Questions You Should Ask When Hiring

Developing questions for job interviews is a critical part of your practice’s hiring process. Crafting questions with the skills and personality of your ideal candidate in mind will help you make a wise hiring decision. To find the person best suited for your staff, you should formulate questions that will elicit both informative and useful responses from your interviewee. Here’s how:

First things first

It’s been said that “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there, but you won’t know when you’ve arrived.” Before you begin interviewing candidates, look carefully at your practice characteristics and the personalities and skills of your staff members to help determine what attributes you want your new hire to possess. Some of these might include good work habits, friendly and efficient service to patients, stability, enthusiasm, good judgment, general intelligence and job skills.

A key concept to remember is to hire for values, attitude and aptitude first, and skills second. If you interview a person with a great attitude and reasonable aptitude, you can always teach specific skills later. However, it is exceedingly difficult to change someone’s approach to work or rapport with others once he or she is on the job. You should design interview questions that will enable you to assess these attributes in your applicants and to do it in a fairly brief verbal exchange, which is rather difficult.