Top Hiring Tips: An Interview With Joanne Mansour

Viewpoint is a column created by AAOE® specifically for ophthalmologists and leaders in practice management.

Ophthalmic practices face an unprecedented shortage of practice staff. AAOE reached out to Joanne Mansour, OCSR, practice administrator at the Virginia Retina Center, who has successfully hired and retained new staff.

What are your top tips for hiring?

• Be open to interview applicants with a greater diversity in terms of their work backgrounds.
• In the past, many of us prioritized applicants who had an ophthalmic background. But in today’s practice many of those candidates are no longer available.
• Interview more people than normal.
• Focus on so-called “soft” skills rather than “hard” skills. An overwhelming majority ― 93% of employers ― say "soft” skills play a critical role in their decision about whom they want to hire," said Ian Siegel, co-founder and CEO of ZipRecruiter, in the company's recent report, “The Job Market Outlook for Grads.”
• An example of a soft skill is knowing how to deal with patients or co-workers in an emotionally intelligent way. Hard skills involve knowing how certain software or medical device works. Have that nontraditional applicant in for an interview. You might be surprised.
• Look for good customer service, attention to detail, maturity, an ability to get along with others and longevity with a past job.
• Think more strategically about the actual skill sets applicants may have had in their recent jobs, and consider how those skills might be transferable to what they would do in your ophthalmic clinic.

You mentioned that your favorite hire was a real estate agent. What prompted you to realize her potential?

This applicant immediately impressed our practice with her soft skills and eagerness to learn. Her prior experience as a real estate agent made her a good fit for our practice's desired level of maturity and customer service skills. During the interview, we discovered that she had worked as a radiology tech 20 years prior, which was not included in her resume. She has become a skilled ophthalmic technician and is currently learning diagnostic imaging and serves as our back-up study coordinator for clinical trials.

This experience really turned around our hiring practice: We now prioritize these three strategies:
 

• Give more weight to soft skills. 
• Train for hard skills since you can grow a staff person’s skills to align with the practice’s needs. No reverse engineering required!
• Provide ongoing education to boost their skills.

How do you manage your onboarding with your new hiring approach?

Hiring people with little or no ophthalmic or medical experience definitely requires a different approach. From the onboarding to actual job training, you’ll need to start from the very basics.

I now look for opportunities wherever I can. For example, we faced the potential loss of a valued employee who had to move out of state due to her husband’s job relocation. Instead of losing her, we found a way to pivot and retain her as our remote trainer to:

• Develop a training protocol for the practice.
• Spend time with a new employee during their first few days. She lets them know what the training process is and serves as their go-to person for any questions. These meetings are conducted over Zoom which helps to build rapport and relationships.
• Create checklists and sign-off sheets by synthesizing the existing material and improve the process. The checklists ensure that nothing is missed during training, which is particularly important in a busy clinic with experienced staff trading off as trainers.
• Coordinate with an in-house staff trainer to show a new employee a task and sign off when this has been done via the checklist. The new employee has to perform the task 10 times with supervision and record the patients’ names so that the practice can follow up with any issues with their records.
• Be always available for a trainee’s questions and do chart audits to tweak the process. This process is particularly helpful as she doesn't have to interrupt a patient interaction to answer a question.

What strategies does your practice employ to retain both old and new staff?

We have been trying many things to make our work environment the most positive place we possibly can. One of my favorite strategies that we’ve recently started is a “director of fun” who finds activities staff can do outside of the practice – some of which are financed by the practice. Other strategies include:

• Make a big deal about new employees and share why they are valuable. We do the same when we introduce our existing staff to the new staff.
• Implement monthly staff meetings to address what is and isn’t working. Focus on working out possible solutions. It has taken time, but now everyone recognizes these monthly meetings are a valuable opportunity to make the practice run more smoothly.
• Host regular lunches with the staff that are paid for by the practice — this boosts morale and shows that you value what they do.
• Write handwritten notes to the staff thanking them. Our physicians write them, and I try to do this regularly as well, including gift cards to recognize behavior and things done above and beyond the call of duty.
• Assist staff in getting certified in clinical trials. Whenever any member of our staff gets a new certification, a group email goes out recognizing their achievement.
• Encourage and finance continuing education for staff. We also acknowledge this publicly, especially as it relates to patient care. For example, we’ve recognized our staff members who are learning phlebotomy or medical Spanish.
• Purchase logo jackets for staff to wear in clinic. It’s incredibly popular.
• Engage in random acts of kindness to show your appreciation.

Any final tips and suggestions?

• Ask nontraditional questions when you interview. Don’t just ask about previous work experience. Ask them what they like to do in their free time. Sometimes you learn about hobbies and other activities that directly relate to your open position. We learned from one applicant that she loved photography. She ended up being excellent at diagnostics as her attention to detail from her photography background had a direct application to her work in the clinic.
• Do your interviews in pairs. One of our staff does the initial interview. We intentionally build in extra time for the first interviewer to spend time with the applicant while “waiting” around 10 -15 minutes for the busy second interviewer to be available. During this extended first interview, we typically learn the most about the individual. The interviewer may ask, “So how was your weekend?” and then lets the conversation continue. This informal time has clarified on several occasions who is the better fit, and it’s now an essential part of our hiring process.
• If the position requires travel to more than one office, do an interview on a different day in the satellite office with another staff person. If the candidate shows up for the second interview and isn’t too shell shocked about the distance, we have confidence that they can actually do the job. When you tell applicants there is travel involved, many think this won’t apply to them. It’s critical to have them understand the impact of travel from the beginning.
• Personal references by current employees are always considered. We emphasize to all applicants that we are trying to find someone who is a good fit for our practice culture as well as for the open position. Both the referring staff person and the applicant understand that selection is based on those criteria, and it’s not personal if they don’t seem to be a good fit.