What do you picture when you’re looking to hire a clinician or receptionist for your practice? Perhaps someone who works hard, brings in new patients and establishes rapport with your patients, raising the reputation of your practice. Now while that all sounds like a dream come true, I’m sure you don’t have to be told that it doesn’t happen all of the time.
The flip side of this is a recruitment nightmare. A hire gone wrong can mean wasted hours and dollars spent on-boarding and training and reduced morale within the team. With the wrong fit, it’s likely the first to notice will be your patients!
Avoiding these crucial errors will help you to sleep soundly when you make recruiting decisions.
Know exactly what you’re looking for
Having a well thought out position description works in two ways. Firstly, it should help to direct job seekers as to whether their skills and experiences are enough to get them across the line. You can save time sifting through resumes by including a polite statement along the lines of “those without the minimum qualifications need not apply”. By spending extra time preparing a position description in more detail, you will also form more tangible expectations of your ideal candidate whereby you can quantify how many boxes each applicant ticks against your criteria, rather than going with a gut-feeling.
Don’t forget to consider recruiting internally
Candidates already within your team are your best asset. Working to up-skill your workforce with continuous professional development can help you to move your employees or contractors step up to a bigger role (for example moving a receptionist into a Practice Manager role). This may leave a lower ranked position vacant, for which hiring is less of a risk. Another benefit of promoting existing members is significantly boosting employee morale, thereby increasing staff retention.
Keep up with the times
What you may not know is that even non-mobile friendly webpages may not make the cut on the market preferred by the upcoming generation in the workforce. Research suggests that around 80% of millennials expect to be able to browse and apply for jobs on their smart phone. Advertising your job in a way that is highly accessible on the World Wide Web, not only via a computer monitor, but also smart phone and tablet can help you to avoid losing out to the more tech savvy competition when looking to pick up fresh new faces for your practice. List your recruitment ad using social media networks, for example Facebook and LinkedIn.
Don’t waste your time meeting candidates too soon
Avoid going straight into interviewing everyone and anyone that simply look good on paper. Resumes can be deceiving but questionnaires, especially well formulated psychometric questionnaires, can help paint an unbiased picture of your candidates. They can do much of the work for you and can help you to eliminate those who may not be appropriate for the job before scheduling out your precious time. Job interviews take time and are expensive; for an hour long interview, your hourly rate multiplied by the number of job interviews conducted equals a costly process – which if used in isolation may lead you to making a bad hire!
Recruiting right the first time saves time and money. Not to mention helping those in your practice to meet their full potential.
