at least in part in New York. Illinois, effective January 1, 2025, requires employers with 15 or more employees to include pay scale and benefit information in all job postings. We have not verified the rules elsewhere — check your own state before you publish.

Watch the ad's wording too. Federal EEO law makes it illegal to publish an advertisement that shows a preference for, or discourages applicants because of, race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. The EEOC's own example is an ad seeking "recent college graduates" — so keep age-coded phrasing out of a manager posting as well.

Screen for ownership, not vocabulary. Good scenario prompts: a front-desk resignation on a Monday, a payer denying your top billed test, a schedule that keeps overbooking one provider, a vendor asking for a price increase, an angry escalation at the desk. Listen for a process the candidate has actually run — what they measured, what they changed, what happened next.

Keep the questions lawful. You may ask about education, work history and any certifications the job requires. The ADA bars asking whether a candidate has a disability, or any other medical question, before making an offer; what you may ask is whether and how they can perform the job's functions. Workers' compensation history is off the table before an offer as well.

Criminal history has its own limits under EEOC guidance: you can weigh convictions in a final hiring decision, but you cannot reject a candidate over an arrest alone, and a blanket policy against every conviction is likely discriminatory.

Federal anti-discrimination law — Title VII and the ADA — covers employers with 15 or more employees, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act covers those with 20 or more. State fair-employment laws can reach smaller employers, so confirm what applies to your practice with your state labor agency or counsel before you finalize the question list.

If your practice bills Medicare or Medicaid, screen the finalist against the HHS-OIG List of Excluded Individuals and Entities. An exclusion means no Medicare or state health care program payment for items or services the excluded person furnishes. A positive match routes to OIG's Special Advisory Bulletin on the Effect of Exclusion, or to its Self-Disclosure Protocol if the person is already on your payroll. OIG's instruction to check the list monthly is addressed to state Medicaid agencies, not private practices, so set your own rescreening cadence with your compliance advisor.

Benchmark with the closest available proxy our research uses for this seat: medical and health services managers (SOC 11-9111). In BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for May 2025, that occupation's median wage in offices of physical, occupational and speech therapists and audiologists (NAICS 621340) was $100,290 a year, or $48.22 an hour. The mean was $106,780, and the 10th-to-90th percentile range ran from $74,960 to $137,520. Across all industries, the median was $123,860, the mean $140,970 and the 25th-to-75th percentile range $94,700 to $166,100.

Label those figures for what they are. The occupation includes hospital executives, and the industry row mixes physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech offices with audiology ones, so it overstates what a typical small practice pays its manager. OEWS also counts wage-and-salary workers only, which leaves out owner-operators. Use the numbers as an outer band, then adjust for your city, your revenue and what the seat actually owns.

Decide the overtime question deliberately. As of 2026, the federal FLSA white-collar salary threshold is $684 per week ($35,568 a year) — DOL's 2024 increases were vacated by federal courts, and the department republished the 2019 rule text effective May 15, 2026. Paying above the threshold does not by itself make the role exempt from overtime: the FLSA's white-collar tests look at both the salary and the primary duty, not the job title, so confirm the classification with the Wage and Hour Division or employment counsel.

Our research found no published benchmark for audiology practice-manager incentive plans, so design yours from your own numbers. Tie any bonus to metrics the practice already tracks — recall completion, no-show rate, billing aging — and set targets from your own history rather than from a published industry average. Write the terms into the offer, and into the posting wherever pay-transparency law applies.

Spell out benefits the same way: health coverage, retirement, paid time off, and any continuing-education or licensure support you fund. An unnamed benefit is one a candidate assumes you do not have.

Start with the paperwork, and only after the candidate accepts the offer. Federal law prohibits running Form I-9 or E-Verify before acceptance. Once they have accepted, examine the new hire's identity and work-authorization documents within three business days of the hire, and keep the form for three years after the date of hire or one year after employment ends, whichever is later.

Give the manager the compliance map early, because they will own vendor relationships. Under HIPAA, your practice may let a business associate create, receive, maintain or transmit patient information on its behalf only after obtaining satisfactory assurance — a business associate agreement — that it will safeguard the data. Make that agreement a checklist item before any billing service, answering service or software vendor touches patient information, and confirm the details with your compliance advisor or attorney.

The first month is learning the machine. Have the new manager shadow the schedule, sit with the front desk, read the last several months of billing and recall reports, meet every staff member one-on-one and meet your manufacturer and payer contacts. Change nothing yet.

The second month is taking the keys. The manager owns the schedule, the recall program and billing follow-through, and starts running the staff meeting. Escalations now reach the owner by exception, not by default.

By 90 days, ask for a baseline: the numbers your practice tracks, where they stand and what the manager wants to move first. Our guide to the KPIs worth calculating and tracking gives you the list to work from, and our staffing guide covers roles, ratios and when to add the next hire.

Keep the clinical boundary visible through all of it. The manager coordinates the people and the process; under ASHA's Code of Ethics, responsibility for patient welfare stays with your certified audiologists, who may delegate only what their code allows. Operational authority grows from week one. Clinical authority does not move at all.

Employer information, not licensing, legal, medical, clinical, billing or coding advice. Hiring, pay-disclosure, overtime and screening rules differ by state; confirm them with the EEOC, the DOL, your state labor agency or a health-care employment attorney, and licensing questions with your state licensing board.