How to Hire the Perfect Employee

By Tammi Sufficool, MBA, Director of Client Services, Williams Group™

Building a team that genuinely understands and embraces a commitment to superior patient care and service is the key to practice success. Most practitioners spend valuable resources — time, energy and money — trying to find the right staff to support their mission. Although building and developing a great team is as much an art as it is a science, it begins with a sound hiring process.

Whether you are a practice owner or an associate doctor, you will most likely be involved in the hiring process. Unfortunately, there are no classes in optometry school that teach the basics of Human Resources. Many practitioners who yearn for a more scientific methodology to their hiring decisions learn these skills through trial and error. After a good share of hiring mistakes, doctors often rely on intuition and luck. Of course you want perfect “10” employees, but it takes more than good luck — you need to learn the “procedure” to best recruit the ideal candidate. The steps outlined in this article will provide more structure to your recruitment and selection process.

Determine Trait and Skill Set

All candidates come with a certain set of skills and traits. You need to assess these applicants, not as having a good or bad skill/trait set, but in terms of a right or wrong fit for the position. In other words, an ideal candidate needs to have the right personality, attitude, and skills to fit the culture of your practice and the position.

Knowing what you are looking for will help you recognize it when you see it. Spend time with your current staff creating a list of the skills, attitudes and behaviors of the ideal employee. Be sure to include personality traits that are germane to the position. Spending time and energy in the development of this list will yield long-term benefits, including a happy, well-adjusted staff member who fits the position well. An added bonus is that your staff not only identifies what they are looking for in their next coworker, they assess their own skills and attitudes in relationship to the “ideal”.

Another important tool at your disposal is the staff assessment profile. Backed by empirical data, staff trait/characteristic assessment tools exist and are extremely helpful in evaluating your applicants early in the recruitment and selection process. These assessment tools provide specific benchmarks allowing you to select applicants who best match the researched characteristics and traits of a successful job fit and job performance. Using assessment tools in recruitment and selection will help you save time and energy by focusing on the recruits that are the best fit for each position. Although, these tools will help you select the best candidates to move forward in the hiring process, don’t be tempted to use these profiles as your only criteria for selection.

Consider Experience Carefully
A huge caveat in recruitment and selection is putting too much emphasis on experience and skill. We often do not realize the opportunity of non-experienced applicants. It’s not to say that previous experience is not helpful, but too many requirements on skill often overshadow personality traits that may not fit the practice. The key here is to hire for personal attributes that are not easily changed or trained. You cannot teach work ethic, ambition, friendliness, honesty, detail orientation, adaptability, professionalism, ability to learn, etc. You can, however, teach computer skills, telephone dialogue, technical duties, and industry nomenclature. Again, there will be some short-term pain in training a technically unskilled hire, but the long-term gain of finding a pleasant fit for the position will outweigh the temporary inconvenience of a 30/60/90 day training program!

Practice Active Recruitment
Always keep your eyes open for great employees. Perhaps someone in your day-to-day encounters has made an impression on you—maybe someone whose personality and skill set would fit nicely in your practice. Keep your eyes open when you are at neighborhood restaurants, your dry cleaners, the grocery store check out, and your favorite department store. Always carry business cards with you and encourage interested prospects to call if they are ever considering a career change.

Get Down to Details
Write explicit descriptions detailing the open position. Abbreviated “Help Wanted” ads scream desperation! Stop adding warm bodies that are not contributing to the success of your practice. You need to set the expectation of the position before applicants apply. It’s better to run a longer ad fewer times than to continue to recruit applicants who do not really know what they want.

Once you have carefully crafted the ad and it has run in the local newspaper and on recruitment websites, the applications will start to pour in. Your next task is to interview all of these candidates to find the ideal person with the personality, skills, and experience to fit the culture of your practice and the position.

Although there is plenty of work involved in reviewing resumes and cover letters, conducting interviews, checking references, and negotiating terms of employment, it is far better to spend time, energy and money up-front on the interview process than to spend it on training the wrong fit for the position. The method to this recruitment-and-selection madness begins with an objective and systematic process.

Assess the Resumes and Cover Letters
Carefully review each resume and/or application. Both documents detail dates of employment and job experience, which can provide an overview of the applicant’s skill set.

Assess each applicant’s resume for employment stability. Applicants who “job hop” may not totally understand their personal workplace strengths and weaknesses and/or their workplace preferences. Subsequently, if applicants do not know what they are looking for, they may not find it at your practice, either.

Carefully read each cover letter. Cover letters function as the mission statement of the applicant. They serve to assess each applicant’s principles and why they want the position. Cover letters are also important in the evaluation of the applicant’s communication skills and ability to follow directions.

Conduct Telephone Interviews
Choose ten to twelve applicants from your cover letter/resume review and schedule a fifteen-minute phone interview with each candidate. Phone screening is a great way to have a conversation to evaluate verbal communication skills, personality traits, and employment qualifications. Ask open-ended questions to allow the applicant to share information and discuss starting wage requirements. End your call by discussing the steps of the selection process so applicants understand the time frame and activities involved.

Use Assessment Tools
Following the telephone interviews, you may choose to use a trait/characteristic assessment tool to help fine-tune your selection of applicants for personal interviews. This step provides insightful job-fit information on the recruits that are still of interest. Equipped with benchmarked information, you will be less likely to invest time in personal interviews with applicants who are not a good fit for your position.

Conduct Personal Interviews
From your telephone screenings and trait assessment findings, offer five to six personal interviews to be hosted at the practice. Ask each applicant to bring a list of personal and professional references with current addresses and phone numbers to the interview.

Plan to spend at least 30 - 45 minutes with each applicant. Determine a standard set of questions to ask each applicant. Listen carefully and take notes. Use open-ended situational questions that require the applicant to discuss previous experiences. Avoid coaching or prompting for the “right” answers. Avoid speaking during the gaps of silence. Applicants need process time to recall experiences important to the context of your question.

Be sure to address each instance previous workplaces were left. There may be very legitimate reasons for leaving. Once questioning is completed, introduce the job description, starting wage and appropriate benefits of the position. Offer to answer any questions the applicant may have and review the remaining steps of the selection process.

Conduct Observational Interviews
Following the personal interviews, determine two to three applicants to invite back for a realistic job review. These one-hour, non-compensated observational interviews provide the applicants a fair assessment of the position and a chance to meet the staff. It’s a great time to ask and answer any remaining questions and to determine the applicant’s interest in accepting the position.

Conduct Reference Checks
Instincts and gut feelings go into choosing the applicant who is the best fit. But don’t rely solely on your intuition. Carefully develop a set of questions and contact the applicant’s references for insights into the applicant’s quality and quantity of work, personal work habits, ability to function on a team, reason for leaving the job and eligibility for rehire.

Once supplied with valuable historic and recently gathered personal and workplace information, making a right-fit decision is a function of a systematic, deductive process. Equipped with a better recruitment and selection process, you can now spend time, energy and money finding the right fit for your practice, rather than trying to fix the wrong one.

Vol. 5 No. 5
Tammi Sufficool, MBA, is Director of Client Services for Williams Group™. She has been involved in organizational development, staff training and management, and strategic business planning within the healthcare industry since 1986. Tammi is responsible for the implementation of consulting programs for Williams Group™ clients worldwide.

Williams Group™ is the world’s largest practice management firm providing consulting, software and web solutions for eyecare practices. Its mission is simple: Help successful optometrists take their practices to new levels of growth, profitability and efficiency. Williams Group™ can help optometrists put the fun back into owning their practice.