The reason practice owners select the wrong clinical staff or reception staff is because they don’t ask the right questions in the interview, they don’t probe to uncover real competencies and capabilities, they don’t explore the person’s true personality and attitude, and they get swayed by enjoyable ‘chats’ that should in fact be probing interviews.
We all like to work with people we like, but we also need to make sure those people we employ are going to deliver and produce results for our patients & our practice. The process of selecting the right clinical staff or reception staff is both subjective and objective, but it does need to be a process.
Focus on doing these 6 things:
- Know what you want done – write the Position Description first.
- List the attributes of the sort of person you want (not physical attributes..!)
- Understand your culture – be honest – and know what sort of person would or wouldn’t fit that.
- Then, after you’ve done that, meet and interview.
- Don’t be swayed by anything other than your original set of criteria, because that is what you want.
- After the interview, give the person a rating against your set of criteria, and use that objective method of assessment to recruit the right person into your team
