I am continually surprised by the lack of sophistication in the physician interview.  Accordingly, I’m never surprised by their lack of effectiveness.   Physicians do a poor job of evaluating job opportunities and hospitals and physician groups do a poor job evaluating physician candidates.  Far too often, a few years into the relationship, both parties are unhappy and feel that their expectations weren’t met. It’s likely that expectations were never discussed, and possibly were unrealistic.  One way to start improving

For some time I have wanted to write a somewhat politically incorrect blog series about the three types of people you find in most any organization, Builders, Cutters and Maintainers.  The underlying message is that organization leadership must require a “No Cutter Policy” to compete.  That is, Human Resources and Executive Leadership must be willing to take a stand and remove any and every poor performer from the organization.  In addition, poor and mediocre hires must be excluded from the applicant list.

I used to be the training manager for a regional discount retailer.  All training programs were in some way aligned with providing the best possible service for our customers. We definitely TALKED a lot about customer service. I like to think that it made a difference for my company and that, during my tenure, the employees were focused on pleasing every customer that walked in the door. But it begs the question - are companies just playing lip service to customer service?

Individual interviews refer to interviews conducted by a single interviewer whereas panel interviews involve more than one interviewer.  In the past, some researchers have suggested that panel interviews are superior to individual interviews because they allow more than one person to provide ratings (Warmke & Weston, 1992).

In September of 2010 The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a report on Distracted Driving fatalities. This term refers to the more popular terms "texting while driving" and "talking while driving".  In everyday life, it’s rarely given second thought to the repercussions that these tasks have on your safety.  In 2009 there were 5,474 people in the US reported as killed by Distracted Drivers. Unfortunately even if you use a Bluetooth headset vs. a handheld device, the rates do not diminish much.

The traditional methods of recruiting and selecting physicians to join an organization simply aren’t adequate in the face of healthcare’s new challenges.  If hospitals want to see the return on their investment, and physicians want to have a successful and rewarding career, we need to do a better job of ensuring a good fit.  We need to bring in physicians who are not only good clinicians but who are good communicators, strong leaders and capable collaborators.  There’s a wonderful article on this subject in the Harvard Business Review by Dr. Thomas H. Lee.

One of the most frequent questions I come across when telling people I specialize in helping companies establish ‘legally defensible hiring practices’ is “…why do companies get sued?”  If you scour legal texts, you’ll see that lawsuits have been filed for anything and everything under the sun, most of which get defeated.  However, if you want to make people like me pull my hair out, there are certain procedures that almost certainly result in a successful claim.  So with this, I give you the Top 3 Ways to Get Sued.

I was recently invited to present about a ‘career as a psychologist’ to a group of fifth grades at a local elementary school.  Not surprising, I was not in the top ten careers chosen by students who rank ordered a list of careers among the 19 career day speakers.  The top prize went to the pizza maker and the landscaper at the local theme park.  Still, my sessions were full and I feel the students learned a little bit about psychology in general, and I/O psychology in particular.

On behalf of Select International, we'd like to take this opportunity to welcome everyone to the long overdue launch of our corporate blog, Select Perspectives.  The purpose of our blog is to provide stimulating, educational content to our readers on a wide array of Human Resources related issues.  We are very proud of the research that we’ve conducted as an organization as well as the team of experienced professionals that we have on staff.  We’ll be tapping into that experience and research as we bring you timely and thought-provoking content.  We urge you to respond with your comments and begin discussions on the myriad of topics that we’ll be introducing.  Through a combination of guest bloggers and in-house content experts, we promise to keep the content fresh and relevant to anyone interesting in finding, hiring and retaining top talent.

Enjoy!

Kevin Klinvex, Chris Klinvex, Matthew O’Connell

Co-Founders of Select International