How To Hire The Perfect Nurse For Your Healthcare Facility
Owning your own healthcare facility is a big deal. It doesn’t matter whether you are looking after people from the elderly age group or you are looking after people that are younger, you need to ensure that you have filled every position in your business with the right people. Healthcare facilities aren’t just made up of healthcare assistants and janitorial staff alongside management; they also need an abundance of nurses that have the right experience and education. Nurses are the front line of your patient care and people who use your healthcare facility are going to base their opinion of your business by how they are treated by those in the front line. They’re the first people that patients see and interact with and it’s important that you get it right when it comes to hiring nurses onto your staff. You can’t just hire by seeing resumes; you need to hold a comprehensive enough interview process so that you can assess experience, competencies and whether they have the right personality to fit your business. You also need to have nurses who are dedicated in their profession and you want to be able to tell that on a first impression.
Finding people that share the same values as your organization isn’t always easy, and you will need nurses across a variety of levels. Graduate nurses could be given big opportunities in your company, and those with a little more experience could easily raise through the ranks with your facility and find their feet in a management career of their own. There is a list of requirements that you need to assess your nurses against before you bring them in for interview, but you also have to work out your budget in terms of offering education to them. Any nurse that is worth hiring will always be exploring avenues to learn and will be eager to continue their learning on the job. Nurses should always be provided the opportunity to renew their BLS certification online if not in-house. You should also have provisions for First Aid courses and refreshers with medical technologies and procedures. Seeking out efficient processes is your job, so it’s also your job to ensure that your nurses are adequately trained in said procedures. Once you have ascertained which nurses have the right education and experience, you can then start working out what you need for the right nursing hire. So, with these five tips, this is how you can get there.
The Right Fit. Personality is a big deal when it comes to hiring nurses. You need to be able to have someone with the right attitude and outlook; if someone comes into the room and is moody and surly and disinterested in their interview, this is going to translate to patients and can potentially compromise patient care. The dynamics of your nursing staff should also be considered, as you don’t want personalities to clash at any point. People have to learn to work together, sure, but it isn’t always about qualifications: personality does count. Consider whether the people you are interviewing complement others already on your team. If it’s a yes, then you have your hire.
The Right Character. Obviously, when you bring in your nurses you’re going to be looking at their qualifications first and foremost. You cannot hire someone on personality alone. However, you also need to know whether they have the same opinion and are on the same wavelength as you. Nurses should always be quick-thinking and compassionate, and interview questions like these can help you to determine whether the interviewee has the right character for your facility.
The Right Pause. Your interview style will differ for a nurse compared to another member of your team. Interviews also do not have to be on a time limit, so there’s no need to cram in as many questions as possible. It’s far better for your facility to be able to allow your candidate to take their time in answering questions for you. Keep an ear out for interviewees asking questions about the patient load and the facility itself, because this is showing an interest on the type of work they would be doing for you, while a candidate who is interested in the skills needed may be a little inexperienced. Give your candidates the right length of pause to answer your questions and you’ll learn more about them.
The Right Values. As a business, you will hold certain values that other facilities in the same industries do not. It’s important that you look at the nurse in front of you as a whole package. The most experienced nurse you’ve seen in a while could dazzle you with their skills knowledge, but not be the right fit because they’re more interested in furthering their own career than being a team player with the rest of the group. It can be off-putting to hear that when you’re so thrilled to have someone with broad experience interested in the role that you have on offer. However, you can’t allow yourself as a business leader to be blinded by fancy certifications, and therefore miss that they could alienate the staff because they’re overqualified.
The Right Needs. You can only hire based on what your facility needs. If your facility is large and high adrenaline in how quickly it moves with patients and turnover of said patients, then you need to hire nurses that are prepared for that type of environment. Experience is crucial and if your facility is slower in pace and looks after long-term patients, then you need to hire the appropriate nurses for that. You need to hunt for the nurses that have the right outlook and trait for your needs; if you miss this step, your hiring process could get very expensive as you repeatedly go through the hiring stages and never move forward from them.
Nurses are hungry to learn, to succeed and to grow, and your business is going to be a rather large part of that growth. If you can ensure that you have the right level of learning opportunities as well as the personality to be attractive, you can then bring in the best nursing candidates from around the country. There is no point in setting up a hiring process that is going to end up with you starting from the beginning. Outline your specific needs and give yourself a timeline for hiring. The last thing that your business needs is to have its growth halted by the fact that you can’t hire the right nurses due to lack of interest. Build a package to offer them that is not only comprehensive, but attractive in all that is involved.
Nursing jobs can sit open for quite some time, and it can be difficult to bring in the nurses that you need. It is in the best interest of some facilities that they bring in an outside agency to hire the nurses for them, instead of going through the process themselves. If this is going to help your business streamline the hiring process, then you should go for it. Ideally, you won’t need to as micro-managing the resume search is often soothing for managers. However, you need to look at what your business needs the most and go with it. Hiring the right people is going to mean you concentrating on what you want for your company and bringing on the best nurses to help further your business properly.
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