Hiring workers in health care is a complex business. Achieving more with less is a familiar theme when hiring for health care jobs. There is a high volume of job applicants for multi-disciplinary positions, and you must juggle shrinking budgets, hiring manager requests, and other issues. Here are a few common health care hiring mistakes and how to avoid them.
Searching for the Perfect Resume
When hiring medical personnel, look for the perfect person and not the ideal resume. Checking a resume is not enough for health care hiring. You cannot simply look at an applicant’s professional experience, academic credentials, and skillsets. Take it further and check out the applicant’s behavioral competencies such as compassion, adaptability, and service-orientation. A behavioral assessment will help you determine if the candidate is a cultural fit for your health care organization.
Choose a behavioral assessment that compares your candidate’s results to health care peer benchmarks. By making a comparison, you will be able to determine the applicant’s strengths and weaknesses. Someone can easily make themselves look perfect on paper, but it will not work out if their values and behaviors do not align with your organization’s mission and culture.
Relying on Your Gut Feeling
Gut feelings are emotional reactions rather than logical rationale. You are probably under pressure from senior management to hire someone. However, it is imperative that you thoroughly evaluate all candidates before extending a job offer. Yes, your gut feeling might be right sometimes, but it can also be wrong. Try to incorporate assessments and behavioral-based interviewing into your hiring process. Assessments will allow you to conduct strategic in-person interviews with questions that reveal a candidate’s cultural competencies. When you interview the candidate, you can rely on customized follow-up questions to probe for weaknesses.
Neglecting to Check References
The old phone-based reference checks are aggravating and rarely give you the insights you need into a candidate’s background. This antiquated method of checking references typically causes managers to give up on the process and hire an average or bad candidate.
Consider using an automated reference assessment. This tool helps you do everything online with reference questions grounded in behavioral science. The questions on these assessments focus on how former employees saw candidates perform on the job.
Moving on After the Offer is Accepted
Upon completion of the hiring process, many recruiters tend to move on to filling the next position. Do not stop at this point. You must track how well the new employee is performing. Try to follow up with the new hire for the first 90 days if possible. You can employ an applicant tracking system to track and check-in with the new hire. By directly contributing to new hire retention, you are even more valuable to your health care organization. Remember that you serve as the backbone of health care when you deliver top-notch talent for patient care.
If you want to avoid making hiring mistakes, let Power Personnel do the hiring for you. The staffing team at Power Personnel can screen and select talent to best fit your health care organization’s needs.
