When it comes to recruiting for your optometric practice, you want to ensure that you quickly find an individual who can meet the needs of your practice and help enhance the patient experience.
Although it can be stressful to search for a replacement staff member, taking an unprofessional approach to selecting a candidate could be the difference from getting your dream employee or hiring a bad employee for your practice. Below are five hiring mistakes you should avoid when hiring for your optometric practice.
Avoid These Hiring Mistakes in Your Optometric Practice
Rushing to Fill the Position
Whenever a member of your optometric staff leaves your practice, finding a replacement becomes one of the top priorities—behind delivering patient care, of course. However, moving too swiftly to fill the replacement could create more trouble than good. Selecting a candidate with little to no experience could cause you to spend more time training and onboarding the individual.
On the same note, you don’t want to wait too long to make a selection on a candidate who meets your requirements. The longer you wait, the less interested the candidate becomes and the greater the possibility of the candidate landing a job with another practice.
Before you post the job description, think of how quickly you need to find the replacement and what experience from the candidate you need to return to business as usual.
Not Checking References
Before you make your selection, or waste too much time interviewing a candidate with a bad reputation. Take the time to check in on the person’s references. It’s vital that at least one of these references is a previous employer or coworker. A few questions you’ll want to ask include:
- Was this person reliable in showing up for work?
- Can you describe their work ethic?
- If available, would you hire this person again?
Putting Culture Over Experience
Finding a good culture fit for your practice is important to ensure chemistry among your team and reduce the chance of tension. However, if you hire someone who’s a good culture fit for your practice but doesn’t have any experience, you might end up with more work than you planned.
The goal when hiring is to find a qualified candidate who is a good culture fit. Identify the least amount of experience you’d expect for someone who is a good culture fit and stick to that requirement.
Not Sticking To Your Hiring Process
An established hiring process is in place to keep you and your hiring staff from making a selection based on gut feelings and avoid bias by ensuring each candidate goes through the same process. A structured hiring process will vet job applicants to remove under-qualified individuals from your short-list and will create a repeatable process to relieve some of the stress of recruiting.
Neglecting Your Job Posting
Posting on job boards is a great way to cast a wider net when hiring your optometric staff. But, if you rely only on the job boards and don’t update the post to help identify what you need from a candidate, then you’re probably going to get under qualified applicants.
Use word-of-mouth in your community and constantly refine the job description to narrow down your search and bring in qualified interviewees.
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