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....
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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...
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Most practices (or recruiters) operate “seat-of-the-pants” when they recruit. Others tend to follow the old-school paradigm of ophthalmic recruiting: Four-Steps of Old-School Recruiting Post a job listing-Target “Best-Available” candidates Read emails & attached CVs Interview finalists & select “Best-Liked” candidate Hope & pray they work out Great hiring combines the best of art and science. The model below distills 25 years of recruiting success and best practices to one diagram. Recruiting, like chess, remains a game marinated in strategy. You make game-winning moves at the beginning, not the end. For you to achieve WIN/WIN recruiting, build a profile of your IDEAL Candidate first. Erect this standard against which you’ll compare every candidate. Unfortunately, most recruiters ignore this most important step of the hiring process…and it becomes their downfall. Without a benchmark…how will you know you’ve found “IDEAL” if you don’t have a standard against which to measure? Everyone asks me, “How long will our search take?” Length of search (n in the diagram above) depends upon two factors: the complexity of your IDEAL candidate criteria and the available pool from which you search. The best method for shortening n is to increase the size of the search pool. (Read Step Two of the process.) Step One– We begin by profiling practice principals AND characteristics of the practice. Why? Attitudinal mismatches account for most recruiting breakdowns. Mismatched personality styles end nearly as many relationships, followed by poor Environmental alignment. Skills and experience mismatches rank fourth on the breakdown list. We identify characteristics (about you and your practice) that you cannot measure because you simply lack perspective. “You cannot read the label when you’re inside the bottle,” quipped one self-aware CEO. It’s a paradox: You (and your staff) are in the rare position of being the only people who aren’t qualified to assess these factors. Environmental factors include conditions requiring candidate disqualification. What are the stark realities of your practice- the good, bad and the ugly? What’s your practice model? What’s the work culture? What community factors could affect associate and spousal contentment? Does your compensation plan fit? I recommend each stakeholder (those invested in the recruiting outcome) “buys-in” to the model we’ve developed. Without consensus, your recruiting process is doomed. Circulate the IDEAL Candidate profile and have each “sign-off” BEFORE beginning the search. This step prevents emotional static from interfering with sound judgement and objective analysis. Step Two requires the search team to get busy. You’ll quickly realize telephone prospecting is discouraging, time consuming, fraught with rejection and not for everyone. But it’s vital. This is why networking amid influential contacts, cold calling and mining private databases combine to accomplish exceptional results. Step Three– Conduct rapid fire, focused and diligent five-minute phone screens. This script is critical. Control the process. Expose disqualifying factors and make cuts decisively. Don’t place mismatches on the short list. Step Four– Interview the Genuine...
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Recruiters need three skills foreign to many physicians and their practice administrators: marketing skills, sales skills and negotiating skills. Consider the skills required to manipulate the social media and Internet landscape to identify, attract and engage candidates. I pirated this tip from my favorite marketing guru: Write recruiting copy that describes the person, not the position. Most copy doesn’t. Few medical staffers have learned the art and science of search keyword analysis. Nor are they adept at combining headlines and effective copy that energize candidates. Fewer lack the experience to discern which social media to avoid. Select online content with care. Internet mistakes last forever. Furthermore, your team needs selling skills to crack barriers and persuade superstar candidates. They’re highly prized and you’ll never find them online. They aren’t looking. Your practice won’t appear on their radar screens. In many cases, superstars won’t respond without a gentle nudge from a cold call. Recruiters with terrific persuasion skills consistently uncover superior candidates, and far more of them. Most staff recruiting teams lack the time (and skills) to make 300 candidate cold calls per week. Finally, few administrative and medical staffs have mastered negotiating. These skills are essential to overcome candidate resistance and secure agreement on delicate contract issues. Your staffs are not at fault; they exercise these skills too infrequently to master them. (When was the last time you or your staff attended any sales or negotiation skills...
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