This paper will help you organize and manage a Healthcare Interview Team that can successfully interview, attract and hire nurse and healthcare leaders.
The transformational change driving today’s healthcare environment has increased the difficulty of identifying, attracting and hiring healthcare leaders with the skills needed to succeed in this new environment.
The interviewing and hiring difficulty is due to the numerous, unanticipated and rapidly emerging challenges that impact the daily decisions of today’s healthcare leaders.
As a result, candidates can no longer be evaluated solely on their past accomplishments and leadership skills. Today, they will be evaluated for their critical thinking skills and their ability to adapt rapidly to unanticipated healthcare challenges.
While most healthcare employers already use Interview Teams, these teams must be prepared with more advanced interviewing techniques to gain a deeper understanding of the candidate and their own organizational challenges.
A well organized and prepared Interview Team can develop consensus concerning the needs of the organization and, in turn, develop a more accurate profile of the ideal candidate. This consensus results in better hiring decisions and more successful outcomes. In addition, the Interview Team will provide the foundation of a smooth running interview process.
The ideas provided in this paper cover several topics, including:
- Organizing and preparing a successful Interview Team,
- Building consensus and identifying organizational needs,
- Questions for your Interview Team to consider asking before the interviews begin, and
- Subtle interview techniques to help identify candidate motivation.
Transformational Change
Healthcare executives and their leadership teams are managing a highly dynamic and widening array of challenges including:
- Reimbursement and regulatory issues,
- Transparency and accountability,
- Physician integration,
- Implementation of new technologies, and
- Collection and analysis of new performance metrics.
These challenges require leaders who can rapidly adapt, innovate, motivate, improve and create healthcare initiatives for the benefit of the patient, their families, the community and the employees of their healthcare organization.
Complicating the hiring process are several additional challenges:
- Extreme competition for top performers,
- A major shift in the workforce as baby boomers retire, and
- Reluctance by many of the upcoming generation of employees to embrace leadership roles.
While each idea in this paper will not be applicable to every organization and every hire, here are a few suggestions to enhance your interviewing and hiring process.
Organizing your Interview Team
As a hiring executive, a successful hiring process begins with understanding your own expectations and concerns related to the position you wish to fill. Additionally, you also need to understand the expectations and concerns of the staff, administrative team, peer group and physicians.
As a result, you will probably have conversations with some of the following people:
- Staff who report to the position,
- Peers to the position,
- Any interdisciplinary people in routine contact with the position,
- Human resources and/or in-house recruitment,
- Senior leadership, and
- Physicians.
How you identify which individuals to include in the Interview Team depends on your circumstances. You might want to hold one-on-one or small group conversations from which a short list of potential members will emerge.
On the other hand, you might already know who you need on your Interview Team. In either case, you will need to formally identify the team members and begin the process of organizing them into an Interview Team.
Your goal is to identify and attract the candidate who most closely matches your ideal candidate profile, make your decisions quickly and hire the professional that is the best fit for the organization.
You might want to include a particularly difficult staff member on the Interview Team. This will give you the opportunity to evaluate the candidate’s potential by observing their reaction to this individual. If the candidate is able to connect with this individual, you might have just witnessed one of their strengths in action.
This a short excerpt from the 16 page paper Organizing and Managing an Interview Team.
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