Five Signs Your Hiring Process Is Failing and How to Fix It

Featured, Healthcare Staffing

How would you rate your facility’s hiring process? As the war for clinical talent intensifies, it’s more important than ever to streamline your hiring process so your facility can attract the right healthcare professionals. Consider the following signs your hiring process could be broken and the strategies you can use to fix it:

You place too much significance on a candidate’s resume:

You could be hiring the wrong people for the wrong reasons. While a healthcare professional’s skills and experience are undeniably important, you shouldn’t treat his or her resume as the final factor in your hiring decisions. A candidate may look fantastic on paper, but a resume can’t tell you everything. In fact, a recent CareerBuilder survey found that 75% of employers have caught a lie on a resume. At the end of the day, you need to find candidates who have intangible skills that aren’t necessarily listed on a resume, like leadership and resiliency.

Solution: The resume should be the starting point in your hiring process. Use it to guide your questions during the interview. Additionally, remember to ask behavioral questions to gauge a clinical candidate’s problem-solving abilities, critical-thinking skills, and leadership potential.

Your interviews aren’t consistent:

Your candidates will come from all walks of life, with different experiences, skills, and perspectives. As such, your conversation during an interview could lead to impromptu follow-up questions. That’s not necessarily bad — after all, you’re getting to know the candidate — but it does mean you have to be careful to keep the interview on track. As the interviewer, you need to collect the same information about each candidate. If you don’t, you won’t be able to properly compare your candidates against each other.

Solution: Go into the interview with an agenda and a set of planned questions. In this way, you can get the same information you need from each candidate and make a more accurate hiring decision.

Your hiring process hasn’t changed in 10 years:

A decade ago, Facebook was just a platform for college students, and social media was in its infancy. Nowadays, social media is where candidates go to start their job search. So, that begs the question, where are you posting your jobs and does your facility have a strong social media presence? If your organization is stuck in the past, it’s time to change things up. Otherwise, you will lose out on the industry’s top talent.

Solution: Stay current on today’s technology to make your hiring process more efficient. Post your open positions on job board websites, such as Indeed, Glassdoor, and CareerBuilder. Then, advertise them on your organization’s social media platforms to extend your talent acquisition efforts.  

You’ve hired an experienced clinician, but they don’t fit your culture:

It’s likely you’re just not assessing your healthcare professionals for cultural fit, and that’s a problem. If your new hire conflicts with management, doesn’t get along with co-workers, or simply doesn’t fit in, they’ll quickly leave. Making a bad hire can be costly — according to the Journal of Nursing Administration, it costs roughly $82,000 to replace a nurse.

Solution: Weave personality tests and behavioral questions into your hiring process to find out if the candidate is a good cultural fit. Still unsure? If you can, meet the candidate in an informal setting, such as a lunch or a dinner interview for a better cultural fit assessment.  

Candidates are accepting jobs elsewhere:

If this is one of your facility’s pain points, your interview process is too long. In today’s war for clinical talent, you need to act fast to attract and retain the best and brightest healthcare professionals.

Solution: Keep your interview process as short as possible. Instead of conducting several rounds of interviews for each candidate, consider using the services of a staffing partner, like Medical Solutions. The company has a robust, clinically-led screening process that can help accelerate your hiring process from weeks to just a few days. 

If your facility has made any of these interview mistakes in the past, Medical Solutions can help. Since 2001, we’ve helped hospitals, medical facilities, and clinics hire and manage great clinical talent. For more information on the workforce solutions we offer, call us today at 1.866.633.3548.