You’ve likely heard it said many times that people are your greatest asset, and we’ve all worked with people who are fantastic at their jobs, providing great service, willing to help, highly productive etc.
They’re the kind of people everyone wants in their healthcare practice, supporting the patients and other team members, consistently performing their role well and helping drive the success of the practice overall.
As well as filling the vacant role, the recruitment and selection process is an opportunity to bring in new skills, enthusiasm and ideas, as well as reinforce your workplace culture in the right direction. There are a number of essential steps to ensuring you really utilise this opportunity and get optimal results. Plus, recruitment and selection mistakes are costly in many ways - the time the process takes, time invested in training the successful applicant, managing an appropriate exit from the organisation, etc.
So, how do you ensure that your next team member is going to have the skills, experience and attributes they need to be such a great asset?
Write a position description
Always start with a position description (PD) – this builds objectivity into the process:
What will the roles and responsibilities of the position be?
What qualifications, skills, experience and attributes are essential, as well as those that are desirable, for successful performance?
Seek help and feedback from existing team members to ensure you capture everything.
Write this up as your ideal employee for the role. You may have to compromise later depending upon the applicant pool, but create a clear picture from the outset of your new ideal team member.
Include a short blurb at the top of the PD explaining where the role fits in to your practice or clinic and emphasising the key strengths and values underlying your corporate culture. This will help keep all involved in the process focused on what you’re looking for. Add a document creation date (for future reference). You now have a document to give to applicants at interview, to clarify and reinforce what the role entails.
Work out the salary range and any additional benefits. The relevant Award is a good starting point, though many healthcare practices paying above Award. As such, consider also how you are remunerating existing team members and research from comparable advertised positions to ensure you’re competitive.
Write your job advertisement and post it
There are a number of options available for posting the role – local newspapers, the local school newsletter, job websites like SEEK, employment pages on relevant industry websites etc. Which is best for you will depend on the role and the size of the applicant pool you’re looking to attract. Which you choose will also influence how you write up your advertisement.
Use the PD as the basis for your advertisement. Include qualifications, skills, experience and attributes that are “essential”, and those which will be “highly regarded”.
Be sure to sell your organisation and let applicants know what’s great about working in your team. Keep in mind throughout your recruitment and selection that this is a two-way process – you’re aiming to build a pool of applicants who really want to join your team.
Decide whether you’re looking to include information about the salary range. There are a number of schools of thought on this, but if you include it, you’ll certainly know that those applying are doing so with this knowledge in hand.
If you’re using SEEK or a similar platform, it’s really worthwhile including questions for applicants to answer as part of their application. Things you’ve worked out in writing the PD are important to their ability to perform the role successfully, like how many years of experience they’ve had with similar roles, their work rights etc. Including these will really help you shortlist the applications you receive.
Finally, don’t forget to include a closing date for applications. This gives both your practice and applicants a timeline to work towards. If you’re going to be contacting applicants before the closing date, let them know this in the ad – it encourages people to get their applications in quickly and helps you keep the process moving!
Next steps
For further recruitment and selection strategies and information, see our follow-on articles Successful Recruitment & Selection - 2. Shortlisting & Interview Questions and Successful Recruitment & Selection - 3. Interviews & Reference Checks.
We’ve also developed a Position Description Template and a Recruitment & Selection Checklist. These and other resources are available on our Downloadable Resources page.
If you’d like assistance with recruitment and selection, the team at Augmentum provides a broad range of services to Medical and Allied Health organisations, including around HR Management and building effective and efficient foundations and teams. We also provide assistance to healthcare business owners and decision makers in other areas, such as strategic development and planning, patient engagement and retention, and establishing reports to keep their finger-on-the-pulse and drive growth and success. Get in touch to find out more, or check out our website www.augmentum.com.au
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