There are many challenges associated with hiring the right team into your medical practice. Prior to COVID-19, the turnover rate in the healthcare industry was a well-known challenge for practice administrators. However, the pandemic brought an entirely new set of challenges related to staffing appropriately for practice volumes.

Over the past six months, we’ve seen quarantined staff creating unexpected holes in busy practice schedules. In other instances, practices were forced to furlough staff temporarily to adjust to lowered volumes. Your workers today have the added burden of dealing with online learning and ill family members, which creates the need for alternative or adjusted work schedules.

In busy medical offices, a vacant staff position can pose a major problem. Patient complaints may soar and as a result, online reviews may falter. 

Whether you fall victim to today’s COVID realities, realize you are incorrectly staffed, or if a key front-line team member leaves (for a few cents more an hour), the following six steps to hiring (and keeping) great medical practice staff will positively impact your bottom line.

1. Do NOT Rush to Fill the Position

If you do need to invest in recruiting new talent, the more due diligence, time, and effort spent upfront to find the right match, the better off your practice will be. Too often, practice administrators rush the process by “needing to get someone in quick.”

Resist the temptation to pull the trigger too quickly.

Any short-term gain resulting from a too-quick hire will most likely generate headaches in the long-term including rising employment costs. It costs a lot more—as much as 200% of an employee’s annual salary—to recruit new talent than it does to develop existing employees. Many of these expenses directly impact productivity and operating costs. 

They include:

• Reduced productivity and increased overtime until the position is filled
• Time lost interviewing candidates
• More lost productivity and increased employee stress while the candidate learns the ropes

The greatest cost, however, may be making a hiring mistake. In this case, you’ll need to figure out how to get rid of the new person and repeat the selection and hiring process all over again.

Bottom line: Hiring diligently and carefully is worth the investment.

2. Prepare for Recruitment Before You Have a Vacancy

Even when your medical office is fully staffed, you should always be on the lookout for new talent. Most practice managers are not prepared for the departure of a staff member. In a typical job market, the span of a two-week notice simply may not be enough time (often, it’s not even close) to find a comparable replacement for a quality member of your team.

The good news (if you can call it that) is that there are many experienced healthcare workers currently seeking employment. Normally, healthcare is a profession that is insulated from unemployment concerns. However, the pandemic has created a situation unique in our experience. As the virus broke and spread in the spring of 2020, elective procedures and preventative treatments fell sharply. As a result, healthcare revenue declined sharply, and more than 1.5 million healthcare jobs were lost. Many of these positions recovered, but healthcare employment overall was 6% lower than at the same time in 2019.

However, this does not mean you should wait until the last minute to search for critical roles in your practice. If you are prepared with an updated job description, interview questions, and a recruitment plan, including where you will advertise, it will be easier to find and narrow down potential candidates. Adequately preparing for the event will prevent you from being rushed into making the wrong choice from your pool of candidates.

Another planning advantage you can give yourself is to decide where to post the position. Consider locations that will attract the best, most talented and highly qualified applicants. Some of these include:

• Posting internally
• Social media (LinkedIn, Instagram, and even TikTok can be great networking tools)
• Placing advertisements on websites that are geared to health care or medical office professionals
• Targeting colleges, universities, and trade schools
• Posting to national recruitment websites such as Careerbuilder.com or Monster.com

3. Describe the Ideal Candidate

Knowing your ideal candidate beforehand will ease the shock of a sudden HR crunch. The first step is to sit down with your management team and define your requirements for all team positions.

Experience and credentials are vital, but the more challenging requirements are those not evident in a resume or cover letter. They include:

• Personality traits: are you looking for someone cheerful, optimistic, compassionate, and able to work independently?
• Work ethic: is the candidate a self-starter, a team player, or a leader? Can they work well with others? 
• Appearance and mannerisms: Does the candidate have mastery over soft skills such as looking people in the eye, listening carefully to others, and remaining poised and courteous under pressure?

Another way to flesh out the attributes of your ideal candidate is to describe how they would respond in two to three hypothetical situations. You can use these hypothetical events in eventual interviews.

When you have concrete measures against which you can evaluate candidates, your search for a new employee will take on enhanced clarity and increase your chances of finding the perfect fit.

4. Make Adjustments on the Fly

The proficient and experienced candidate you would love to hire may have no interest in the job and find the compensation lacking. Therefore, you’ll need to find other ways to entice those potential employees by tweaking the job description and its requirements.

Often, it’s more than just about monetary compensation. The intangibles you can offer, such as flexible hours, learning opportunities, educational benefits, a cordial and pleasing work atmosphere, and special pricing on treatments can offer exceptional value to candidates. 

5. Establish a Process that Weeds out Candidates for You

Before you review any candidate submission, ask a staff member to respond to each applicant and request a specific action on the part of the candidate. To maintain credibility, the request should be relevant to the position. However, the precise nature of the action is not important.

By doing this, casual candidates will weed themselves out of the process. And if you still find you have more applications than you can handle, then assign another task. Roughly 90% of the total pool will drop out with each request.

6. Invest in Training and Development From the Get-Go

Hiring and training a new team member is expensive, with total replacement costs reaching between 90-200% of an employee’s annual salary. However, 93% of employees indicate that they will remain at companies who invest in their careers. Therefore, investing in employee retention makes a lot more sense than having to recruit and train new employees.

Employees who have access to meaningful training and development opportunities are more engaged. Moreover, research has found that consistent development opportunities can decrease employee turnover and produce up to twice the revenue per worker. 

Investing in talent development is critical for medical practice administrators because it directly affects employee retention, motivation, engagement, and productivity. Millennial employees, in particular, are lifelong learners and are likely to look elsewhere if their employers fail to give them opportunities to learn and acquire new skills.