Eyeworld

OPHTHALMOLOGY BUSINESS 80 May 2017 by John. B. Pinto, Corinne Wohl, MHSA, COE, and Craig N. Piso, PhD Fifteen tips to avoid bad practice hires service:" a genuine interest in and heartfelt desire for helping people, including both teammates and patients. Screen for candidates with prior experience helping others (this could be a formal job or volunteer work.) Ask your candidate: "As someone applying for a job where we are helping patients—often the elderly and frail—what can you tell me about your background and interest in serving others?" Tip 8: Ask: "Tell me about your first paying job." Our experience over a combined 100+ years in the field has shown us that the best workers we encounter in our consulting work— both doctors and lay staff—started their work life very early as babysit- ters, grass cutters, and the like. Tip 9: Especially for more critical hires (doctors, managers) always ar- range a working interview. Such an interview takes place over the course of a regular work day, meeting with and shadowing various staff, and sharing a couple of meals with se- lected members of the team. Tip 10: To the extent possible, apply one or more practical tests to final candidates: • Watch a senior tech candidate work up a staff member • Give a biller a few charts to code and ask them to place a mock collection call • Ask a receptionist to answer a mock phone call from you (and you should pretend to be a diffi- cult patient) • You can even give a practical test to trainee candidates: have a tech/ scribe candidate demonstrate their memory by reciting back a long, compound sentence. They can show their dexterity with the simple children's game of pick-up- sticks (keep a box of toothpicks in the office) Tip 11: If you are hiring a provider, always travel to their current clinical setting and watch them in action. Never hire a surgeon, especially a partner-track doctor, who you have not personally observed in the OR. You are not just looking for surgical skills but how they perform globally during the most stressful part of a surgeon's life. "Hiring people is like making friends. Pick good ones, and they'll enrich your life. Make bad choices, and they'll bring you down." —Jason Fried "My vision is to hire qualified em- ployees that may have not yet had the opportunity to create a better life for themselves, or did have one but might have come down on hard times and need a hand." —Grace Hightower B ad hires hurt all over. First, they waste your time and money getting recruited. Then they work slow, make expensive mistakes and bring down the morale of fellow staffers. Finally, it costs money and time to replace them. As if that wasn't enough, your self-confidence as an employer takes a beating. Every practice we know has at least one proverbial "bad apple" in the barrel, and even the smartest practice owners and administrators makes dozens of hiring goofs in the course of a career. It comes with the territory. You don't have to become a hir- ing genius to materially improve in this area. Small wins count big. Just consider baseball's common metric: the batting average. Hitting the ball just four times out of 10 times at bat is exceptional performance. Babe Ruth had a lifetime average of hit- ting the ball 3.42 times for every 10 times at bat. Hitting it three times is about average. If you only hit it two times, they'll kick you off the team. Hiring the right people at every level within your practice is critical to creating and maintaining suc- cessful operations, profitability and brand integrity. Here are some tips for selecting top talent, people who can bring more value and be a better fit with your culture. Tip 1: Always hire with a clear, updated, written description of the job. This makes everyone inside the practice get on the same page about the needed skills. Tip 2: Ask: "Do we really need to hire?" Most practices in America are modestly over-staffed. Don't just replace a departing worker by rote—ask yourself if there's another option, such as shifting duties to others, streamlining office proce- dures, paying overtime here or there, bringing in seasonal workers, etc. You'll never have to fire the person you don't hire. Tip 3: If you are replacing a depart- ing member of your staff, and are on good terms with them, have them interview your finalists—nobody knows the job better than the last person doing it. Tip 4: As Jim Collins wrote in his iconic book, Good to Great, "Hire first for character, then for technical skills." This is difficult to accomplish in the space of a brief interview. Expand the time spent with final candidates as by having two in- terviews on separate occasions, or arranging a half-day to job-shadow. Are they punctual? Do they show an interest in those around them or seem self-absorbed? Are they patient and focused when you describe the job? Tip 5: Ask this character-challeng- ing question, "Tell me about a time when you made a very big and perhaps costly mistake during your career, how it played out, and what you learned from this experience." More mature candidates will always take personal responsibility for their mistakes, humbly acknowledge any wrongdoing, and be able to report growth as a result of bouncing back from the error of their ways. By con- trast, less mature, even dysfunction- al individuals will more likely make excuses, blame others, and shirk responsibility for previous work-re- lated problems, and, as a result, are unable to describe any valuable lesson learned. Tip 6: It's a gross simplification to be sure, but there are really only two kinds of people in the world: givers and takers. We all have a pretty well- honed intuition, often within a few minutes of meeting someone new, for which category they fit into. Hire only givers. Tip 7: Everyone who interacts with your patients must have a "heart for To the point: Simple practice tune-ups for complex times

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