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Recruiting the Right Employees
How high do you need to jump to recruit and retain employees? In the past, high jumping might have been good enough. Today, even a good pole vault might find you missing the bar and falling right back down to earth on your rump.
No one seems to need convincing that in today's business environment the most frustrating and time-consuming challenge is recruitment and retention of top talent. Reluctantly, more and more dentists realize this labor shortage will not go away. They don't like it either. But many dentists are beginning to build strategies to recruit only the talent that matches their practice model and select and retain only individuals whose skills will produce the outcomes the practice needs for profitable growth.
Unfortunately, dentists have dumped a mountain of resources into recruitment and training efforts with a molehill of differences. The engine may be running but there is not much forward progress. This leaves many dentists in a gut-wrenching quandary. Faced with playing a new game with rules they don't understand, dentists can either abandon the tried and tested interview as their primary tool for selection, or they can keep doing the same thing over and over again -- just play harder.
Selecting and promoting employees needs to be like an opportunity-seeking missile. The pool of available workers is depleted of the best and the brightest. Dentists need to hone in on the talent, not just warm bodies. "Being good at your job,” writes Jorgen Sanberg in Understanding Competence at Work (Harvard Business Review, March 2001), "means having the right understanding of your job."
Larry Brossidy agrees - and knows - about hiring and developing the right people. In his tenure as Chairman and CEO of Allied Signal from 1991-1999, he delivered a nine-fold return for his shareholders, tripled operating margins, and nearly tripled the return on equity. Brossidy feels that the most flawed process in American business is the interview. "Some people interview well and some people don't. And a person who doesn't interview well may be the best choice for the job. It takes time and effort to drill down further -- but it's always worth the trouble -- there is no way to spend too much time on obtaining and developing the best people.
Brossidy also admits to some "people" mistakes he made. He attributes these to three things. First, some mistakes came from an over-reliance on interviews. Second, many managers, including himself, assumed successful people in one environment would be able to thrive in another. And third, when a hiring mistake was made, corrective action was postponed. Sure, everyone was given a chance to improve, but in the end, some people just didn't work out. The decision to let someone go is difficult but it has to be done. Of course, the solution is not firing quickly but hiring people with the least probability of failure and the propensity to succeed.
Dentists are really fed up with hiring people they like in the interview but can't seem to do the job they were hired to do, let alone show up on time, if at all. So how effectively can a dentist avoid the bad apples and find the good ones who understand how to do the job and then actually apply what they know?
A recent American Management Association survey showed that 60 percent of businesses required specific job-skill testing of applicants and 31 percent used psychological tests. Yet interviewing, the single most unreliable way to predict what a person will do on the job, remains the most used selection tool for hiring new employees.
What do dentists need to do to have the highest probability of making a good hiring decision? Job matching and behavioral and interests testing improves the odds of hiring the right person anywhere from two to five times over using the interview alone. Pre-employment assessments generally include disqualifying (or screening-out) tests and qualifying (or selecting-in) tests.
Disqualifying tests such as SELECT™ for Healthcare and SELECT™ for Customer Service weed out applicants that a dentist doesn't want in the selection pool. These instruments eliminate at an early stage unqualified or unsuitable persons from consideration for employment.
Qualifying tests such as Managing for Success Series® or Personal Soft Skills Indicator™ measure the ABC's of employee performance: attitudes, behavior and competencies.
These employment and performance assessments -- screen-out and select-in alike -- provide a variety of efficiencies, saving time and money for the dentist and staff. They reduce the expense of high turnover by helping to determine who will do well in a particular job on the front end of the interviewing process. These assessment capabilities can be used as well to size up the existing dental team for the purposes of team building.
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