home care office staff

The staff you hire to work within your home care agency are the foundation of your business. Whether you’re a new business and establishing your team for the first time, or an existing company needing to add to or replace members of your team, it’s critical to have the right people in the right place. Making good hiring decisions relieves home care owners and managers from unnecessary employee frustrations and turnover. Knowing whether potential employees want it, get it and have the capacity to do it isn’t always easy for owners to recognize. Here are 6 suggestions to consider in reviewing your hiring process.

Defining Your Why Guidesheet

FREE RESOURCE

Connect your team to your “WHY” and retain your best caregivers and office staff.

Position Scorecard

Create a scoring system based on the purpose, accountabilities, competencies, and a pre-employment assessment.

  • Before adding to (or replacing a member of) your office team, know the purpose behind the new hire.
  • Define specific responsibilities this position will be accountable for.
  • In order to determine if a candidate has the capacity to fulfill those responsibilities, it helps to produce a list of core required and desired competencies to evaluate them on.
  • There are several employee evaluation tools out there to consider (Kolbe, DiSC, etc.). I’ll go into more detail in a later section.
  • The last section is scoring the candidate based on: Do they get it, want it, and have the capacity to do it? (A concept taken from the book Traction by Gino Wickman.) The final question on the score card is: “Would you hire this person today?” With each of the questions in this section, don’t just write yes or no. Write down why and what impressed you about the candidate.

*For more details on the Position Scorecard and to receive a sample of one, please join me this month for our monthly Core Webinar.

Take the Time

While a certain amount of friction can occur when you are without a key office staff position, resist the temptation to make a quick decision on hiring. Hiring the wrong person to join the team can lead to even more frustrations. Be thorough in reviewing the resumes and applications submitted and only invite the best-qualified candidates to begin the interviewing process.

Rigorous Interview Process

After selecting your top 2-3 candidates, the interview process begins. You’ll want to go through a series of interviews to get to know the candidate.

  • 15-minute phone interview – This gives you the chance to evaluate how well they present themselves on the phone. As an office staff member, it’s important to have someone pleasant and professional sounding on the phones.
  • 45-minute in person interview with the department head. Use the scorecard to keep notes about what impresses you – or doesn’t – about the candidate.
  • Due diligence
    • Pre-Employment Assessment (see below)
    • Complete the Scorecard
    • Check references provided by candidate
    • Background check
  • Team interview (more below)
  • Interview with CEO – this is reserved for the candidate(s) everyone up to this point agrees should be offered the job.

Team Interview

Only the top 2-3 candidates should be selected to bring into a team interview. This “team” can extend beyond just those the candidate would work directly with to include others in the company they will interact with in the position. This gives your office staff and other key employees an opportunity to get a sense of how well they might work with the various candidates.

Pre-Employment Assessment

A challenge for every business owner/manager is getting the right person in the right seat. You’ll find many great candidates who would be great to work with as individuals, but the key to an employee being satisfied with their job is having them in a position that fits best with what drives them. There are several employee assessment options out there (Kolbe, DiSC, etc.) that identify a candidate’s natural abilities and predict how they might approach and solve problems. Tools like these go beyond the interview questions to better understand whether the candidate will be able to perform well in the position based on how they approach preventing problems, respond to opportunities, and initiate solutions.

By taking your time in being thorough throughout the hiring process, you’ll have greater success in finding the ideal employees to join your office staff. The expectations of the new employee will be clear, and you’ll have a far better knowledge of how you can succeed in working with them. “Leaders of companies that go from good to great start not with “where” but with “who”. They start by getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats. And they stick with the discipline – first the people, then the direction – no matter how dire the circumstances.” – Jim Collins, author of Good to Great.

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One Comment

  1. Ed Kelly September 10, 2017 at 9:44 pm - Reply

    Great Blog! Thanks for Sharing!

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