Featured Education Resource for Employers

Recruiting for Retention Part Three: Matching and Committing

You’ve done the hard work and found a candidate that may be a great fit for your position. Now comes the next step in recruiting them on your path to retention!
 
Interviewing in person or virtual, “interviewing” the candidate’s spouse or partner, and even preparing a site visit allow for you to determine further if the candidate is a good fit for the role and your organization.
 
And, these are all great opportunities for you to continue marketing your facility and community! The good news: the foundations you’ve laid in parts one and two will help ensure you already have everything you need to knock this step out of park and land your ideal candidate. Next up: Part Three: Matching and Committing
 
Topics we cover in Part Three include:

• Interviewing
• Virtual Interviewing
• Interviewing a Spouse/Partner
• On-Site Visits
• Negotiations

 
Interviewing
 
Interviewing is where you get to determine how closely a fit you and your candidate are. In today’s world interviewing can be conducted in many different ways, both in person and virtually. It is best to have processes for both types of interviewing and your interviewers properly trained.
 
Interviews can go through a series of steps from a phone screen to a panel interview to an in-depth on-site interview. It is important to use those steps to not only assess what you need from the candidate but to be able to relay information that may be important to the candidate as well.
 
We include a few strategies to help you prepare for and successfully execute your interviews. From asking some questions before you begin such as: Is everyone on board? Is your interview team prepped? Has the preferred type of communication been established?
 
We also explain a few different interview approaches you might want to consider using: behavior-based questions, data gathering/fact finding, and open-ended questions. Bottom line—we’ll show you a few ways you can ask for specific examples of a situation or task, learn the action taken, and get the result!
 
Virtual Interviewing
 
The way you interview today looks much different than it did even five or ten years ago. If you aren’t already conducting virtual interviews, you most likely will be in the near future.
 
We include some tips to help ensure both you and the candidate you are interviewing are both able to assess the fit between the person and the role. We also include some tips that can be beneficial to share with candidates so they can make the most of your time together!
 
 
Interviewing a Spouse/Partner
 
This topic occasionally raises eyebrows amongst our HR colleagues, as it should, without context. When we say, “interviewing a spouse/partner” we of course do not mean a formal interview with a candidate’s significant other. Instead, what we are trying to convey is the idea that as a savvy recruiter, you should know of any “decision makers” involved in your candidate’s job search. For many, this may be a spouse or partner. This could also include a parent or child. The heart at what we’re trying to get at here is that you should know who else is a key decision-maker within the candidate’s job search process. Why? This person’s opinions about which job is taken may matter as much as, if not more, than the candidate’s own opinion.
 
We point out some key topics you may want to get a read on from the spouse/partner viewpoint. We also give some practical suggestions for what skills may make a great spouse/partner “interviewer”.
 
On-Site Visits
 
The on-site visit is a part of the recruitment process often reserved for positions like a provider or leadership role. We include some strategies to help you make the most of the time you’ll have face-to-face with your candidate. You may be surprised at how planning an on-site visit may help inform other aspects of your recruitment efforts, such as how you’re marketing your community!
 
Negotiations
 
Once all of your hard work and well-laid recruitment plans come together into a successful match, you need to be ready to make an offer! In this section we cover some of basics to help you make sure you are prepared to make an offer, including a key aspect: who is responsible for, and able to, negotiate?
 
In each of the Recruiting for Retention guides, we also include supplemental resources to help make your R4R process as easy as possible. The additional resources that accompany Part Three are:
 

• Sample Interview Questions
• Interview Question Dos and Don’ts
• Sample Letter of Intent
• Virtual Interviewing Tips

 
These additional resources can be found in the same folder on your 3RNET Dashboard.
 
Here's where to find Part Three and accompanying resources on your 3RNET Dashboard:

• "R4R Resources" section
• "Recruiting for Retention Part Two" folder

 
Login to your 3RNET dashboard and check out Recruiting for Retention Part Three: Matching and Committing.
 
Part Three: Matching and Committing includes the collective expertise of 3RNET, which has been a trusted resource for rural and underserved recruitment and retention since 1995.
 
The content of this guide is based on content from 3RNET’s longtime-published Recruiting for Retention Manual. This streamlined, more modern guide hopes to further what the Manual always intended to accomplish: provide best practices by combining the years of collective expertise from 3RNET’s National Rural Recruitment and Retention Network for rural and underserved healthcare recruiters.