How to Attract the Right Talent & Hire the Best of the Best
This year has brought too many changes to count at this point, but there is one thing that is exactly the same: the difficulty of attracting and hiring the best talent for your private practice! With all that has gone on this year, many doctors are in a situation where they either have to begrudgingly replace a team member refusing to come back, or they are excited to have the opportunity to replace someone. Either way, this can be a daunting task – even in a situation where the unemployment rate is high, and the selection of candidates seems huge.
Here are 4 steps to help you attract the right talent and hire the very best people:
Step 1: Know Who You Are Really Looking For
Before even approaching the process of interviewing someone for hire, your first step in finding a new member of your team should be to assess the expectations of the open position, and decide what type of person would mesh with the existing team.
Hiring can be an enormous waste of time, energy, and money if you attempt to hire someone that isn’t the right fit – someone who is just a “quick fix” for an open position. You will have wasted valuable time on training a candidate who is only interested in an immediate salary and a short-term engagement. Due to poor hiring choices, companies lose upwards of $1 BILLION per year on turn over expenses in the United States alone! As the leader of your team, you don’t want to make this costly mistake!
You Should Be Reflecting On Questions Like:
• What drives success for this job?
• What knowledge is essential?
• Are there specific ways the job must be done?
• What will cause someone to fail at this role, and what qualities will hinder them?
Step 2: Use a Credible Assessment Tool – Not Just Your Own Intuition
After you feel you have a strong grasp of the position, and what the ideal candidate should embody, begin to identify questions that will allow the ideal candidate to shine. You should be assessing the candidate’s cognitive, affective, and conative strengths, but remember to place a good deal of emphasis on the conative category. At Scheduling Institute, we use the Kolbe Assessment to do this.
Why? Because a candidate’s personality and learned knowledge are constantly shifting, assessing their IQ and emotional responses doesn’t do much in the way of defining who they are. Conative assessments help get to the root of a person’s identity — how they operate instinctively when presented with a problem they’ve never encountered before. What steps does your ideal candidate take when he or she faces an unfamiliar situation?
Review the three parts of the brain and forms of assessment below.
Cognitive:
• Review the candidate’s resume and references
• How much training will be required, with past experiences in mind?
Affective:
• Consider whether or not the candidate’s personality is a good fit for the office culture.
Conative:
• Review the candidate’s Kolbe RightFit™ results.
• Only hire someone with an A or B result
• Do their strengths align with the expectations for the position?
• How does the supervisor decide upon expectations for this position?
Step 3: Conduct a Cheeseburger Test to Find the Best of the Best
Once you have conducted an interview, assessed your candidate’s personality, AND sent the candidate a formal assessment to complete, consider using a cheeseburger test to weed out the average candidates from the best of the best. After all, you aren’t looking to hire an average person to do an average job, are you? Call the candidate into your office before lunchtime, and ask them to make a lunch run because you are incredibly busy. If any kind of negative attitude peeks out — an eye roll or a sigh — the interview process should end HERE. No one ever found an ideal team member by ignoring red flags! If the candidate agrees to making a lunch run, order your food in a very particular way — maybe lemons with no seeds, a salad with cheese and dressing on the side, or a burger with condiments under the patty — just to make sure they are listening attentively and can follow directions. This test might sound unorthodox, but it can weed out fairly effortlessly the candidates who neither listen nor follow directions carefully.
Step 4: Don’t Just Believe Their Resume – Conduct a Skills Test to Make Sure They Are Capable of Excelling at the Job
Lastly, conduct a skills test for the candidate (if applicable). When they come through your office doors on the first day of training, you should know that they embody the skill set necessary to succeed at their position. If the potential employee is interviewing as a copywriter, give them a writing assessment that makes them work quickly under pressure and produce high-quality results. If they are vying for a marketing position, assign them a presentation due the next day on a hypothetical marketing campaign. Make sure you build a scenario that causes some pressure because this is when the candidate’s true colors will shine!
If you want some extra help to ensure your hiring process is easy and successful, combine the steps above with our Ultimate Hiring Guide. You will be sure to hit the jackpot in hiring a wonderful new member for your team in half the time it normally takes! Not only have we successfully implemented these steps in our own hiring (for our team of 120+), we have helped hundreds of doctors experience the same hiring success in their own practices!
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