How to Hire Hospice Chaplains: An Employer's Guide

Start with the seat the role fills. The hospice interdisciplinary group must include a doctor of medicine or osteopathy, a registered nurse, a social worker (or a marriage and family therapist or mental health counselor), and a pastoral or other counselor (42 CFR 418.56). The hospice designates an RN member of that group to coordinate care (42 CFR 418.56(a)). Your chaplain is the spiritual-care capacity standing behind the care your RN member coordinates.

The service standard tells you what the job produces. Hospice spiritual counseling must include an assessment of the patient's and family's spiritual needs, counseling consistent with their beliefs and acceptance, reasonable efforts to facilitate visits by local clergy or pastoral counselors, and advising the family of the service (42 CFR 418.64(d)(3)). Write those four elements into the posting and you have a duties list that reads the same way a surveyor reads it.

The hire is structurally an employee hire. A hospice must routinely provide substantially all core services — nursing, medical social services and counseling — directly by hospice employees, with physician services allowed by contract (42 CFR 418.64). Counseling is one of the core services that rule ties to hospice employees — the service your chaplain delivers — so a staffing model that fills the seat through contract labor needs review before you build it. How much flexibility the phrase “substantially all” leaves for a specific arrangement is an interpretation question — confirm it with CMS guidance or health-care counsel.

Documentation runs through a record your team already maintains. The comprehensive assessment must cover physical, psychosocial, emotional and spiritual needs and include an initial bereavement assessment of the family; the assessment must be updated at least every 15 days (42 CFR 418.54(c)-(d)). Your chaplain's spiritual assessment feeds that record, which makes documentation skill a hiring requirement rather than a nicety.

Bereavement is the second output to staff deliberately. Hospices must run an organized bereavement program supervised by a qualified professional with grief or loss experience or education, and make bereavement services available to the family up to 1 year after the patient's death (42 CFR 418.64(d)(1)). Whether your chaplain supervises that program or feeds it is your organizational choice — what the rule fixes is the qualified supervision and the service window, not your org chart.

The worker-side view of this role — training routes and what the day looks like — lives in the hospice chaplain career guide. This page stays on your side of the hire.

The federal answer is deliberately open. The hospice conditions of participation list education standards for hospice social workers but set no degree or certification standard for the pastoral or other counselor on the interdisciplinary group (42 CFR 418.114). The spiritual-counseling standard works the same way: it requires the assessment and counseling described above and sets no degree or certification requirement for chaplains (42 CFR 418.64(d)(3)). The qualification bar is yours to set in the posting.

In practice, employers commonly set that bar from a few credential building blocks: ordination or faith-group endorsement, completed Clinical Pastoral Education units, board certification, and documented chaplaincy experience. Match the bar to the population your hospice serves, and state it plainly so candidates can self-match before they apply.

Read board certification accurately when resumes land. The Board of Chaplaincy Certification (BCCI) requires Board Certified Chaplain applicants to hold a bachelor's degree and a qualifying master's degree — 72 graduate semester hours in total. Candidates also complete four units of Clinical Pastoral Education, carry faith-group endorsement, and document at least 2,000 hours of chaplain work or volunteer experience after the required CPE. An Associate Certified Chaplain track requires two CPE units and 48 graduate semester hours. BCCI also offers an advanced Palliative Care & Hospice certification for chaplains who already hold the Board Certified Chaplain credential.

Rules change and the requirements are yours to defend. The federal standard lives in CMS's hospice conditions of participation. Rules change — confirm the current requirements, and whether any state or accreditation requirements sit on top of them, with your state hospice licensing agency and any accreditor you answer to before you finalize the qualification lines in your posting.

Source where the credentials are built. The certification path runs through a qualifying master's degree, Clinical Pastoral Education units and faith-group endorsement, so graduate programs, CPE centers and denominational endorsing bodies are all places chaplaincy candidates pass through on the way to the credential. Ask the certifying body and any professional chaplaincy associations you work with what career resources they publish.

Two second-source pipelines are worth standing up: chaplains already working in other clinical settings, and your own volunteer chaplains, who already know your team and your program. If you recruit from the volunteer ranks, remember the volunteer program is regulated in its own right. Volunteers must work in defined roles under the supervision of a designated hospice employee, and their hours must equal at least 5 percent of the total patient care hours of all paid hospice employees and contract staff (42 CFR 418.78).

Keep the sourcing itself lawful. It is illegal under EEOC-enforced laws to publish a job ad that shows a preference for, or discourages, applicants because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40 and older), disability or genetic information. Word-of-mouth recruiting carries its own exposure — relying on referrals through a workforce that skews one direction can leave your applicant pool skewed too — so spread sourcing across channels.

The channel detail — which boards deserve budget, how referral rewards work, how to run the funnel from posting to hire — belongs to the recruitment strategy guide. Before you publish, sanity-check the posting against what candidates actually see: browse current hospice chaplain jobs.

Verify every credential at its source. Confirm degrees with the school or a transcript service, CPE completion with the CPE center, endorsement letters with the endorsing body, and certification standing directly with the certifying organization. Weigh references from the people who supervised clinical work — CPE supervisors and prior clinical managers — not only congregational ones.

Medicare-certified hospices carry a federal background-check rule of their own. A hospice must obtain criminal background checks on all employees with direct patient contact or access to patient records. The check follows state requirements or, where a state has none, must be obtained within three months of employment for every state the employee lived or worked in during the past 3 years (42 CFR 418.114(d)).

When you order that check — or any other consumer report on an applicant, such as a motor vehicle record — the Fair Credit Reporting Act applies. It requires a clear written disclosure in a stand-alone document and the applicant's written authorization before you obtain the report (15 U.S.C. 1681b(b)(2)).

Run the exclusion screen. Federal law does not require providers to check the OIG's List of Excluded Individuals — OIG says so itself — but excluded-person liability still applies, because no Medicare or Medicaid payment may be made for items or services furnished by an excluded individual. OIG recommends screening before hiring and periodically, and it updates the list monthly. For a hospice that bills Medicare, the screen is cheap insurance against an expensive hire.

Sequence the health steps lawfully. The CDC recommends screening health care personnel for TB upon hire rather than routine annual testing absent known exposure or ongoing transmission. Under the ADA, a covered employer may require a medical examination only after a job offer and before duties begin, and only if every entering employee in the job category gets one. What your hospice must do beyond that comes from your state's rules — confirm with your state survey agency.

The step-by-step — what to order, in what order, with which disclosures — is the background checks guide's territory. Confirm your screening sequence with your state agencies or health-care counsel.

Anchor the offer to the closest federal pay data and label it honestly. BLS's Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for May 2025 puts clergy (SOC 21-2011) — the nearest published occupation, with no hospice-chaplain category — at a national median of $29.24 an hour, or $60,810 a year.

The industry row sharpens the picture. Clergy employed in home health care services (NAICS 621600) had a May 2025 median of $61,210 a year, with 10,920 employed there. Treat both figures as the occupation benchmark, not a hospice wage — where a given hospice lands is a market question your own postings and offers answer.

What you need to offer to compete is set by the postings chaplains in your market are actually comparing against yours. The labelled clergy benchmark, and why it is only the closest available occupation, sits on the hospice chaplain salary data page.

Structure the rest of the offer around coverage, not guesswork: full-time or part-time against your census, the on-call rotation and how it is paid, the travel territory and mileage terms, and the benefits package. Publish those terms in the posting and carry them into the offer letter.

One posting rule to check before you publish: Washington requires employers with 15 or more employees to disclose the wage scale or salary range and a general description of benefits in each job posting. Other states have their own pay-transparency laws, so confirm your state's requirements with your state labor agency.

Interview for the job as the standards define it. Put an IDG member in the room — the RN who coordinates care and the social worker or counselor on your IDG both carry the case history your chaplain will write into. Scenario questions do the real screening. Ask about a patient whose tradition differs from the chaplain's, a family asking for clergy from outside your area near the end of life, and a spiritual assessment that has to land in a record updated at least every 15 days. Add the handoff into bereavement support, which can run up to a year after death.

Keep the questions lawful. EEOC guidance says to limit pre-employment inquiries to what is essential for judging whether a person is qualified, and to generally avoid questions that would reveal race, sex, national origin, disability status, age, religion, color or ancestry. Any test you require must be necessary and related to the job, applied so it does not exclude people based on protected characteristics.

Chaplaincy is a role where faith sits inside the job description, so treat the legal line as a reviewed one. The EEOC's position is that employers must reasonably accommodate an employee's religious beliefs or practices unless doing so would cause difficulty or expense, and the same structure applies to reasonable accommodation for qualified applicants and employees with disabilities. Have employment counsel or health-care counsel review your interview guide and any faith-related requirement before you use it.

Sequence the paperwork after the yes. Complete Form I-9 Section 2 — your review and verification of documents — within three business days of the hire, and retain the form for three years after the date of hire or one year after employment ends, whichever is later.

Write the offer to state the specifics of the job: the coverage and on-call rotation, the territory, the documentation platform, and the training you provide. State the qualification in the posting's own terms — ordination, endorsement, CPE units or certification — so the file matches the ad.

Orient to your documentation, not to the chaplain's last employer's. Walk the new hire through your visit-note format, how the spiritual assessment feeds the comprehensive assessment cadence, your IDG meeting rhythm, and the bereavement program's intake and supervision lines. Hospices must receive a standard survey by a state agency or an approved accrediting organization at least once every 36 months — a chaplain trained to your standards from the first visit is part of staying ready for it.

Design the ramp deliberately. Pair the new chaplain with an experienced team member for a defined orientation window, start routine visits first, and add on-call and bereavement-caseload duties only after the routine work has settled. Give every chaplain a named contact for the questions that surface after hours.

Retention runs on the same inputs. Fund the professional development the credential path builds on: CPE units and any continuing education your certification body requires. Build peer support around the emotional weight of the work, and treat the chaplain's IDG seat as a working seat in care planning rather than a ceremonial one. Judge your retention from your own records — separations, exit reasons, first-quit timing — rather than from any industry figure, then fix what your records name.

The scheduling, overtime and wage-hour topics that sit around every senior-care hire are covered in the employer hiring guide.

Employer information, not licensing, legal, medical, benefits or tax advice. The spiritual-counseling, staffing and background-check standards come from CMS's hospice conditions of participation; consumer-report rules come from the FCRA; exclusion rules come from HHS-OIG; interview and accommodation rules come from the EEOC; and pay benchmarks come from BLS. Confirm current requirements with the bodies named above, and with a CPA or health-care counsel for classification and pay-structure questions, before you hire.