Take advantage of higher unemployment levels; automate and improve the hiring process to better select for quality employees that match with your mission; and consider how you can employ gig economy workers and those that only want to telecommute.
Hire Quality Employees By Identifying Your Mission
Write down your business’s core objectives or reflect on the efforts of your best employees and ask yourself what distinguishes them from the rest. Use this information to design questions that you can use on the application or in the interview that will help you identify employees that are the best match for your business’s culture.
Write a Job Description
List the responsibilities of the position. Be wary of including ‘multi-tasking’ in the list. Multi-tasking is often our way of saying that we want our team members to make broken operational systems work. Also check for responsibilities that take the employee away from the core objectives. Keeping the employee’s activity centered on core objectives is the best way to keep them engaged in their work.
Ask Applicants To Go Above And Beyond In The Job Advertisement
When you write the job advertisement, ask the applicant to do something more than just attach a resume. As an example, when we look for applicants on Indeed, we ask the applicant to use the Cover Letter portion of the application to write a few sentences that explain why we should consider them for the position. The Cover Letter portion is immediately visible when you view the application and doesn’t require opening any attachments. If any of the applicants fail to do this simple task, they are immediately dismissed from consideration and sent a regret letter. If the applicant has completed the task and we like what they have written, we take the extra time to open the attached resume and review it.
Don’t Spend Too Much Time Scrutinizing Their Materials
Don’t spend a lot of time scrutinizing the resume. If it appears that you have an applicant worthy of further consideration, send them an electronic survey generated from your WordPress website. The survey congratulates the applicant for making it the next level of the interview process, then asks the applicant additional questions to determine if he or she can work the hours, will enjoy the kind of tasks that come with the job, and if he or she is a match for the practice’s core objectives. The survey has been shown to be highly successful at identifying the best applicants.
How To Build a Survey On WordPress
Firstly, you have to determine if you have a WordPress website. Go to https://www.isitwp.com and type in the URL of your website. The Is-It-WP website will tell you if you have a website built using the WordPress platform. If you do, that’s great! It means you can use one of the WordPress free form plugins to build an employee screening form. If you don’t have one, not to worry. Ask your IT person for an alternative idea. You probably have some kind of way to create a form on your existing site.
This is what the opening of our form looks like. A homegrown picture of the working space gives the job a unique feel and character. The instructional language is welcoming, respectful, and upbeat.
This is where we ask the applicant all the make-or-break questions. We find out whether or not they can work our hours and the days of the week that we are open. We also let them know that this is a medical facility and that they will see biological specimens like blood and sometimes witness pets that are in pain, very sick, or near death. These questions filter out applicants that aren’t right from the outset.
WordPress forms allow for the attachment of files. We ask the applicant to RE-attach any application materials (like resume or cover letter) here so that we don’t have to toggle between this location and our Indeed folder to piece together all the applicant’s materials. If the applicant follows direction and loads his or her materials here, everything can be stored in one spot.
This is the most important part of the form. We ask the applicant to answer some essay questions based on our mission statement. It allows us to filter for applicants that best match our workplace culture. Writing is also an excellent test of intelligence. Studies show that individuals with high intelligence are more likely to succeed at their jobs and stay with them longer.
Reference Check
To reduce the risk that we will spend too much on a candidate that’s not a fit, we check references before we bring them into the interview. Ask the employee for the email addresses of three professional references, preferably individuals for whom they have worked. We have found that emailing the candidate’s references is faster and more convenient for all involved. We ask the candidate to alert their reference that we will be contacting them by email so they aren’t suspicious of our email when it arrives, but also let the candidate know if the reference wants to be contacted by phone, we will happily oblige. We repeat this condition in the email that we send to the reference since some individuals may be unwilling to put their sentiments in writing.
Online Search
We also search the internet for the candidate’s name to glean more information about the prospective hire, but keep in mind that you are treading on squishy legal soil here. For example, maybe you find the applicant on Facebook and then learn that she is pregnant. If you use this information as a deciding factor in the hiring process, you have broken the law.
It is only after we complete all these steps that we ask the applicant for an in person interview or, in cases where we are concerned about exposure to COVID-19, for a Zoom meeting. Make sure that you as you go through these steps, you keep the applicant informed of your progress. If you take too much time to complete any of these steps, you may lose the candidate to another offer.
The Interview
Make sure that the interview process is structured. Veterinary practices often invite the candidate in for a “working interview” when they are short staffed, so the “interview” ends up being an applicant chasing after an employee trying to do the work of two people. It’s not fair to your existing employees and it makes your practice look disorganized.
Instead, allow various team members to spend one-on-one time with the applicant, to show them around the building, tell them about the job, and answer any questions. Cohesive, positive team dynamics are very important to the happiness and productivity of any team. When we allow our team members to participate in the hiring process, we can better select individuals that our existing employees will like, get along, and work with well.
And don’t be afraid to shake things up further. Sitting alone in an office with an applicant may be the only one-on-one time you have with him or her for another year if they get the job. Have the applicant play a game with the staff. Show the applicant a particularly memorable client email, good or bad, and then demonstrate how the company has responded to such emails in the past. Now, invite the applicant to try their hand at writing their own sample response. For additional creative ways to conduct better interviews, catch this article in the Harvard Business Review.
Consider Gig Economy Employees
Asking existing team members to do side jobs like managing social media pages, writing for the website, fixing the computers, or processing accounts receivable takes them away from core responsibilities, risks disengagement, and because they may not be trained or experienced at the task, sets them up for failure. Additionally, managers are often disappointed with the results and the timely execution of the additional responsibilities they assign, so it sours the manager-employee relationship.
Instead, consider hiring gig workers for these side jobs. Write a job description for the responsibility so that you have a clear understanding of the specifics of what you want done and the value of the job as a whole, then you’ll be able to better determine how long it will take to the job and how much you should pay for it. The job description will also improve the training and the quality of the feedback you provide to the employee.
On boarding
Too many veterinary practices hire great applicants and then throw them into chaotic workplaces with spotty training or cliques of negative employees. Certainly a systemized way to train employees makes all the difference when building a great business and great team, but you can still succeed with on boarding if you do two things:
Ask yourself if the processes you are trying to teach are unnecessarily complicated.
Receptionist training is often way too complicated. It is commonplace for receptionists to explore the presenting complaint on the phone with clients that are trying to make an appointment for their pet. I don’t mean this as an indictment, but most often this a waste of time. As a medical team, agree to a short list of questions that we need to know about each prospective appointment. The goals of the questions should be:
-
- Is this an urgent or non-urgent case?
- is the presenting complaint/species of animal in our wheelhouse of services?
- Is this a follow up appointment, drop off, or diagnostic test, and if so, is the appointment in accordance with the doctor’s orders? For example if we are testing glucose levels, is the appointment timed correctly based on when the client typically gives insulin.
Are you present in the employee’s day-to-day life?
After the hire, don’t just disappear into your office. Signal to the employee that you are present and that you are keeping an eye out for his or her progress and wellbeing. You spent several days and weeks getting to know this individual, don’t just abandon her to the whimsy of whatever happens out on the floor. Stay with the new hire until you see that she is comfortable and has developed some sense of autonomy.
Conclusion
We have been hiring employees the same way for decades. It is a new age and we are a new kind of worker. Explore resources on this site, the Veterinary Hospital Managers Association, and in publications like the Harvard Business Review. Developing new methods to hire will keep the process stimulating fo you and likely make you more successful.
