Ever considered how hiring the right office staff can affect your practice’s success?

Ask any physician, you will find a variety of answers. Office staff is crucial to the financial, social and cultural success of your practice.

If only it were as easy as putting an ad in the wanted section of the newspaper. The problem is it is difficult to find just the right person. Instead of finding the staff member that can complete your office, you may end up with a person that is bad for office dynamics and economics.

Once you have reached the decision to hire staff after consulting with your current staff, especially your medical office manager. Now take it one-step further. What will new staff be doing? It is essential to have a job description that is agreed upon by the other office staff as well as yourself.

To create this job description you will need to ask yourself the following questions:

1. What area in the practice needs assistance?
2. What kind of person will be able to help you with this?
3. What qualifications will the candidate need?
4. What kind and how much experience will be needed to perform the tasks you have designated?
5. Where and how do you get what you need?

Getting organized on these issues will help guide your search. If your search is for someone with an area of focused experience, you might advertise on health career boards or ask fellow physicians if they know of anyone. If your searching for general office experience, this would not be necessary. You would be able to cast a wider net and consider newspaper classifieds, job boards and more.

Once you have received applications/resumes you need to review their resume for professionalism as well as to get an idea of their career profile. Review the resume for those items that you deemed most important when considering hiring additional staff. This may not be concrete experience, but rather hints of potential future aptitude and a good work attitude. You may consider prescreening candidates by telephone, as it will speak volumes about their communication ability. Questions during this brief contact can include queries about the candidate’s strengths, their current job, past job performance and their career goals.

A Bit Off-Topic:  When putting together a good medical staff you also need to consider your payroll.  I found a place called California Payroll that provides payroll services that delivers a suite of solutions designed to improve your operation efficiencies while reducing your business costs.  They combine dedicated service teams with industry-accredited, highly experienced personnel with powerful, agile systems configured to meet the your needs very

For those candidates that you invite to the office for an interview, you should prepare beforehand a list of questions. You should have a variety of questions. It should cover past, present and future work, through open-ended questions and/or scenario-based questions. It might also be a good idea to include the office manager or other members of the staff in the interview will be directly supervising the new employee. This will ensure that the full range of questions is asked that complete a picture of the candidate.

Questions to ask candidates may include the following:

1. Ask about how candidates tackled work problems in the past; ask for concrete examples that demonstrate tenacity, problem-solving ability, a good attitude in tough situations, and more.
2. Ask the applicant how they would deal with a typical situation that you and your staff see everyday, problems with patients, or other scenarios.
3. Ask about conflicts they have had with co-workers or managers in the past. How did they get resolved?
4. What is the applicant’s work ethic? Determine this by asking about times in the past they have stayed late, performed extra work, or other tasks. What is their attitude on this?
5. How does the candidate react when given a task he/she is not sure how to do?
6. Depending on what type of staff position you are interviewing for, ask about applicant’s experience with computer programs, accounting/accounts payable, medical diagnostics, medical procedures or operation of medical diagnostic equipment.
7. Always ask if you can contact the applicant’s previous employers.
8. Ask the applicant if they have any questions? This question may give you an idea of how interested the person is in the position.

What happens now?

When you have finished the interview, you should have a good idea of the candidate’s personality, work experience and ethic, and appropriateness of including him/her in your staff. When the applicant believes they should have a clear idea of what the job requirements are. Be sure to write down your impressions of the candidate, answers that stuck in your mind and any questions either during or immediately after interview that you may think of that you did not ask.

Always follow up with the candidate’s references and former employers. You might also perform a background check. The goal of checking into the candidate’s past is to confirm or test his/her professionalism, work ethic and inter-office dynamics.

Being methodical and logical in your hiring process for new staff to ensure that your practice runs smoothly. It will result in a better caliber of candidates and an increased likelihood for a good match in personnel.

Article Rating:

Tags: medical diagnostic equipment, medical diagnostics, medical equipment, pharmaceutical companies

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.