IECMHC Hiring Guidance

Hiring Considerations

Who Is Hiring?

State, local, and tribal IECMHC systems vary in structure. Consultants may be employed by:

• Statewide or large systems
• A subcontracted agency through a statewide or large system
• An independent subcontractor

Considerations Depending on Who is Hiring

Who Will Be Served?

Ideally candidates should:

• reflect the cultural and ethnic experiences and languages of the population with whom they will work.
• have experience with the setting where the consultation is being provided be from the region or community being served.

Serving Tribal Lands and Communities

• The hiring team must understand the cultural beliefs, practices, and languages, customs of the tribal communities, and their laws.
• If the hiring agency is operating within tribal lands, it will be important to confer with tribal legal departments regarding hiring processes. The agency must also be aware of Indian law and policy, the unique legal relationship tribes have with the federal government or state. Agencies can do this by recognizing tribal sovereignty and recognizing government-to-government tribal consultation processes.
• The effectiveness of IECMHC is directly related to understanding and considering the cultural beliefs, practices, languages, customs, historical context and laws of the tribe.
• Candidates must be active learners and listeners who welcome feedback from tribal members.

Key Skills for the Position

• IECMHC draws from multiple disciplines, candidates should be comfortable with many of the following areas:
• IECMHC candidates need to be able to:

Keeping the “MH” in IECMHC

Mental health training is an essential skill for IEMHC, candidates should be competent in:

• Bringing a mental health perspective to understanding infants’ and young children’s social-emotional development
• Creating a therapeutic alliance with consultees
• Modeling and foster reflection and self-awareness
• Integrating new mental health practices and strategies

Essential Consultant Attributes

What attributes are essential?

In interviews and conversations with candidates, look for the following attributes:

• Enjoyment of the consultee/consultative setting(s)
• Reflect the community served
• Reflective capacity
• Openness to new information
• Capacity to tolerate ambiguity
• High value on reflection and relationships
• Cultural awareness and sensitivity

Enjoyment of the Consultee/Consultative Setting(s)

Identify candidates who are comfortable in the setting where consultation services are provided.

• If your program provides services in childcare settings you want to find out how comfortable the candidate is in busy, noisy, often chaotic climates. To find this out you can inquire about prior experience working in a childcare setting, often candidates worked in summer camps or childcare programs when in high school or college.
• If your program works with home visiting teams you want to find out how comfortable the candidate is in working with clients who often face challenges with substance abuse, partner violence, mental health, and other issues. To find this out you can inquire about the adult populations they have served. A candidate with limited infant mental health experience but prior experience working with substance abuse programs could be a good match if your program has the ability to provide infant mental health training
• Consultation is different from individual therapy work. In consultation the focus is often on the caregivers in the child’s life as opposed to the child. So that the consultant works on behalf of infants and young children but does not cultivate meaningful direct relationships with them. This may be something you want to highlight and discuss with potential candidates.

Reflect the Community Served

Identify candidates who:

• Reflect the cultural and ethnic experiences and languages of the population with whom they will work.
• Understand the cultural beliefs, practices, and languages of the infants, young children, and families served.
• Recognize that the effectiveness of any intervention (especially IECMHC) is related to understanding and considering the beliefs and customs of the infants, young children, and families served. To assess this, ask the candidate about the different racial and ethnic groups they have served. Ask how they incorporated a client’s cultural beliefs and experiences in the work. Ask for the candidate to share an example or story from their work that involved infusing or addressing cultural beliefs and experiences.

Reflective Capacity

• Reflective Capacity is the ability to imagine, think, and plan; to generate new awareness; to construct new understandings, and to use this process to transform practice. The reflective consultant uses both internal and external knowledge to enhance their consultative practice (Brandt, 2014). Identify candidates who: This can be assessed by providing a vignette of a common challenge consultants in your program experience and ask the candidate how they would respond. Look for their ability to consider multiple perspectives, the implications of parallel process and to join in collaborative thinking with the consultee.

Openness to New Information

Openness to new information encompasses two aspects for the hiring team to consider:

• Capacity to remain open to a process of discovery rather than prematurely drawing conclusions about a problem. As new information comes to light, the IECMH consultant must be able to acknowledge and consider its relevance, resisting the temptation to discard it because it does not readily fit with existing hypotheses or conclusions.
• In the spirit of ongoing learning, IECMH consultants must be willing to explore new areas of knowledge and new ideas and recommendations from supervisors and peers. Consultants must work to evaluate the merits of new information and integrate it when it seems useful. Sometimes, they may discover that new information requires them to change course—alter their thinking, approach, or strategies.

One way to assess this is to ask the candidate to share about a challenging case or work interaction, why it was difficult, and how they responded. Listen for the candidate’s ability to incorporate new information, approach supervisors or peers for input, or consider multiple responses.

Capacity to Tolerate Ambiguity

The hiring team should look for candidates who:

• Can tolerate uncertainty in consultative situations that are unclear or confusing. This allows the consultant to maintain a stance of curiosity, flexibility, and openness to information as it emerges. It also allows the consultant to encourage this capacity in their consultees.
• Can tolerate ambiguity. To assess this capacity in a candidate, the team can ask the candidate to describe a work situation in which they felt unsure of what was going on and what they ought to do. What thoughts and feelings did they have? What did they do?

High Value on Reflection and Relationships

The hiring team should look for candidates who:

• Are aware of their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as important source of information.
• Can appreciate that others have equally rich and diverse internal experiences. The candidates’ responses to the vignettes and anecdotes from their work experiences, as recommended in the prior sections, will also provide opportunities to assess their attention to their internal responses and curiosity about other’s internal experiences.

Cultural Awareness and Sensitivity

The hiring team should look for candidates who:

• Have invested time in learning about equity, diversity, and inclusion.
• Are alert to discomforts and emotional responses to multicultural issues in themselves and others.
• Can openly discuss and sensitively attend to topics related to race.
• Are committed to ongoing professional development in cultural awareness and sensitivity.
• Actively engage in self-reflection and reflective supervision.
• Embrace a stance of compassion, humility and curiosity.

To assess this consider asking the candidate to respond to vignettes that include issues of equity and inclusion. When providing a vignette considering having the individuals in the situation be from different races or cultures, such as a white consultant serving a primarily Vietnamese child care center or a Black family being seen in a primarily White pediatric setting.

Getting All in Order

The Search

Job Description

A clearly written job description sets a program up for success when hiring. All employees want to understand what is expected of them and how they can accomplish program deliverables.

Sample Essential Job Functions in an IECMHC Job Description

• Uses a framework of promotion, prevention, and early intervention to promote mental health and resilience and prevent behavioral problems.
• Partners with consultees to support ongoing communication with caregivers about mental health, behavioral health, or developmental concerns related to their infant or young child.
• Develops written intervention strategies using a team approach to assist staff with positive behavior-support strategies to promote infants’ and young children’s optimal social-emotional development.
• Provides group and individual training on overall social and emotional wellness with specific topics related to infant and early childhood development, trauma-informed care, attachment, self-care, and other related topics.
• Adheres to all data and program requirements.
• Uses independent judgment and discretion in setting daily priorities to complete tasks.
• Demonstrates sensitivity to linguistic, cultural, social, economic, individual, and role differences among the infants, young children, and families served.
• Brings observations and discussion questions to supervision.

IECMHC Job Requirements

• Master’s degree in mental health
• Licensed or license-eligible and trained in their field
• At least 1–2 years of work experience as a mental health professional
• Possesses attributes and skills critical to IECMHC (e.g., facilitates partnerships, culturally sensitive, flexible, empathetic, curious)
• Possesses specialized knowledge (e.g., infant and early childhood development; mental health challenges in infants, young children, and adults; risk and protective factors)

Recommendation

The Center of Excellence (CoE) recommends that consultants have a master’s degree in a relevant mental health field and be eligible for a clinical license. Please review the CoE IECMHC Competencies for more information on the center’s recommendations for consultant qualifications.

Staffing Exceptions

In some areas of the United States, finding a candidate who fits the standard job requirements of an IECMH consultant is difficult or almost impossible. The reality is that there are mental health professional deserts, and hiring teams may need to be flexible and discerning when hiring.

If the hiring team decides to engage a consultant who does not meet IECHMC requirements, hiring managers must create a realistic professional development plan that covers content the candidate lacks in formal training or experience. Additional supervision or mentoring may also be indicated. The CoE’s foundational modules and consultant assessment are useful tools for building capacity for IECMHC work.

Where to Post Advertisements

The hiring team needs to know the lay of land in their region. Online hiring platforms (e.g., Indeed, LinkedIn) are useful places to post ads, and other options include:

• Local newspapers (particularly in rural areas).
• Agency careers page
• University careers pages
• Social media
• Employee referral programs
• External recruiters
• Partner agencies
• Job Fairs.

To ensure that the pool of candidates is diverse, the hiring team can partner with Tribal Colleges and Universities (opens in a new tab), Historically Black Colleges and Universities (opens in a new tab), Hispanic-serving institutions (opens in a new tab), Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander–serving institutions (opens in a new tab), and trusted community partners to send the advertisement to their contacts.

Recruitment in Rural and Tribal areas

• Seek out a community member for ideas on where and how to advertise.
• Partner with a local established agency or mental health professional in the area for guidance on recruitment.
• Partner with tribal colleges and universities to send the advertisement to their contacts.

Sample Job Advertisement

Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation Position Available

Our agency is seeking an experienced mental health professional with a master’s degree in counseling, social work, psychology, or marriage and family counseling for the positions of infant and early childhood mental health consultant in our county. Infant and early childhood mental health consultation presents an exciting opportunity for experienced professionals to expand their skills into the field of consultation. Consultants receive specialized training to provide mental health consultation services to early childhood education settings through an evidence-based consultation model. In collaboration with consultees (teachers, home visitors, child care providers), consultants work to promote equity and build adult capacity to support the social and emotional development of the infants and young children they serve, some of whom may exhibit challenging behaviors. Driving required.

The Interview

Developing Interview Questions

• Ask questions that require reflection
• Request anecdotes that illustrate a past case that went well
• Create opportunities for reflection about past work
• Provide vignettes for applicants to respond with potential next steps

Sample Questions (1)

Questions That Require Reflection

1. What types of clients are difficult for you to work with? What are your thoughts on why that might be the case?
2. In some centers or homes, you may see teachers, staff, or caregivers speaking to infants and young children in ways that seem harsh or insensitive. What strategies might you use to manage your own emotional response to seeing infants and young children in less-than-ideal environments?
3. The IEMCHC process can be slow. Tell us a bit about how you might manage your own thoughts and feelings about wanting to make a difference and hoping to see change happen more quickly.

Sample Questions (2)

Anecdotes that illustrate a past case that went well

1. Tell me about a case you worked on where you felt you were particularly effective. What went well? Anything you would have done differently, in retrospect?
2. Tell me about a past client that you still think about. What about that client has stayed with you? Looking back, do wish you could have done something differently?
3. What does it look like when you develop a good relationship with a client? How do you know the relationship is successful? Can you give an example?

Sample Questions (3)

Create opportunities for reflection about past work

1. Have you ever seen a child treated differently or be the subject of bias due to race, disability, gender, or language? How did you approach the issue?
2. What clients are difficult for you to work with? Why do you think that might be the case?
3. Have you ever been faced with an ethical conflict? If you have, what can you tell me about how you handled it? Anything you would do differently now?

Sample Vignettes for Candidates

Please consider this scenario: You are the IECMH consultant to Happy Kids Child Care. During circle time, a 3-year-old girl begins talking to a child nearby and disturbing the children sitting near her. Next, she hits the boy beside her and walks away from the circle group.

1. What would you be considering at this point? What step or steps might you take next?

Please consider this scenario: A teacher you are consulting with complains to you about the center director. She says she will not speak with the director about her concerns. You can relate to the teacher’s concerns and understand why she feels as she does.

1. What are some things you would consider when deciding what to do next? What do you think would be the best course of action?

Setting the Program and the Candidate Up for Success During the Interview

The hiring team should:

• Explain the position
• Explain the expectations
• Provide materials that will help the candidate understand the role (e.g. job description, program evaluation, program brochure)
• Provide materials about or explain the culture of the agency or program (e.g., agency core values, Diversity-Informed Tenets for Working with Infants, Children and Families (www.diversityinformedtenets.org (opens in a new tab))

1. Who will conduct the interview?
2. Will your program require one or two interviews?
3. Where will the interview take place?

Sample Interview Script

For the interviewers:

Please read through/say the bullet points below before starting the interview. The intent is to help the candidate better understand the position and therefore better understand the interview questions.

Before we start, we’d like to tell you more about this position:

• IECMHC is different from therapy. Therapeutic training and skill is important for the role. However, IECMH consultants work with adults charged with caring for children in early care and education settings, home visiting settings, and other settings.
• The consultant works with the consultee to build their capacity to respond to infants and young children with challenging behaviors and to more generally support the social and emotional development of all infants and young children in the setting.
• IECMH consultants carry a caseload of clients and spend much of their time in the field working with those who support infants, young children, and families.
• Supervision is an important part of the work. All consultants meet regularly with their supervisor to process the work.

Consider Post-Interview Writing Sample

Some IECMHC programs require candidates to submit a writing sample after a successful interview to gain additional information about a candidate’s skills.

Post-Interview Writing Sample

Read and reflect on the following excerpt taken from “Diversity-Informed Tenets for Working with Infants, Children and Families”

(www.diversityinformedtenets.org (opens in a new tab) )

Self- Awareness Leads to Better Services for Families: Professionals in the field of infant mental health must reflect on their own culture, personal values and beliefs, and on the impact racism, classism, sexism, able-ism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other systems of oppression have had on their lives in order to provide diversity-informed, culturally attuned services on behalf of infants, toddlers, and their families.

1. How does this statement resonate with your professional identity? How have you carried this forward in your work as a mental health professional? ***Please provide your answer in no more than two paragraphs.

Weigh all of these priorities together to make a decision, including the diversity of the children served and of your existing consultant applicant pool, and who would be best equipped to move your organization forward in providing high quality, equitable consultation.

Decision-Making Time

After the interview, your team will need to decide which candidate to hire for your program. Sometimes this is easy and sometimes the decision-making process can be difficult due to:

• Lack of qualified candidates
• Disagreement among team members

Prepping for New Employees’ First Day

• Review and use onboarding strategies from IECMH Consultant Training and Support Guide
• Prepare supervisor for new consultant
• Ensure all hiring paperwork is in order
• Gather New Employee Orientation (NEO) materials (e.g., books, materials, program manual)
• Use tools from IECMH Consultant Training and Support Guide to create NEO plan

References

• CoE IECMHC Competencies (Center of Excellence for Infant & Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation)
• Foundational Modules (Center of Excellence for Infant & Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation)
• CoE Consultant assessment (Center of Excellence for Infant & Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation)
• Irving Harris Diversity Informed Tenets for Work with Infants, Children and Families (opens in a new tab) (Irving Harris Foundation)