Testing New Hires

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AUTHOR:
Neil Baum, MD
Clinical Associate Professor of Urology, Tulane Medical School, New Orleans, LA

Author, Marketing Your Clinical Practice-Ethically, Effectively, and Economically, Jones Bartlett Publishers

Finding the right person for your practice is never easy. The cost of hiring the wrong person can exceed that person’s salary by 10 times. These expenses include time to find a new hire, correcting costly mistakes of the previous hire, and loss of morale in the office when an employee is let go and the other staff have to pull up the slack in the work load created by an employee who was terminated. Here are two suggestions that help identify the ideal candidate:
1. Ask the candidate to use their cell phone and watch how they type on the keyboard of the cell phone. If they can type using two thumbs instead of one thumb or one finger, you know they are going to handle all computer input tasks easily. One of the best employees I hired was able to use her BlackBerry and enter text without looking at the keyboard.

2. Give all new hires a typing test. A slow typist will be a drain on your practice and will impact the efficiency of your practice. This can be done at TypingTest.com. You might considering having a minimum performance on the typing test before consider hiring the candidate. You can use these test scores as benchmarks for the future.

Bottom line: Take your time when hiring a new employee. Consider a cell phone and typing test as a barometer of the success of the employee’s performance when he or she goes live in your practice.