Resource Centers:(News, information, and tools to support your practice)
January 2010
| Article Tools
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
Success File: What traits do you look for when hiring employees?
Are you overlooking some important ones?
By Bob Levoy
During seminars on hiring, managing, and retaining great employees, speakers will often walk around the room and ask the audience why they fired the last person.
Typical responses include, “bad attitude,” “unreliability,” and “lacked people skills.” Seldom does anyone say a person was fired for lack of clinical or clerical skills.
Ironically, clinical or clerical skills are almost always the first thing listed in job advertisements and descriptions. This contradiction frequently leads to problems because while technical skills can be taught, a good attitude and people skills almost never can.
What’s your first priority? “In our selection process, kindness, caring, compassion, and unselfishness carry more weight than years on the job, an impressive salary history, and stacks of degrees,” says Hal F. Rosenbluth, CEO, and Diane McFerrin Peters, director of new ventures, of Rosenbluth Travel and co-authors of The Customer Comes Second.
The formula for their company’s success, they add, is that “we have more nice people than our competition. Niceness is among our highest priorities because nice people do better work.”
Overlooked traits
The following is a list of some commonly overlooked traits employers deem important when hiring employees. Some may provide clues as to why employees with good skills and experience have not done well in your practice; others may prove helpful when hiring new employees.
• Does the applicant come across as a really nice person?
• How verbal and articulate is the person?
• What is the applicant’s energy level?
• How effective is the person’s overall presentation and impact upon others?
• Does he or she
• Does the person seem willing to cooperate and collaborate with others in order to achieve mutual goals?
• How tactful and diplomatic does the applicant seem to be?
• Does the applicant have a positive manner and attitude?
• Is the person rather rigid, inflexible, and highly opinionated in his or her viewpoints?
• How competitive is the applicant?
• Does the applicant display initiative, drive, and resourcefulness, or is he or she the type of person who must be closely supervised?
• Is the person a self-starter or one who needs to be prodded into action?
• Did the applicant leave former jobs for reasonable, sound, and logical reasons?
• Has there been progress in the person’s compensation?
• How ambitious and career-oriented is the individual?
• Is the applicant involved with an ongoing program to improve his or her knowledge and skills?
• How well does the candidate respond to stress and pressure?
• Does the applicant seem persistent and persevering, or does he or she give up easily when encountering obstacles and difficulties?
• How effective is the applicant in dealing and working with others?
• Does the applicant speak favorably of past employers and teachers, or does he or she display a high degree of negativity in discussing relationships with these people?
• Does the person show patience with others?
Action step: Use behavior-based questions to determine the presence of such traits. Widely used in industry, behavior-based interviewing aims at projecting job applicants’ future performance based on how they’ve handled past work situations. For example: Tell me about a time when you felt you went beyond the call of duty in helping a patient (customer/client/co-worker). Tell me about a work emergency or crisis of some kind in which you were involved. What was your role? What did you do?
There is no right or wrong answer to behavioral questions — only responses that may or may not be relevant to the job for which you’re hiring.
Bob Levoy’s newest book, 222 Secrets of Hiring, Managing, and Retaining Great Employees in Healthcare Practices, is published by Jones and Bartlett Publishers. He can be reached at b.levoy@att.net.
Bookmark this page
Comments