Recruitment and the interview process – For years, my standard approach for hiring staff was to begin with a 1 hour interview process. Although the questions were well thought out and structured to ask about our main cultural pillars, customers, teamwork, professional leadership and practice leadership, as you would as expected, I would get lovely answers from the candidates of how good they are with customers, how well they worked in a team, how great they are with initiative and how important they had been in the growth of their former business. In addition, this process would require the interviewing staff member to block off 1 hour in their already busy day and catch-up with this work later.
However, the second stage of the interview process was usually a 3 hour observation and participation sessions with one of the staff. They would spend that time doing a work observation with someone doing the job they would be asked to do, participate as much as possible and actually get a feel for what the job was actually about (not the theory what the job would be).
The great thing about this process is that it would lead to 1 of 2 very specific reactions:
- Thank you, but this job is not for me
- Great, I really like what this job is all about, I’m willing to continue
As the candidate was observing and being along side the staff member, although the process is longer, it is actually less disruptive to the staff member’s day, because they still get to do their actual job, without having to catch-up later.
This process gives the candidate, a warts and all, look at what they will actually be doing to be able to genuinely know whether this is or isn’t the right job for them.
The previous worse-case scenario is that the candidate accepts the job, start for a few weeks of training, then turns around and says “sorry mate, it’s just not for me” (This has happened several times in the past). This process avoids this situation (as much as possible) by bringing the work experience component as the first step, rather than the glossy standard interview process, where we mostly hear what we want to hear.
Recruitment – Our best staff members have come from student placements (A 4-6 week interview process)
About 15 years ago, we started taking on student placements. Although this was a lot of work at the start, from a bigger picture point of view, it was effectively a longer version of the “work observation” component of our interview process.
The student gets a “warts and all” experience of our centre for anything from 4 to 6 weeks and gets to really be integrated into our organization and culture. In addition, we get to shape their training before they have finished their university placement.
Again, there is usually one of 2 outcomes of the process
- The student gets a great learning experience (because you’ve put the effort in to teach them as much as you can in the time they are with you)
- They are the right fit and go on to become part of your team.
Over half of our clinical staff, including branch managers, started their journey with us as students and have continued their career as a smooth transition from student to fully integrated staff members, who is also the right fit for the organization.
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