Preventive Hiring: How To Hire For Your Medical Spa

Nothing you do as an business owner is as important as hiring the right people.

But hiring is tricky. It's very easy to pluck someone that's immediately available when you need boots on the ground. But, I always keep two things in mind when looking to hire someone.

1. A bad employee always damages your company.
2. Successful recruiting means hiring above yourself, not below.

As technology companies seeking the best talent, Microsoft and Google have developed a number of interviewing techniques and systems to avoid hiring the wrong people. (The emphasis here is on 'avoid hiring the wrong people', not 'hiring the right people'. Why? Both of these companies feel that there's a tremendous pool of talented people that will be attracted to them and that the screening process is best used to keep sub-par staff outside the gates.

From  the book; How Would You Move Mt.Fuji Microsoft "seeks to avoid hiring the wrong person, even if this occasionally means missing out on some good people. The justification is that never before has it cost so much to recruit, maintain, and -- heaven forbid -- discharge an employee"

David Pritchard, director of recruiting for Microsoft says, "The best thing we can do for our competitors is hire poorly. If I hire a bunch of bozos, it will hurt us, because it takes time to get rid of them. They start infiltrating the organization and then they themselves start hiring people of lower quality"

The Google hiring process is notoriously long and complicated. My brother-in-law works for Google and I think he had 16 interviews over six months. A single no-vote of the hiring committee means you're not in. (Liberum Veto) Why? They assume that there is a huge talent pool of great people and that they can afford to pass on people that would be great fits in order to make sure they never let someone through who brings problems.

Hiring for your medspa:

I've tried to institute a similar process. There are benefits to multiple interviews by other employees. When an existing staff member interviews a potential hire and then signs off on them, they put some skin in the game and have a reason to help the new hire succeed.

Every new hire has an interview process that includes an interview with me, the physician, and the rest of the staff, any one of which can pull the plug at any time.

The purpose is two-fold. One is to select only the best staff. Two is to provide the new staff member some support. If existing staff member have signed off on the new hire, they're saying that they can work with the new hire and that they think they're a good fit.They've made a conscious decision and commitment to the business that hiring this person is a good decision. I've found this to be effective in curtailing much of the initial problems new hires experience. 

The other thing to be on the watch for is managers hiring 'under' them. It's very common for managers to hire new staff members that don't threaten them in any way. (Possible replacements for their own job.) Personally, I would never tolerate a staff member doing that to my business.