General Surgery Coding Alert

Are you expecting to add new staff members to your practice in 2024? According to the Society for Human Resource Management, the average cost per hire is now between $4,000 and $5,000, says Colleen Gianatasio, CPC, CPCO, CPC-P, CPMA, CPC-I, CRC, CCS, CCDS-O, president of AAPC National Advisory Board.

The dollar amount can increase threefold for positions at the executive level. And there’s an additional cost in both dollars and morale for situations where your organization completes the hiring process only to find out that the hire wasn’t the right fit, she says.

To protect your practice from unnecessary financial strain and stress, it’s crucial to base your recruitment methods on these five tactics to help you assemble your ideal team.

Know Who Should Be Involved in the Process

Historically, organizations may have considered interviews to be one-on-one situations with a quick couple of rounds involving only a few candidates, but including more people in the process has several benefits.

“Phone screenings are a great way to save time, especially if you’re hiring for a lot of positions or you’re receiving a really high volume of applicants for your open positions,” Gianatasio says.

In these situations, delegating a phone screening to someone else, like a recruiter or someone in your human resources department, can be better for everyone — and much less time-intensive.

“It’s helpful because it provides additional staffing, but you have to remember they’re not experts in the field,” she says.

If you go this route, make sure you prepare the person performing the phone screenings with some “rule-out” questions and a list of the soft skills you’re looking for in a candidate. For example, if the role you’re hiring for requires a certified professional coder (CPC^®) credential, make sure the recruiter asks about that and advances only CPC^® holders to the next round. Soft skills might include being a team player, being an effective verbal communicator, or feeling comfortable presenting information in front of larger audiences.

Be Strategic in Your Interview Style

Once you move folks onto the next round, you have a few options: a group interview, serial interviews, or even a meal interview. Each has its benefits and drawbacks, from making a candidate potentially feel intimidated by being on one side of a table and being questioned in a rapid-fire manner, to enduring a drawn-out and time-intensive meeting with team members individually, versus enjoying the more relaxed setting of a meal (which might be full of opportunities for faux pas or awkward moments). In any interview situation, however, you should try to lean on empathy as much as possible.

Remember that everyone’s time is valuable. “Consider how many rounds of interviews are necessary for the role in the practice. It’s also good practice to provide candidates with your expected timeline to hire and an outline of the interview process,” says Terri Brame Joy, MBA, CPC, COC, CGSC, CPC-I, product manager, MRO, in Philadelphia.

Important: Keep in mind that COVID-19 has rocked the world, including people’s comfort levels around various aspects of the “traditional” interview process, Gianatasio reminds folks. Where a face-to-face visit usually kicked off with a firm handshake, now, many interviews are performed online. This is especially true for positions that can be performed remotely. If you’re conducting interviews remotely, it’s OK to evaluate candidates on their preparedness, she says.

For example, if the role involves customer-facing or high-level provider-engaging responsibilities, and the interviewee logs into the interview while lounging on their couch wearing a stained sweatshirt and eating a cupcake, you can consider those preparedness choices when choosing a person who will be representing your organization.

Try to Predict the Future

While you’re still in the beginning of your hiring process, think about who needs to be involved, Gianatasio says. “Look at each hire that you’re making with your long-term organizational needs in mind; don’t just think about what the immediate needs are.” Don’t just think about the skill sets you need right now, but those you’ll want in the future, too.

Gianatasio recommends folks try an exercise: Close your eyes and imagine your team in five years. How many people are there? Will they be responsible for the same task(s) in five years? What new roles or responsibilities may need to be filled or otherwise brought to the team? For example, if your organization plans to expand to hire a new provider with a different specialty, or if you’re in charge of hiring coders, you’ll need to hire someone with complementary skills.

Aim for Structure — or Flexibility

If you need to hire a lot of people quickly — or if you work for a large practice that has a very formal interview process — it may make sense to have a very structured interview planned,

which allows you to evaluate multiple candidates by the exact same questions and standards. But if you have more flexibility, a less structured or unstructured interview may leave space to build rapport. You may have an easier time evaluating whether a person has that spark of passion that can help your organization grow in the best ways, or whether they’d be a good fit with your team and culture.

You have options within any kind of interview to evaluate a candidate’s appropriateness, too. Situational, behavioral, and performance-based interviews allow the interviewer to see how a person responds (or imagines they’d respond) in various scenarios. Some questions may allow a candidate to speak from actual experience and some allow them to imagine how they’d react. These interview approaches can tell you about a candidate because you can glean information from their actual answers, as well as body language or tone of voice. All of these characteristics help you determine whether they will be a good fit in reality, not just on paper.

Bottom line: Approaching interviews with a lot of preparation helps everyone, in the short and long term, and can even save you money by allowing you to choose the right candidate from the first round.