6 Tips For Finding Health Care Staff

If you’re having trouble finding and retaining good employees, these tips can improve your ability to attract superstars, and minimize expensive turnover.

• Get Beyond the Classifieds. Network, network, network. Call your colleagues and friends. Launch an active word-of-mouth campaign to find top notch candidates. Send an upbeat memo about the position for which you’re hiring to 25 friends and colleagues. Some will refer a candidate they know, others will pass your memo on to someone else, or post it on their communication board at work.

 

• Think Outside the Box. Not all positions require someone with direct experience.   Think “transferable skills.” Many people with customer service backgrounds could be the perfect fit for a position requiring those skills. Where do you find these people? Front desk staff at good hotels, high-end food service or retail operations, or an upscale hair salon are all good bets.

 

• Recruit Continuously. Look for great employees while you are out to dinner, at the bank, at the hospital, or at a local hotel. If you find someone you think you’d like to have work for you, give them your card and ask them to give you a call if they are ever interested in making a move. This is a particularly successful with practice.  Everyone is a potential candidate!

 

• Ask Candidates to DO SOMETHING. Asking candidates to take a short “technical assessment” weeds out people, for example, with so-called “billing experience” who are clueless about ICD-9-CM, managed care, or Medicare rules. For customer service positions, initiate discussion about good and bad service stories. Or, ask managers and supervisors to analyze an A/R report or several EOBs, and provide three action steps for improvement.

 

• Always hold a second interview. Sometimes practices skip this step for front line staffers. Don’t. Candidates often present themselves differently in the second interview. Be sure you schedule the second meeting before making a final decision.

 

• Check References and Educational Credentials. DO NOT skip this critical step, no matter how terrific the candidate seems. Too many health care organizations are burned by folks who lie on their resume or who were poor performers in their last position. Ask candidates to provide the names of  managers for whom they’ve worked. And don’t forget to call universities and trade schools to verify degrees.

 

I am Bernie Reifkind, CEO and founder of Premier Search, Inc. I can be reached at 1(800) 801-1400 or email at ceo@psihealth.com.  I welcome your phone call.