Of all the decisions you will make, none is more important than the decision of who will work with you in your practice.

Your staff is an extension of you and is a deciding factor in the success of your practice.

The cost to fill just one position can be steep. You might spend more than $13,000 for a receptionist, billing clerk, or assistant. That’s worthwhile if the result is a smooth-running, profitable practice. However, you could end up feeling saddled with a staff member who only makes life more stressful. The time and cost involved in making the right hire pale in comparison to the cost and negative effects of making a poor hiring decision.

You can improve your hiring success rate by up to 80 percent by following these tips:

• Allow enough time to conduct a thorough search. The worst hiring decisions come when you are most desperate to bring someone on board. Making a premature selection decision only prolongs the selection process. Don’t allow the pressure of a vacancy to influence your decision unduly. It is better to take the time to do it correctly from the beginning than to sacrifice quality in hiring.

• Make sure you understand the job’s skills. These include both hard and soft skills inherent to the job. Use clear and realistic skill-based job descriptions that convey not only areas of responsibility but also the interpersonal skills needed to fulfill those responsibilities. This will help potential applicants understand the job requirements and allow you to better evaluate how well suited they are for your practice.

• Let your advertisements do the prescreening. Inject some personality into your job advertisement by sharing not only title and key soft and hard skills required, but also your practice’s mission. Doing so will make your ad stand out from the sea of other ads and will be more likely to attract people of like values.

• Interview candidates on the telephone. Talk to the best candidates on the phone. This is a good way to weed out inarticulate and otherwise inappropriate people.

Develop a short list of questions to help you sift through the applicants. Schedule face-to-face interviews with the top three to five applicants who answer the questions to your satisfaction.

• Get a detailed application form. Ask every candidate you interview to complete one.

A printed application will allow you to collect information that’s not on a typical resume, such as pay rate, reasons for leaving positions, and past employers’ phone numbers. It will also clue you in to the applicant’s penmanship and spelling.

• Don’t just ‘wing’ the interview. Everyone likes to think he is a good judge of character. Many believe that general questions about the candidate’s experiences will garner enough information to make an accurate assessment of that person’s work performance and ethic. This is simply not true.

Decades of research have shown that unstructured interviews that rely on “gut feelings” do not work. The key to successful hiring is structure.

Write a structured interview guide that includes a minimum of two open-ended, behavioral questions for each core skill to learn what an applicant does effectively, and how he or she achieves goals and meets or exceeds expectations. Structuring the interview to gather information systematically and objectively yields the best results.

• Follow the rule of three. With all the online interviewing tips available, most applicants are well rehearsed for standard interview questions. Don’t accept a standard response.

Instead, ask three questions to get to the truth.

For example: You could begin with, “Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a difficult patient.” Follow his or her answer with, “What did you do?”

Don’t stop with that response. Ask, “What was the outcome?” These three questions will give you considerable information.

To probe even further, end with a fourth question, “What did you learn from that interaction about what patients want?” and “What did you learn about how you react to a stressful situation?”

Asking probing questions will get you to an applicant’s core behaviors. From that vantage point, you will be in a much better position to determine if he or she has the technical skills you are looking for and the interpersonal skills and values that are the right fit for your practice.

• Invite the finalists back. One face-to-face interview is usually not enough to make the best decision. Allocate time in your process to bring back your top two or three candidates for a final interview. If you want to include other staff members in the process, this is a good time to do so. This is also the best time to talk about the candidates’ salary expectations and what benefits your practice is offering.

• Do your due diligence. Before you make a final decision, check references and credit ratings (if the employee will be handling money), conduct a drug test, and obtain a criminal background check.

Your practice is your livelihood, and your staff, an extension of you. Conducting these checks and tests will give you peace of mind, and that’s worth its weight in gold for any business.

Hiring is easy; firing is hard. Struggling with a bad hire, even harder. So be selective. The cost of doing so pales in comparison to the cost of fixing a bad hiring decision.

Cassandra Shepard, CPBA, CPVA, is president of Prosperity Solutions, LLC. She worked as a human resources executive for Fortune 500 companies for 12 years and is now coaching chiropractors and alternative health practitioners in exploding their practice income through corporate programs. She can be reached at 719-282-9355 or www.bookyourpracticesolid.com.