How to Hire the Best Pharmacist, Not the Best Interviewer
Pharmacy directors & hiring managers, when have you hired someone on who did so well in an interview, but didn’t perform for you after the interview? “Hire slowly, fire fast” is a motto managers are often told. Here are 3 strategies to hire the best pharmacist for the position, rather than the best interviewer:
1. Check references thoroughly by asking insightful questions. This means checking all references consistently. Ask open-ended questions and situational questions, such as ones that delve deeper into what may not have gone well & how it was handled.
“Tell me about a time when [something didn’t go well]. How did he/she handle it?”
“What is [pharmacist]’s approach to handling conflict?”
“What advice do you have for someone who may be managing [pharmacist] in the future?”
Read on for the rest of this article & 2 other strategies to hire the right pharmacist.
When you are hiring, it’s also a good time to get a sense of the environment your pharmacist would work best in. For example, you may ask a reference “what kind of practice setting/work environment/role do you feel best suits [pharmacist candidate]?” Take into consideration that personal bias may affect the answer, but if 4 references mention the same thing, chances are that you may have a trend to look at.
2. Weigh a pharmacist’s capacity for strong teamwork highly, in addition to experience & skills. Use personality/behavioral assessment tests to determine how someone fits in with the team BEFORE you hire them on. Everyone perceives & interacts with the world differently, and determining the way your new hire prefers to interact with the world can help you figure out how best to motivate/manage them, as well as teach your team how to work with each other given each person’s uniqueness. You may use the Insights Discovery, Kolbe Test, Myers-Brigg, or other assessment tool to provide you insight.
In this competitive job market, it is easy to demand that pharmacists come with higher skill sets or experience. However, keep in mind that your hiring a pharmacist primarily based on skills may reduce the amount of training time & medication errors, but doesn’t necessarily lead to long-term fit.
The most high-achieving individuals working together don’t necessarily make for the best team and progress in the pharmacy. This phenomena happens frequently in sports, where not necessarily the most high-achieving individuals win games. If you have an average team but have team members who carry a positive attitude & work ethic, work well together, and serve under outstanding leadership, you will come ahead of a team of pharmacists who are the most experienced, clinical savvy, computer system savvy but who don’t “click” as a team.
3. Create a formal training program, complete with standards of performance expectations for your pharmacy or company (which include simple yet important expectations, such as how to communicate, how important it is to be on time, etc). This will be covered more in a future blog article.
If you hired the best pharmacist, but he/she is not performing for you, explore the reasons. For example–is the pharmacist overworked to the point where he/she cannot perform the job well? Do you not have systems in place that are conducive to the pharmacy standards you want upheld? Do you focus on team building on a regular basis to optimize the energy & focus of the team? How about a strong mission & vision for the pharmacy that the whole team knows about and is working towards as a team?
Comment below with your stories about how you’ve hired good interviewers but not necessarily the best pharmacists, or comment on the challenges you have with hiring the right pharmacist who performs for you beyond interviewing well.
