A Parkite has taken the reins at CHG Healthcare, the nation’s largest physician staffing company, and she’s more than prepared.President and CEO Leslie Snavely has worked for the company for 14 years, just as long as she’s lived in Park City. In fact, it was a desire to move to Park City with her husband and young daughter that led her to join the company as their head of marketing all those years ago.Originally from Ohio, Snavely first came to Utah following her then-boyfriend who was stationed at Hill Air Force base.“We just fell in love with the mountains of Utah, and I think we didn’t expect to. We ultimately got married in Park City in 2002,” she said. “So Park City had a special place in our heart all the way back then. … We were like, ‘We just got to get back to Park City.’ But it took a little while.”They had a few detours, moved back east for a while and to Arizona temporarily. But getting the position at CHG Healthcare, headquartered in Salt Lake City, finally gave them an avenue back to Park City. Founded in the ’70s by a doctor at the University of Utah, CHG’s mission as a physician staffing and recruiting company serves at the intersection of healthcare and sales, Snavely said. They work in the locum tenens industry, which temporarily staffs hard-to-find positions until the role can get permanently filled. They don’t just send in replacements, they also help with licensing, credentialing, malpractice, insurance, travel and housing for their clients. Trained in marketing, it’s a business she didn’t know she’d come to love.“We send doctors in temporarily because if we didn’t, there would not be health care provided. The origin of that really was from small communities. And Utah has a lot of small communities,” Snavely said, admitting a personal connection, too. “I grew up in rural Ohio. There were only so many doctors, and if the doctor wanted a vacation, there wasn’t medical care.”It’s especially difficult for specialty physicians, and with a shortage of clinicians all over the country, job boards aren’t enough. CHG Healthcare aims to mitigate the inevitable lapse in care.“If I’m a cardiologist and I work at Park City Hospital, and then I decide to move to St. George to get to warmer weather … when I leave my job in Park City, most likely, I’m giving two- to four-weeks notice. They cannot get a replacement cardiologist that fast,” Snavely explained. “So, what we’ll do is we’ll come and bring a temporary physician in to cover the gap between when that person leaves and the new person starts, and then we’ll also help find that new person.”It’s rewarding work, she said, and while she doesn’t have a background in healthcare, it’s become a passion of hers.“I’m a people person. And so I think I have a newfound appreciation, 14 years later, for how hard the business of medicine is and how important it is for us all to care about it,” she said. “One of the things I love about it the most is we help doctors with their careers.”Most of the time, she said, people go into healthcare because they want to help others, sometimes at the expense of their own needs and goals. And while they study what it takes to be a clinician, career training is often left out.“You don’t necessarily learn how to manage your career. You don’t necessarily learn how to manage a business. So we get to help doctors with the things that they didn’t get to learn,” Snavely said.Working at CHG through the COVID-19 pandemic also reinforced her love of healthcare, “to recognize how important for our country and our society that healthy people are.”Now as the company’s president and CEO, Snavely said her time with the company, from head of marketing to running the technology and strategy organizations to chief sales officer — as well as jobs before joining CHG — has helped her transition into such a big role.“If you think about preparing yourself along the way, I worked for Procter & Gamble a long time ago, I worked for Pepsi, all of these jobs helped to prepare me to learn how to do different parts of a company,” she said. “It’s a huge opportunity to have been at a company for 14 years and then take over because you’re not learning, you hit the ground running.”As president and CEO, Snavely sets the company’s direction and strategy, as well as continue to build the culture of the company, which employs 4,000 people across the nation, she said.“CHG is an award-winning, best-place-to-work organization. We have been for decades, and so it’s really upon me and my team to make sure we continue to be that,” she said.While she’s a full-time, working mom at a high level, she said she does her best to take advantage of the Park City lifestyle — skiing in the winter, mountain biking in the summer with her husband and two high-school-aged kids, Katharine and Matthew.“We are a Park City family. I mean, we love it here, and I don’t think you could rip us out of this place,” she said with a laugh. “They’re both on the Park City High School mountain biking team … we were just up at the race this weekend, camping and bike racing. Again, you couldn’t rip us from here because in Ohio they didn’t have mountain biking racing. They didn’t really have mountains.”Active in the natural landscape of the area, Snavely is also active with the Park City Community Foundation and as an advocate for women’s leadership in the state of Utah. She’s driven to bring about a more gender-equal society.“I believe everybody in our Park City community, our Utah community, the national community … should have an opportunity to be who they can be and deliver what they want in their life,” she said. “We have so much talent, and if we don’t all have an opportunity to contribute, we are shorting ourselves of great talent. … In Salt Lake, we are behind where we need to be, and that also translates to Park City in terms of having an equal playing field for everyone.”Whenever she can, Snavely said, she partners with local organizations to facilitate conversations around male allyship and how male leaders can help for a gender-equal world.“Helping to expose people to new thinking on it and teach them practical ways to be helpful — Most often here in the state, people are very well intentioned but they just don’t know where the gaps are,” she said. “At the end of the day, we have a lot of disparity in our town, and I just think it’s really, really important to try to help as much as we can.”The post New president and CEO of CHG Healthcare loves the job, loves her Park City home appeared first on Park Record.