Ask
Clint 
Team Focused Recruitment, Selection and Retention of Quality Employees
1) To be successful in Recruitment, Selection and Retention (RSR), the organization must determine what the main reason is for lowering turnover. These reasons include:
a. Cost issues of about $2,000 per employee replacement.
b. Employee morale issues.
c. Customer service issues.
d. Regulatory issues.
e. Marketing issues.2) Once you've determined why you want to lower turnover, then you can have a common methodology for teaming to make success occur in turnover reduction.
3) Your facility must keep score on turnover daily. It's important not only to keep score for the facility where we end up saying we didn't lose an employee today so it is a good day. But, we must also develop score keeping systems for departments, units and shifts so they are able to set specific goals by areas of the organization and measure how they're doing against those goals. As an example, nursing unit managers and charge nurses must provide shift reports that include how we're doing on our turnover goal on a frequent, if not daily, basis.
4) Your retention program must also include passionate orientation. By passionate, we mean you must develop a mentoring program where a trained mentor is assigned the parallel schedule with the new employee. The mentor is given the responsibility and team support necessary to experience an appropriate mentoring process completed with the new employee. They will work off a sequenced checklist that starts with the things people need to know to be successful. The mentor also requires the individual to be involved in a return demonstration process with the sequenced checklist so that they have checked off that they know the information and the mentor has also agreed that they know the correct information on the checklist.
5) This passionate orientation process replaces any type of "throwing people to the wolves". It also replaces a process of "everybody takes their turn orienting new people". In addition, it also designs a sequenced process that can be used every time so we have commonality in the orientation process. This eliminates the different methods and skills that could have been trained in the wrong order by the different people syndrome.
6) Another area of retention is the ability to have good supervision. This includes specifically how we are able to conduct coaching sessions with individuals. It is important that people receive appropriate coaching vs. counseling to give them positive and negative feedback on their job. An important area of consideration is how the charge nurses and unit managers are involved in the supervision of direct care staff.
7) The facility also needs to have a process to understand the difference between age groups. There is a definite difference between people who are thirty-four years of age and older and people who are thirty-four years of age and younger. People 34 + have been involved in limited choices in their life and accept what they have offered to them in the way of involvement, scheduling, benefits, etc. People under 34 expect to be involved in team based scheduling, menu selections on benefits and most importantly, fun on the job.
8) It is important to have ways to assess "is the work at the facility fun?" One of the things most striking in today's health care organization is that the people that run the organization had an average age of over 34 in 1998 yet we continue to hire people who have an average age of under 34. There are many other break points below 34 where changes in values and belief systems are also evident in the workforce. It is true, however, that people that are coming into the workforce today expect work to be fun. They like to have spontaneous fun and the ability to believe that work can be work and fun at the same time. Many people from previous generations believe you should have fun, but fun at a later time, after you get off work, during your annual vacation, maybe even after you retire. It's definite today that people who are coming to the workforce expect the workplace to have some type of meaningful engagement process that includes fun.
9) To be successful in your recruitment process, it is necessary to base the recruitment effort on strengths vs. weaknesses. This means that you have to take the talented people that work in the building and interview them. These people interviews would include an objective based checklist of what makes them talented, such as they show up for work, work extras, have no disciplinary actions, have great customer service reviews, great performance evaluations, no absences, etc. After you sit these people down and have a conversation with them about why they work for your organization, you need to use them in your orientation checklist development and mentoring process. In addition, these individuals need to be involved within the talent based ads. You ask these people where we should place the ads, how we should position the ads and based upon strengths vs. weaknesses. Instead of indicating why we need so many individuals, we indicate that we are looking for people just like the talented members. We profile the specifics of the kind of person we're looking for and then we ask people to call for a professional interview. This allows us to base our recruitment efforts on what is going right rather than what is going wrong in the organization.
