Eyeworld

JULY 2021 | EYEWORLD | 137 P Contact Pinto: pintoinc@aol.com Wohl: czwohl@gmail.com due. It might be reasonable for this practice to provide written procedures and cheat sheets to compensate for different skill sets. Or make the decision that you will only hire a receptionist who can fulfill both of those expectations equally. 3. Have a more intentional interview pro- cess. Prepare in advance. Who do you want to include in the interview process? What do you want each interview to focus on? Do you prefer individual or group interviews? Share all the hiring information (position description, resume, timelines) with each interviewer. 4. Develop a robust, clearly defined on- boarding process. Too many practices find themselves in a time crunch when a new hire arrives. The written documentation (department operations manuals, training checklists) is incomplete or non-existent. Current short staffing means that no one has time to train. Multiple hires at the same time are challenging and new hires are assigned to shadow staff members who are well intended but not necessarily compe- tent teachers. Preparing well in advance to onboard in each department is the way to avoid coming up short when a new employ- ee joins your practice. 5. Assign a mentor for at least 6 months. The better your practice onboards and supports a new hire, the higher the chances are that they will become an employee who performs well and be someone who you retain. Unfortunately, we see all too often a competent employee who leaves with- in their first year of employment because their initial impressions were that they were thrown into their position with poor training, were held to high standards with- out support, and they just don't feel cared enough about to stay. In this situation, employees are easily drawn to competing practices after being trained by yours. As- signing a mentor to a new hire for at least the first 6 months provides a comfortable haven for them to learn new tasks from an experienced person and even ask questions that they may not want to bring directly to their formal supervisor. Your mentors must be trained for this critical role and know what you expect of them. The art Now we take the solid hiring steps listed above and add the nuanced approaches that help lead to successful hiring. As client stories and our di- rect experience suggests, approximately half of all candidates hired with great expectations end up not performing as originally hoped. Not all of this failure can be eliminated, but the most experienced and intuitive managers add a bit of art to the science of hiring new staff. 1. The interview and nuanced success fac- tors. Create a formal recruitment commit- tee for each position. Provide the position description in advance so each member fully understands the actual role (and not their imagined role) for the position. Spend time teaching the recruitment committee the success factors of interviewing. Ex- amples include listen more than talk and avoid over selling the practice when you get excited about a candidate. You want to hear them talk. Avoid the trap of "I like them so the skills they have matter less." That feeling that the candidate will fit into the practice culture is important, but it can lead to disappointment if it causes you to overlook experience and/or skills gaps. 2. Don't shelve the position description; make it a live document and tool. Har- ness all that time you spent developing the position description. Review it quarterly, to be proactive, and confirm that your expec- tations for that position are aligned with the actual tasks being performed. Without this ongoing oversight, it is common to have to play catch up at an inopportune time and repair the damage of this mis- alignment between your expectations and each new staff member's incomplete under- standing of them. Don't let staff drift away from your standards and vision for their position.

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