This guide will help you build a “Nursing Panel Interview Teams” to successfully interview, attract, and select candidates for nursing leadership positions. Download the 15-page guide here.
The transformational changes in today’s healthcare environment have increased the difficulty of identifying, attracting, and hiring nurse leaders with the skills to succeed in this new and evolving environment. This interviewing and hiring challenge is due to numerous, unanticipated, and rapidly emerging challenges that impact today’s healthcare leaders’ daily decisions.
As a result, candidates can no longer be evaluated solely on their past accomplishments and leadership skills. The ability to use critical thinking skills and adapt rapidly to unanticipated healthcare challenges are two essential criteria for assessing today’s candidates.
While most healthcare employers have already organized panel interviews, these panels must use more advanced interviewing techniques to understand the candidate and their organizational challenges more clearly.
A well-organized and prepared panel interview process is based on a consensus concerning the organization’s needs and, in turn, generates a more accurate profile of the ideal candidate. This consensus results in better hiring decisions and more successful outcomes. Additionally, the panel interview team will provide the foundation of a smooth-running interview process, a robust and viable process designed to enhance the candidate experience.
The ideas provided in this paper cover several topics, including:
- Organizing and preparing a successful nursing team panel interview,
- Build consensus and identify organizational needs,
- Questions for your nursing team panel interview to consider asking before the interviews begin, and
- Subtle interview techniques to help identify candidate motivation.
Background – Transformational Change
Nurse executives and their leadership teams manage a highly dynamic and widening array of challenges, including reimbursement and regulatory issues, transparency and accountability, physician integration, implementation of new technologies, and the collection and analysis of new performance metrics, to name a few.
These challenges require nurse leaders who can rapidly adapt, innovate, motivate, improve, and create nursing initiatives to benefit the patient, their families, the community, and their healthcare organization’s employees.
Complicating the hiring process are several additional challenges:
- Extreme competition for top performers,
- Significant workforce shift as baby boomers retire, and
- Reluctance by many of the upcoming generation of employees to embrace leadership roles.
While each idea in this paper will not apply to every organization and hire, here are a few suggestions to enhance your nurse interviewing and hiring process.
First of All – A Special Request
Here is a special reminder and request on behalf of all candidates. These people do not anticipate that their boss or co-workers will learn of interviewing activities that might put their job at risk.
Please use caution when handling a resume, leaving a voice message to schedule an interview or request references, sending an email to a work email address, or even sharing a candidate’s name with a colleague not on the panel interview team. Please protect their confidentiality as if it were your own.
Getting Organized
As a hiring executive, a successful hiring process begins with understanding your expectations and concerns about the position to be filled and those of the staff, administrative team, peer group, and physicians. Additionally, you also need to consider the candidate’s experience.
You will probably have conversations with some of the following people:
- Staff who report to the position,
- Peers to the position,
- Any inter-disciplinary people in routine contact with the position,
- Human resources and in-house recruiting,
- Senior leadership, and
- Physicians.
You will likely select members for the interview team panel from this list.
The criteria you use to identify which individuals to include in the panel interview team depends on your circumstances. You might want to hold one-on-one or small group conversations from which a shortlist of potential interview team members will emerge.
On the other hand, you may already have identified who you need on the nursing panel interview team. In either case, formally identify the team members and prepare the interview panel on how to successfully interview and attract candidates.
Consider including a difficult to manage staff member on the panel interview team. Adding this person to the team will enable you to evaluate the candidate’s potential by observing their reaction to this individual. If the candidate made a positive connection with this individual, you might have just witnessed one of their strengths in action.
Your goal is to identify and attract the candidate who most closely matches your ideal candidate profile. Make your decisions quickly, and hire the professional who is the best fit for the organization.
Sections in this Guide
The sections in this guide will help you create an effective hiring process and include:
- Background – Transformational Change – what makes interviewing different today,
- First of All – A Special Request – Privacy – protecting your candidates,
- Getting Organized – evaluating your interviewing and hiring resources,
- Building the Interview Team – who is on your team, what are their roles, and why,
- Discovery – is your organization ready to hire – you may be surprised,
- Fine Tuning – finding the rough edges in your hiring process,
- Interview Tour Guide – your eyes and ears when the candidate lets down their guard,
- Why Work Here? – good question indeed,
- Interview Team Preparation – getting your team ready,
- Evaluating the Candidate after the Interview – collecting and evaluating feedback,
- Not All Candidates Are the Same – how candidate motivation affects behavior and can lead to misunderstandings, and
- Additional Considerations – details, details, and,
- In Closing – final thoughts.
Download “Nursing Panel Interview Teams”
You have just read a short overview from the 15-page guide “Nursing Panel Interview Teams.” This guide reflects more than 25 years of experience guiding nurse professionals through career advancement interviews.
Get your copy of the complete “Nursing Panel Interview Teams” guide. Fill out the following information to receive a PDF copy emailed directly to you.