How to Find Superior Employees

The country is at full employment. Most of the really outstanding potential employees for your pharmacy already have jobs. Now, you have 2 choices.

• Hire the best you can find in the labor pool, which may lead to mediocrity.
• Hire good people away from jobs they already have.

The latter is much preferable, but how do you do it? Two basic and fundamental principles apply:

• Have a recruiting and hiring strategy that is unmistakably the best. Advertising on Indeed or Ziprecruiter may produce the results you want. Including in your ad the reasons people should want to work for you and nowhere else is a must.
• Create one of the 10 best places in your county at which to work, meaning that you have a place where the best want to come to work and remain employed for the rest of their careers

Attract the Best

To hire the best, you need to answer the question “what’s in it for me?” for each and every prospect. How do you find out? Ask them.

Essentially, to attract the best, you should have:

• A goals-oriented program as the basis for rewards that include raises and promotions.
• Perks that equal the best for competing jobs, whatever they may be for the same talent.
• Eventually, good leadership, which may be your biggest challenge.

Provide Superior Leadership

Your leadership should include:

• Giving a copy of that individual’s 30-60-90 days goals to each new employee.
• Good training.
• A system that motivates the best to do even better.
• Personal attention to each team member to encourage and help them do better.
• Good supervision, including if you see someone performing a task in less than the best way, show and teach her a better way to do it.

You should also offer better rewards for better performance, as well as give each team member the tools and training they need for each to prove how much she can contribute. The more he or she contributes, the more he or she should earn, and the higher up the ladder of success she should go.

Create a Workplace the Best Never Want to Leave

To create a superior workplace, start by posing this question to your best team members: “what should we include in our jobs and workplace that does not currently exist?”

And from your applicants, you need to discover 2 very important things:

• What do your best candidates want that they are not currently getting from their current place of employment?
• What do your top candidates want to find in the workplace that you may not yet be offering?

Two things should now become apparent:

• Twice yearly evaluations based on goals achieved and accompanied by raises, and eventually promotions give you a competitive edge. The raises can be small. They simply have to acknowledge improved performance.
• No dead-end jobs should ever exist. There is a system for invoking this principle, which can readily be based on what the military does.

Additionally, hiring on the basis of experience is bad business. You want them to learn how things get done in your pharmacy, not someone else’s. A better way is to select on the basis of attitude.

The above gives you a brief overview of what it takes to hire the best and keep the best. Unfortunately, the devil is in the details. You need to be able to ferret them out and make certain they are applicable to your pharmacy in ways that they are not found in any other pharmacy or even any other business that competes for the talents and abilities you seek.

Remember that today, you are not just competing for patients, but also for good team members. Good employees may be more difficult to find than good patients. Pursue them vigorously and offer them what they expect to find. Then you can even pull them away from any other job they may currently hold.

The Pharmacy Sage invites questions and can be reached at thepharmacysage@rxresultsnow.com.