Over the last several years, HEALTHCAREseeker.com has achieved over a 99% customer satisfaction from the Travelers and Hospitals we 
work with. What can Hospitals learn from our hiring experiences that you can use in your own hiring of full time or part time staff?
It all started a number of years ago when HEALTHCAREseeker.com increased its workforce of recruiters three fold due to our tremendous growth. We needed a way to teach our new recruiters how to interview candidates so that we were consistently sending high quality nurses/allied professionals to our Hospital client’s.
First, we listened to hundreds of our best recruiters recorded interviews and broke down the process of why those recruiter were so successful at placing people that our Hospital really liked. We wanted to build an interview methodology that was replicable and analyze all phases of how good candidates are selected, so that we could increase our chances of sending high quality candidates to our Hospital clients. What came out of that work was a powerful interview methodology called SCAT that has proven to be one of our most valuable tools we have for quality submissions and a tool that Hospitals themselves can use.
SCAT stands for Skills, Compelling reason, Adaptability, and Trust. In each one of our interviews our recruiters are taught to ask questions that will help determine these key areas.
Skills for us really represents, is the person highly skilled? Our recruiters start by reviewing the candidate’s resume and skills checklist in great detail looking for what the candidate is really great at and what they lack experience in. The recruiter will ask very detailed questions to properly determine if the candidate has previous experience that the Hospital will need. Our Recruiters also ask detailed questions that we have developed to look for red flags. Red flags are areas that the Recruiter needs to dive into more to get a better understanding if the candidate has issues that will make them a problem for our Hospital clients. Our recruiters are taught to respect their intuition and that if needed, to investigate any hunch they may have regarding a potential problem.
If we could put the C in front of the S and pronounce a word like CSAT then we would have done it because the C is so important in the determination, if the candidate will be a good match for the Hospital. C stands for compelling reason. Does the candidate have a compelling reason for why they want to go to our client’s hospital? It has to be more than just money. Maybe the candidate has friends in the area that they really want to see, or the candidate loves to be outdoors and the Hospital is near great national parks, or perhaps the candidate loves the state where the Hospital is located. There has to be a compelling reasons otherwise the candidate may not have a reason to take the job or to stick at the job if things get tough.
In our business of mostly placing Travelers, the A in SCAT is a unique skill set to look for. Adaptability in SCAT comes into play because our candidates are frequently put into challenging situations at the Hospital where they need to adapt quickly. We tell our candidates that they can’t try and change the Hospitals systems and that they need to be professional to adapt to work with the Hospital staff. Adaptability also comes into play when the professional is moving a long distance away into a new environment in that they need to be flexible in housing accommodations or other new experiences.
The last phase of our interview methodology is T which represents Trust. We need to believe we can trust the candidate and that the candidate’s can trust the recruiter and the team at HEALTHCAREseeker.com. What we have learned is that as much as we would like to make a placement, that if we do not trust, the candidate has a higher chance of failing on their assignment, therefore, leading us to spend more time running around trying to fix the problem.
The SCAT interview methodology is only one part of our screening process. Other than using SCAT, another important phase is our reference and background checking. Overall, our SCAT methodology is the key ingredient that ensures that we are sending over quality candidates.
The exact SCAT interview Methodology that HEALTHCAREseeker.com uses may not be able to be used by the Hospitals for your own hiring of permanent employees, but the intent of the article is for you to think about what phases of your hiring and interviewing processes are critical to guarantee that you are getting the staff you want. You might want to consider building your own “SCAT” interview methodology that addresses the critical components of your hiring process.
Let’s face it, when hiring full time staff you often will have problems managing people if you did not hire the right people to begin with. Knowing what you want in your staff and how to go about getting them is critical to reducing people problems down the road.
