Do you know how to play the hiring game?
Do you know how to play the hiring game?
Hire (and fire) the right way
Job loyalty is not what it used to be. There was a time, once, when people stayed in their jobs for eight years and longer. People expected to grow old and retire with a company. Those days are long forgotten for most of America’s work force, and even those who haven’t forgotten aren’t playing by those rules any more.
With unemployment at record lows, just about anyone who wants a job can get one. What’s the downside? It’s harder to keep good employees when more lucrative positions are frequently in the offering. So just how do you get employees to stay with your company, even in an industry with notoriously long hours and low pay?
Will they? Can they?
It sounds obvious, but the best way to get an employee to stay and grow with your agency is to hire the right person for the job. It makes no sense to hire someone who has ambitions other than home care administration if that’s all you have to offer.
The trick, of course, is making sure the person you are hiring and the job you are trying to fill are a good match.
Sue Romero, owner of Englewood, CO-based Susan Romero Consulting, advises would-be hirers to sit down with their staff and take stock of a position and the skills needed to succeed in it. Together, the "hiring team" should formulate a list of minimum skills that a successful applicant must have.
For example, if you’re looking to hire someone as a home infusion therapist, the person should be able to demonstrate the ability to insert IVs and draw blood. For an office position, you may need to specify that the applicant should be able to type at least 80 words a minute and deal with multiple phone lines.
Those are the "can" skills, says Romero, and are the easiest to determine because they can be "pulled off a resume and clarified with technical questions in an interview."
It’s the "will" skills that are harder to determine, notes Romero. "Will the person do the job? Does he or she have the right attitude for the job? These are the questions you need to be considering. You want to determine the success criteria of someone who already is successful in that job. What are the soft skills [an employee has that makes him or her successful]?"
Romero points to attributes such as a positive attitude, demonstrated initiative, and the ability to cope with on-the-job stress as "will" skills. Good indicators of whether a person will fit into the home care field are whether the applicant can handle unruly patients and whether the applicant will show initiative to take on work outside the immediate job description.
The right questions
It’s important to determine the "will" skills in advance of an interview. "Remember that past behavior is an indicator for future performance," Romero says. "The interviewer will want to identify questions in advance that will elicit how the applicant reacted to certain situations in the previous job."
Romero uses an angry patient as an example. An ineffective method of determining whether a person will be able to cope with an irritated patient is to ask, "What would you do if your patient got angry with you?" Most people know enough to give at least a textbook answer. A better, more effective tool is to ask the applicant to describe how she handled an angry patient in a previous job.
"You are looking for situational success stories," says Romero. "You want to ask open-ended questions. You want [applicants] to tell you about a situation, to explain something. And get them to elaborate on why they responded as they did. It’s so important to interview people toward the success criteria that you and your team decided on — the ones that you decided were important for your organization."
Romero cautions that the quantity of success criteria isn’t the issue; rather, quality is. "You don’t need a lot — maybe just three or four — but you want them to match the office and job culture."
Asking questions in today’s litigious society can be intimidating for interviewers. How do you get the information you want and need without crossing any boundaries? Henry Wolford, owner of Wolford & Associates, a management consultant firm in Irvine, CA, says, "You’re OK as long as you stay with job-focused questions. For example, Where you’re working now, if you were in charge, what would you change?’ You want to elicit from them the things they’d like to change and see if it fits in with your agency."
He also notes that it’s important to ask skill-specific questions. If you are looking for someone who gets the greatest satisfaction from a job well done, ask the potential hire how she would like to be rewarded if she were to win a competition.
"If the person wants two weeks in Tahiti and a brass band escorting him to the airport, he’s over the top," he says. "You want someone who gets recognition out of doing the job and would rather that recognition be private than public. This is a person who is close to self-actualization with respect to the job."
Wolford, like Romero, says hirers should start with the attitudinal skills and go from there, within reason. "The other things can always be developed," he notes.
When the applicant arrives, Romero advises looking for nonverbal cues to augment the person’s responses. However, she encourages interviewers to carefully probe what they perceive as negative nonverbal cues, "so you don’t make a wrong assumption."
As an example, Romero talks about the potential hire who sits in front of you with arms crossed. "If you’re talking about a conflict in a previous job and she closes her body off, you might want to ask a feeling’ question," Romero says. "Ask how she felt in that situation and get her to talk about it. Maybe she was uncomfortable and had problems dealing with it, or maybe she’s just nervous and will loosen up. Or maybe she’s just cold."
Romero says one interview is sufficient time to get to know the candidate, but she strongly recommends getting the person’s potential supervisor to conduct an interview as well. Furthermore, she advises "having a peer interview with someone from another department but with whom the potential hire would be working. You want to get an evaluation of how the person will fit into the organization from a variety of people."
Drawing other employees into the interview process not only gives you a better rounded opinion of the job candidate, but does double duty in terms of getting your employees to buy into the job selection process. "[Employees] feel that they have some ownership in the selection process. They helped bring the person in so they are more likely to act as a mentor and help the person become successful in the new job."
According to Romero, everyone in the interviewing process should have some input. It’s important, though, that the candidate be evaluated objectively according to the pre-determined success criteria. "When the interview is subjective, you are comparing the candidates to one another. You need to keep going back to the criteria and objectively look at it and evaluate each candidate toward that end," she notes. "You can even weight the criteria if it makes it easier."
After the hiring
There’s more to keeping an employee than finding someone who is not only capable but willing to do the job. Wolford points out that "when you have unemployment rates as low as we do, you find not only that some people who shouldn’t have jobs have them, but competitors are throwing lures into your organization to pull good employees away." How do you stop what Wolford calls "fishing in my employee pool?"
First, an employer needs to be aware of what keeps people at a company. There are basic physiological needs that must be met, and the higher people feel they rank on your "valued" scale, he says, the less likely they are to be pulled away to another firm.
First, Wolford says, are the basic needs of food and shelter. If you have an employee to whom you aren’t paying a living wage, who can’t afford a table, let alone to put food on it, he "will think of nothing else than getting a better job with more money. He will be gone the first chance he gets," he warns. "If you’re not paying competitive wages, you’ll always be behind the eight ball."
The Heave-ho Thumb |
The disciplinary action process boils down to these five steps: |
1. When an employee needs disciplinary action, give him a verbal warning and pull in your pinkie finger. |
2. If the employee repeats the behavior or fails to improve, issue a written warning and pull in the ring finger. |
3. If the behavior continues, issue another written warning. This time, pull in your middle finger. |
4. If problems continue, give the final warning and pull in your index finger. |
5. What you’re left with is the heave-ho thumb. (The exceptions to the heave-ho thumb rule are an abusive or threatening employee — who should be dealt with more severely, according to company policy — and unions. In the case of a union, Wolford points out that there is a contractually specified process to be followed.) |
Source: Henry Wolford, Wolford & Associates, Irvine, CA. |
Feeling safe and secure
Once the basic needs have been met, there is the issue of safety. This goes beyond the driver whose truck is kept in good working order or the nurse who is given safeguards to prevent against bloodborne pathogens. Job security plays a large role, too. "If employees are forced to work in poor sanitary conditions or deal with out-of-control management, they won’t be lured away by more money. But if someone comes to them who has been in business for 100 years and has a stable company, they feel they will be safer at this other company and they will go there," says Wolford.
Belonging is another critical factor in keeping an employee loyal. It’s a matter of whether the employee feels at home, explains Wolford. "In a situation where safety is taken care of, does the team consider me to be a part of it?" Closely related are esteem needs, he says. "It goes beyond feeling like part of the family. You can have a brother or sister, but if the other sibling is always being praised then there isn’t that feeling of esteem that comes from being part of a family." This form of recognition, he says, can be doled out through rewards and commendations, but a simple pat on the back and a positive word is often enough.
Finally, there is the idea of self-actualization, explains Wolford. "This is when you have a person doing what he was born to do. If an employee has that general sense of self-worth, [no one can] steal him away."
When things go wrong
Both Romero and Wolford agree that a progressive discipline system is a must for any company. This system should go hand in hand with documentation so that in the event a disgruntled former employee comes back with a lawsuit, you will be able to prove why the person was let go, and the steps and changes that person was given to turn herself around.
Wolford likens the firing process to something he calls the "heave-ho thumb," a tool not to be whipped out at the first mistake or sign of trouble, he cautions. Still, when poor work habits or disciplinary problems have escalated beyond the acceptable levels, you can put the "heave-ho thumb" into action in a matter of five simple steps including verbal and written warnings. (See box, above left.)
He points out that these five steps are not written in stone. People can rectify behavior for some time and then begin their slide back down the slippery slope. "A number of things can cause a person to go bad: drugs, personal trauma," he says. "The trick is to use progressive discipline as a coaching tool. The person might respond to the first warning and improve, and then you go back to square one. It’s a two-way street. A person can go halfway down the path and then come back. Some people improve permanently; some people improve temporarily; and some people you will have to let go."
The progressive discipline system may be on a longer timetable for more senior employees than for newer ones, says Romero, but it’s important that in either case you inform the employee that you are documenting your performance concerns and that failure to perform the required changes could lead to termination.
Before you take that step, Romero suggests you "step back and figure out what happened. Did I communicate my expectations? Did I provide adequate training? Can he handle the technical skills?’ If you have given someone a fair shot, then you need to move forward quickly and with discipline."
"You want to document specific facts and occurrences and dates, and if it’s only a verbal warning, you want to make a note of what was said, and the date and time. This way the person you’re firing can hardly say she didn’t know it was coming. Anyone with $10 and a [phone number of an attorney] can file a lawsuit," Wolford points out. "People get sued because they go around year after year writing up perfunctory performance reviews. They are putting up with a lot of garbage and then one day they blow up and fire the employee. Then, when [employers] go back to look into the files, there are only glowing reviews."
Romero has found in her experience that sometimes the person about to be fired is relieved. "I’ve heard a few people say, Thanks. I know this job isn’t for me, and I’d like to move on,’" she says.
Firing an employee can be stressful for everyone involved. Other employees are not oblivious to the signs of trouble, and the stress only escalates when the process is drawn out. "Too many times, managers are so hesitant and self-blaming that they spend more time beating themselves up for employee problems than dealing with [them]. It’s important that the employee in question comes through the process with her self-esteem intact, so you want to move quickly, but fairly, through the process," she says.
Romero encourages all managers to conduct an exit interview. If they feel too uncomfortable to do it themselves, she urges getting someone in human resources or even an outside consultant to do it. "Oftentimes, the stated reason a person is leaving is not the real one. Once you get to the root of the problem, then you can start altering your selection criteria to adjust for this," she says. "Maybe you aren’t interviewing for the right criteria and, therefore, [employees] aren’t fitting into your company culture.
"There will be turnover. It’s guaranteed," she continues. "But you can try to minimize some of the interviewing stress and better your chances to hire right the first time."
[For more information, contact:
• Sue Romero, Owner, Susan Romero Consulting, 5891 E. Geddes Circle, Englewood, CO 80112. Telephone: (303) 741-9275. Web site: www.romero consulting.com.
• Henry Wolford, Owner, Wolford & Associates, 24 W. Yale Loop, P.O. Box 50755, Irvine, CA 92604. Telephone: (949) 551-2991. Web site: www.hme consultant.com.]
Mental Health Resources |
National Alliance for the Mentally Ill |
2101 Wilson Blvd., Suite 302 |
Arlington, VA 22201 |
Telephone: (800) 950-6264 |
Web site: www.nami.org |
National Depressive and Manic Depressive Association |
53 W. Jackson Blvd. Room 618 |
Chicago, IL 60604 |
Telephone: (800) 82-NDMDA |
Web site: www.ndmda.org |
National Mental Health Association |
National Mental Health Information Center |
1021 Prince St. |
Alexandria, VA 23314-2971 |
Telephone: (800) 969-6642 |
Web site: www.nmha.org |
National Foundation for Depressive Illness Inc. |
P.O. Box 2257 |
New York, NY 20116-2257 |
Telephone: (800) 248-4344 |
Web site: www.depression.org |
(For more information on depression and related conditions, see patient insert on depression, pp. 101-104.) |
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