Employee turnover is an unfortunate but inevitable part of running a business. Not only is it costly and time-consuming, it is disruptive to existing staff and can impact morale. Finding and hiring the right office employees is critical to the overall success of the organization.
Medical practices are particularly vulnerable to turnover fallout. This is because many practices manage their operations with a small, streamlined staff. Each position, no matter the title, is vital to the practice’s overall health and performance. To prevent turnover, practices must be diligent in their hiring efforts by adopting a systematic strategy for hiring. This article outlines an effective hiring strategy you can use to acquire exceptional, retainable employees while maintaining the well-being of your practice.
The following steps will assist you and your hiring team in effectively and efficiently identifying and hiring the right talent for your practice:
Create a hiring team. The chance of hiring the best candidate increases when you have the input of several people. The hiring team should include key practice stakeholders and be small and manageable. It is beneficial to include team members with various backgrounds, personality types, and job responsibilities. This ensures recruitment of a well-rounded individual and sets up the new employee for team success.
Identify why the previous employee left. Examining why you need to replace an employee may supply the practice with information critical to its staff retention scorecard. An exit interview of the departing employee and interviews of remaining staff members are both beneficial in the identification of watch-outs and/or needs for the next practice hire. The more receptive you are to this feedback, the more you may learn. 
Review position job description and adapt as necessary. Ensuring that the job description includes all relevant duties and skills helps manage the practice’s expectations as well as those of the applicants. Prior to the hiring process is a perfect time to make changes to the job description. When updating the description, solicit input from other office personnel about current practice needs. You’ll want to make sure all responsibilities are covered without overlap and that staff morale remains intact as the result of job ownership. The updated description should have a job title and summary and needs to include key responsibilities, supervisor, skills and qualifications, type of employment (full or part-time), salary range, and benefits. 
Determine rate of pay. Pricing your practice appropriate to the local market—and the job description—can help you avoid future issues with payroll and staff. Being the highest payer in the area will set you up for overhead inefficiencies. Being the lowest payer in the area can result in poor morale and staff turnover. Conduct a local online job search for similar jobs in the area to help you identify an appropriate rate. The rate you decide on could change depending on an applicant’s experience, etc.; so it is helpful to identify a range (e.g., $17–$20 per hour, depending on experience).
Create and place the ad. A successful recruitment effort hinges on the creation and placement of an ad that accurately describes the position and outlines the desired skill set. The ad should be placed on job sites that provide good candidate return on investment. Some of the more commonly used job sites are: indeed.com, careerbuilders.com, craigslist.com, and healthcareers.com. Additionally, ads should be placed on local university, professional society, and applicable business group job-posting sites.
Select top resumes for interviews. Screening resumes is the first step in narrowing the candidate pool and allows you to focus your time on candidates best-suited for the position. The hiring team should review the resumes and select the top candidates based on job fit. Job fit includes both objective and subjective measurements. Objective measurements include job requirement fit (i.e., hard skills); subjective measurements include items such as attitude and motivational fit (i.e., soft skills). Candidate background can also be assessed by reaching out to referral sources as well as to online profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and other online social media sites. Optimally, the resume review process yields 10–15 candidates; however these numbers could be less depending on the quality and caliber of candidates your search produces.
Create interview questions. Creating questions for both phone interviews and live interviews is key to ensuring that the hiring team is prepared and consistent throughout the interview process. Phone interview questions should be macro in nature and are intended to capture a big-picture view of candidates while identifying potential watch-outs or job non-negotiables. Live interview questions should do a deeper dive into the candidates’ backgrounds and should be crafted with the goal of obtaining information that will help determine job- and practice-fit.
Screen candidates by telephone. Phone interviews are essential for eliminating time-consuming live interviews with those who, despite strong resumes, don’t meet all of your needs. Utilizing the pre-selected interview questions, have one key player from the interview team schedule and conduct telephone interviews of the qualified pool of candidates. Each conversation should be 10–15 minutes in length during which the interviewer assesses each applicant’s answers as well as his/her communication skills.

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