Leadership has been defined as crystallizing your business vision and executing rock-solid processes to implement that vision. As the Chief Executive, your vision should propel recruiting excellence. Your mindset ordains your hiring results. For example, many executives embrace the premise that it’s perfectly acceptable (even normal) to establish hiring standards at the level of the “Best Available Candidate”. Most fall prey to this thinking without giving it much thought. Imagine the upside if you mandated standards that dictated your staff could only interview and select from a short list of IDEAL Candidates. The difference is huge. The “Best Available” bar might rest lower than any standard. What if the “Best Available” at the moment is a poor fit for your office environment? What if your “Best Available” candidate is a bad match to your business model? “Best Available” candidates only succeed when three conditions align: A) you defined the correct candidate criteria; B) your assessment accurately assessed ALL the criteria and C) SOMEONE in the pool matched ALL your criteria). That approach foolishly ties success to serendipity. (Who wants to rely on luck for such an important decision?) When it comes to hiring, far too many have surrendered their practices to the momentum of mediocrity. Hiring to the standard of “Best Available” is simple and lazy. Hiring to the standard of “IDEAL” talent is never easy, but you can make it simple. It takes work. The initial step of the transformation begins in the CEO’s office with his or her vision. Great recruiting follows a steadfast mindset. I recommend interviewing and hiring only candidates whom you assess and validate are IDEAL matches. This affords you the opportunity to disqualify poor matches up front rather than wasting time with candidates you’ll eventually flush. Change your mindset to exchange weak and slow hiring results for strong and fast ones: “I accept only candidates that match my IDEAL criteria and I will upgrade to a stronger hiring methodology”. Evidence suggests that few practices have analyzed their recruiting and hiring practices to expose process breakdowns. Fewer still have implemented recruiting processes that achieve EFFICIENCY and EFFECTIVENESS. Sadly, others simply “wing-it”, concocting steps as they go along. I believe if you keep doing the same things, you’ll get the same results. After witnessing the pain and frustration of traditional “old-school” recruiting methods, many look to engage outside recruiters to run their searches. In many cases, outside recruiter expenses run 30-40% below the costs of internal recruiting....
Read More »
Most ophthalmic hiring fails. Searches take too long, or you endure a parade of candidates misfit to your practice. In some cases, you confront both. The point became piercingly clear to me when I was having dinner with a group of leading physicians at a recent American Academy of Ophthalmology Conference. Over coffee, they grumbled about their recruiting experiences. “I never thought it would take so long”, bemoaned a principal from a leading ophthalmic surgery center. “I thought the Internet would make it easier, not more difficult”, declared several highly successful surgeons. “My staff found our last associate on a job board. The interview went quite well and I hired him. Even though he had great surgical skills, I had to let him go after six weeks because no one could stand working with him”, complained a prominent physician who leads a growing, progressive practice. “I realized after I hired an associate that she was so fixated on making money that it dominated her every action… she just didn’t get what my practice is all about”, griped another. Sadly, I’ve witnessed similar situations hundreds of times over 25 years. It’s no surprise the question I hear most is, “Why do so many of us get such poor results after spending so much time looking?” They suffer from two problem types: internal and external. Internal problems have root causes within the practice; external problems remain those outside your control. The owner’s mindset and a weak recruiting process lead the list of internal...
Read More »
Depressed demand and soft housing prices foil lots of deals. Take the case of Retina Surgeon, Dr. Arnold Smith. A weak home-value market prevented a gifted surgical specialist from accepting Smith’s best and final employment offer. The candidate owed more on his mortgage than its market value and neither party would swallow the cash outlay required to sell the house. Both parties experienced 11th hour heartbreak. We cannot blame the market, the house or any external culprit. The recruiting process failed them. The right process with correct steps would identify any deal-killing issues up front. The story did have a happy ending. Dr. Smith asked us to re-energize his search. We mined our database and executed a campaign that addressed potential deal-killers. We filtered out mismatches early and pinpointed a short-list of matching candidates. By avoiding these last-minute surprises, Dr. Smith quickly got back on track and hired a great...
Read More »
Many practice executives hoped the Internet and social media would make employment searches easier or simpler. Not so. Experience suggests they’ve complicated the recruiting process for practices and for candidates. Every week I hear from candidates new to the job market. They declare their preference for working with a recruiter instead of posting their CV online or responding to Internet job listings. “Why not use the Internet?”, I asked a recent candidate. His answer might surprise you. “Using the Internet to apply for a position is like throwing your CV into a black hole. It goes in and nothing comes back. No feedback, no human contact. By working with a recruiter, I know my CV will get seen… and by the right type of practice for me”, he explained. Furthermore, privacy and confidentiality concerns force many would-be candidates to stay in the background. Employed, talented candidates worry about posting their resumes on line. They fear losing anonymity and confidentiality. In addition, they know that posting contact information on line will subject them to spam email and computer viruses…. an historic failing of online job boards (even those protected sites that claim to be spam free). Realize that tech-savvy candidates know how to probe Internet job postings and reverse engineer searches. That opens the potential to discovery of information about the practice… including the unflattering and false. Those inaccuracies (bad reviews, etc.) might damage your chances with a great candidate…killing a win/win opportunity. Finally, I believe it’s a mistake to limit your search exclusively to Internet job boards. They offer the illusion of productivity. Don’t confuse activity with results. If you limit your search to “typical” sources, you’ll overlook large pools of quality candidates who haven’t promoted themselves as looking for a...
Read More »
The chart documents the differences between amazing recruiting outcomes and terrible ones. Plot your experiences on the grid and answer the question: “What’s missing from my recruiting effort?” Success and Failure in Ophthalmic Recruiting The vertical axis represents recruiting EFFECTIVENESS. How well does each candidate match the model of the IDEAL Candidate required for your practice? The term IDEAL refers to a candidate’s match to you and your practice or organization. IDEAL (and resulting fit) are relative terms. We’re describing candidates in relation to a standard that’s unique to your practice. There are no good or bad candidates. Think in terms of good fit to bad fit. (I shared the four criteria that determine match to IDEAL here.) The horizontal axis illustrates Speed of Recruitment. This represents the EFFICIENCY of your recruiting effort. Obviously, every practice wants to celebrate the dual successes of Efficiency and Effectiveness in Quadrant A: Fast and IDEAL (aka Recruiting Heaven). Plot your recruiting experiences on the chart. Analyze your recruiting efforts (those you carried out on your own or those you outsourced to an external firm.) Use the key below to identify process breakdowns and their root causes. The Four Quadrants Quadrant D: Typically I see outcomes in this quadrant when practices attempt to D.I.Y. (do it yourself). Perhaps you were desperate or overpursued a misguided referral. These outcomes are frustrating and costly, but you’re in good company. There is hope. If you have experience in Quadrant D, probabilities are high that you’ve inadvertently broken one of the six immutable laws of recruiting outlined in “The Six Immutable Laws of Ophthalmic Recruiting”. Quadrant C: Outcomes in this quadrant typically occur when you hire someone who made a good impression. You hired someone you “liked” (subjective criteria), instead of an IDEAL fit (objective criteria). Beware of recruiting firms who offer an arrangement for which they are paid a fee upon hire (contingency). Many lead you into Quadrant C because they’re paid when you hire a candidate they push. Some candidates “look good on paper”, but are a poor fit for your practice. Quadrant B: Outcomes in this quadrant primarily occur because you know what you don’t want. (As opposed to what you do want.) As a result, you waste staff (and your) time disqualifying mismatches. Alternatively, you might know what you do want but haven’t launched the correct marketing techniques to reach them. Quadrant A: These candidates represent true WIN/WIN. You discover “Recruiting Heaven” when you (and your recruiting team) follow a proven process for effectiveness and speed. You don’t wander into Quadrant A or get there by accident. You achieve brilliant results from thorough preparation and the discipline of sticking to a proven...
Read More »
Best Practices to Find IDEAL candidates Conduct a thorough profile of your practice and its uniqueness. Engage a third party to help assess your style and your practice model. You (and your staff) may lack the perspective to do this objectively. Document the candidate characteristics that determine IDEAL. Describe the PERSON, not the POSITION in your marketing efforts. Ensure your recruiting process covers the correct steps in the correct sequence. Best Practices to accelerate your recruiting effort Identify, contact, engage and attract confidential candidates (those who will not post their CV online) by making plenty of approach calls. Give your staff access to experts with selling prowess (the art and science of persuasion). Learn (or outsource) marketing techniques to attract candidates that fit your model. Use marketing messages to filter out candidates that DON’T fit. Deal with potential deal killers up front to avoid last minute...
Read More »
