Episode 139: Utilizing Assessments Throughout Hiring and Onboarding: Part 1

Speaker 1:                                             You're listening to Your Practice Made Perfect. Support, protection, and advice for practicing medical professionals, brought to you by SVMIC.

Renee:                                                 Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Your Practice Made Perfect. I'm Renee Tidwell and I'll be your host today. Go ahead. In this episode, we'll discuss the use of assessments in the workplace, but more specifically, we'll discuss how you can utilize assessments in the recruiting, hiring, and onboarding process. Because the topic is so vast, we have split this into two episodes. For those interested in the use of personality assessments at the hiring phase of employment, this is a great place to start. For those of you interested in using personality assessments or skills assessments for your current employees, be on the lookout for part two, which we'll be releasing soon. Joining me today we have executive coach Terry Humphrey. Welcome to the show, Terry, it's good to have you today.

Terry:                                                 Thank you, Renee. I'm happy to be here with you and look forward to digging into this topic with you.

Renee:                                                 I'm excited for today's episode, but before we officially get started, we'd love to get to know you a little bit better. Would you just take a minute to share about yourself for our listeners? Maybe include some things like how long you've been working as an executive coach and how did you get involved in that?

Terry:                                                 Sure. I'll give you the short version. I have quite a few years, probably about 35 years now, of work experience in organizational development, consulting and executive coaching. The work that I've done is focused on developing people and I had the opportunity and privilege to work in healthcare for many of those years. So working with teams, executive teams of hospitals, to physicians, to physician practices, and a whole host of others. I've had that opportunity to really dig in with my clients and understand the types of challenges that they have. To your point, today is probably more challenging because of COVID and also just some generational shifts.

Renee:                                                 Terry, that's great experience. It sounds like we've chosen the perfect person to be here to help us unpack this topic today. Let's go ahead and get started. To kick us off, let's start with some basics. Can we start with discussing assessments? I know from my own work with you and with my team, assessments can be great tools if they're used correctly. There's so many of them out there, though, and that can seem pretty overwhelming, especially I feel like to managers. It's so hard to know what the best assessments are and when is the best time to use them. Let's start with the best time to use an assessment. Would that be at the hiring phase or after a certain time length that the employee has been with the company?

Terry:                                                 So Renee, that's a complicated answer. Assessments can be used at any time from hiring to development to team building and a whole host of other reasons. So the assessment as part of a really good process can provide you with some great information. One of the things that I often recommend to my clients is to, if you have an HR resource in your practice or available to your practice, or certainly when I was working with hospitals and HR resource at the hospital, is to put together an approach that includes your assessments, but also make sure you're very conscious of who should be interviewing, what are the things you're looking for, what are the things that make someone successful in a practice, and what are the things that you have to offer someone who is at various stages of their career. The assessments, though, I think are super helpful in looking at key indicators.
                                                       I would use an assessment in a hiring process, for example, to assess somebody's skill in order to be able to perform a role. For example, if I'm hiring someone who is technical, someone who has an IT background, there may be some very specific concepts and knowledge that I would want them to have coming in because I'm not fluent in that. I would need an assessment to help figure out if that person really does know everything that they're telling us that they know. I might look at someone's motivation, for example, or see if their personality is a good fit with our team, and that is a good use of an assessment, but that also takes some planning to do that appropriately to make sure that the assessments actually perform that function, that they're validated, and that they do not have bias. So those are some ways that I would think about assessment in the process.

Renee:                                                 So let's kind of start with the beginning of an employee life cycle. We're going to begin with the hiring process. You've hit on that a little bit. What are some of the more common assessments used in the hiring process specifically for medical practices?

Terry:                                                 If I think about conceptually what the assessments are, there are literally hundreds of assessments that you can pull from. But I would look at particular assessments that look at the specific skills. So if you're hiring a nurse, there are assessments that you can look for that would tell you whether or not the nurse knows some of the technical areas of the job that you need for them to know. And an assessment can be performed by a technical expert. So you might have them interviewed by someone who knows the job inside and out and they can help you assess. So it doesn't have to be a written assessment.
                                                       They could be literally bringing an expert in saying, "I know this area. I can interview for these types of skills and knowledge." For technical folks, for example, who are perhaps they're coding or they're a systems engineer of some kind or they're working in cybersecurity, there will be specific technical things that they need to be able to perform on the job, and those functions can be assessed either through testing or through using a technical expert as part of the hiring process. Am I getting at your questions?

Renee:                                                 Yes. I definitely think that's helpful, and I know from my own experience, you're right, there's so many different ways that this can be approached. It can be so overwhelming, lots of different aspects to look at. I think you've done a great job hitting on that technical side and bringing in a consultant is a great resource that sometimes I think we don't necessarily think about. Let's talk a little bit more, though, about how can I assess if someone's going to be a good personality fit or fit in well with our culture? How could I approach that as a manager?

Terry:                                                 I love that question. The phrase that I hear frequently is, we hire on ability and we fire on personality. Often that bears out. So there are a number of ways to assess for personality or behaviors. Personality is very specific, and so I'd like to use the word, behaviors, because behaviors are things that we can observe. We can also dial them up or dial them down. Personality is often associated with things where we have hard-wiring, but our behaviors we do control. And so the way to get at that, for example, in an interview situation is to decide what are the core behaviors that the person in this role needs to exhibit in order to be successful. That might mean oftentimes in a hospital setting we're hiring a nurse who has patient-centric behaviors. They put the patient first and they're concerned about the patient. They have an attention to detail.
                                                       One wrong medicine for a patient can be catastrophic. And also somebody who has good critical thinking skills. So those are things that we might say these three behaviors are critical for this particular role, and therefore we're going to ask questions that find out what someone has done or not done before in previous roles. So you might ask a question that is behaviorally based like, tell me a time when you have done this or tell me a time when you've had a bad experience. How did you recover from that? So there are a lot of ways to word the questions to get at behaviors. There are also some very specific assessments that can be used to assess those behaviors. So many assessments like a DISC assessment, sometimes a predictive index or some other assessments like those will get at behaviors that will give you more information that will help you ask additional questions and also see if that person will be a reasonable fit.
                                                       Now, it is one of those things again where I encourage people, don't play with the assessment and make a broad based decision that any assessment can be used in the hiring process. I would definitely consult someone who has an HR background and get their input about which assessments to use for your situation. But some of those assessments will provide you good information about whether or not this person is a good fit. Also, it will tell you where this person might need to develop and you can make a decision as to whether or not you have time and resources to help that person develop the way that they need to in order to be an even better fit for your team.

Renee:                                                 And I'm sure it's probably important too, any one assessment, kind of like your first impression isn't always going to be the end all, be all of what someone is going to be like. Same thing for an assessment. There may be people, especially if you're talking about a written assessment, there are people that are going to freeze up on that or be nervous about that as well. So keeping all of those things in mind I'm sure is really important to this process.

Terry:                                                 Definitely. That's a really good point. The whole interview is an assessment process. We're trying to see that this person can fit in here. How do I feel about this person? I often hear people say, "Well, my gut tells me." And one of the things I'll tell you about your gut is that your gut has a lot of information and experience. It also is something that you need to verify. So you can trust your gut but verify by asking specific questions and also if it's appropriate, use a formal assessment to make sure that your gut is telling you the truth.

Renee:                                                 Absolutely. Kind of hitting on that a little bit more, we were talking kind of about a good fit. Who's going to be a good fit or is the organization, is the practice going to be a good fit? But I feel like especially right now, culture plays a big role in the work environment no matter where you are or what industry that you're in. Is there a way that assessments could help ensure a good fit between the candidate and the practice's culture, specifically speaking?

Terry:                                                 There are some assessments that can get at specific cultural aspects. So when I think about culture, I think about what is the mission and the vision of the practice? What are the things that we value or what are our stated values and what does that look like when you see it? So if good patient-centric care is one of your values, I would want to know what that looks like. If integrity is one of your values, you want to be very specific about what does that mean. And once you're really clear about those things, then you can craft questions for the interview process that get at that. So if I link, maybe integrity means a high degree of trust. I can place a lot of trust in someone. Maybe they are doing our bookkeeping or billing or what have you, and their integrity means that they have strong attention to detail.
                                                       I can trust their work and I know that I can also trust that they're not taking money, right? So committing fraud is one of those things that you want to try and assess that out as much as you can in the interview process. So you create questions to ask about the behaviors that are appropriate in the workplace. And also you can ask them, when have you made a mistake? How did you recover from that? So those types of questions are great. You're not going to pick up on some of those subtleties in a formal assessment. So some sort of assessment survey will not always give you that information. But if you combine really good interview questions with an assessment around technical skills and perhaps an assessment around behaviors and motivation, you will have a much more complete picture and it'll increase your odds of hiring someone who will be a better fit for your practice.
                                                       So Renee, one of the points I want to make clear also is not all practices have taken the time to really work on a vision, a mission, or values. And that's certainly not an indictment. That is, though, a process that I would encourage every practice to go through for a number of reasons. One, it will give you information about who are the folks who are a good fit. And I often hear, well, it feels like a family here. Well, that's great. My family is a big Italian family. I'm the only introvert in this big Italian family. It's probably different than your family. So think in terms of what makes your family or what makes your practice click, what works in the practice, what doesn't work in the practice, and then get really clear about what is the vision for the practice. Are you interested in staying the same size? Do you want to grow? What are those things that are going to make you unique? When you go through that process, that's going to help you identify people who are a better fit. So we all get that option to create the family we want at that point.

Renee:                                                 Terry, that was really helpful information. Listeners, we're going to go ahead and link any helpful resources in the show notes, so be sure to check that out. We'll have part two coming soon, which will cover utilizing assessments for your current employees. And with that, we'll say goodbye.

Speaker 1:                                             Thank you for listening to this episode of Your Practice Made Perfect. Listen to more episodes, subscribe to the podcast and find show notes at svmic.com/podcast. The contents of this podcast are intended for informational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice. Policy holders are urged to consult with their personal attorney for legal advice as specific legal requirements may vary from state to state and change over time.