Who you hire defines everything, The challenge that comes with hiring medical staff is disturbing, knowing that you’re to place the care of your patients on mere resume and listed experience, but how exactly do you hire exactly who you want and be confident about the choice you made.

The points listed below have been designed to ease the process of hiring efficient staff;

Define your requirements

To define your requirements, you want to be extremely specific about the job role, why is this necessary?

As a healthcare institution, this helps you filter and narrow down your applicants to the exact candidates you want, this also saves you time from interviewing the wrong candidates.

How to be specific:

• Job titles: Go straight to the point, avoid using words that may confuse potential candidates
• Job summary: Make use words that define the overview of the company and job role.
• Responsibilities: Outline the core duties of the job and ensure to emphasize responsibilities that are your unique to your healthcare
• Qualification and skills: Outline a list of hard and soft skills, this list should also appear concise to avoid attracting wrong candidates.

Maintain a Verification Process

Healthcare workers require a level of experience to have been hired, this includes passing certain field tests and exams that show certification for their practice.

You can verify applicants such as doctors in specialized areas and nurses on a platform like Medical and dental council of Nigeria, The Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria, medical laboratory science of Nigeria, Pharmacy practice in Nigeria, Radiographers Of Nigeria, etc which provides information on the confirmation of a medical practitioners status in Nigeria. You can as well see if a medical practitioner is sanctioned.

Adopt hiring for cultural fit(non-specialist roles)

It is essential to hire for cultural fit because you want to hire an individual who will work in line with the organization’s core values and culture.

This is essential because employees who identify more with their company are happier, experience greater job satisfaction, are more committed, and perform better.

Assessing candidates soft skills

For your patients to feel at comfort and promote the hospitality of your healthcare, your candidates should possess soft skills such as having a human-centered approach and have topmost value for helping others. Other crucial soft skills are; effective communication and listening, stress management, teamwork.

To assess these skills, prepare interview questions that target these areas, also pay close attention to your candidate’s answers and point of view.

Develop a talent pool

A talent pool is a database of potential job candidates, why is a talent pool necessary? Well, this allows for diversity amongst your employees and gives you as the recruiter enough candidates to assess from and have a second candidate just in case.

There are specialized software designed to help with candidate profile management known as Applicant Tracking software, known to categorize applicant’s resumes and scan for specific keywords to determine if the applicant should be passed across to the recruiter. Examples of ATS software include; Zoho recruit, Greenhouse, Workable and more.

Think long term

As a recruiter, you’ll surely come across candidates that are not fully fit for that current position but will most likely prove to be useful as the healthcare grows from time to time, you want to keep these types of candidates in your talent pool as mentioned earlier and keep them posted on new job openings which they will be fit to operate.

Ignoring your candidate applications will pose a negative image for your employer brand, you might not need them at the moment but there’s a chance you’ll most likely need that exact candidate with the resume you felt impressed with years ago and won’t be able to locate them. KEEP THEM.

Partnering with staffing agencies

Now let’s assume you’re new to the healthcare business, it’s advisable to let staffing agencies work with your in-house recruiters in supplying clinical and non-clinical talents from a variety of channels to best match available options.

Some staffing agencies offer great benefits that are sometimes even better than regular employers, examples of staffing agencies in Nigeria includes; Platinum Careers,  Pelican staffing nigeria.

This article was published by Netwalkers.com.ng/blog,  a software developing company focused on developing solutions for the hospitality & health care industries. We also support businesses with e-commerce solutions, our goal is to support innovative small & medium scale business in Nigeria with intelligent business without putting a hole in their pocket.