Practice Management Alert

Don’t land flatfooted with a new hire who’s not prepared to do the job.

When you’re hiring a candidate for a professional role that requires certain knowledge or certification, you may want to include a skills screening as part of your application or the interview process.

For example, if you’re hiring a coder, you may want to include some scenarios that applicants code to evaluate their skill and knowledge of coding. If you’re hiring someone for clinical documentation improvement (CDI), you may want to ask applicants to include a miniature mock-up presentation with two or three slides that might demonstrate their ability to gauge appropriate content — and make sure everything is spelled correctly and their messaging is clear.

What should you avoid? Asking applicants — not new hires — to complete a coding assessment that stretches on for two or three hours may be too much, said Colleen Gianatasio, CPC, CPCO, CPC-P, CPMA, CPC-I, CRC, CCS, CCDS-O, in a December 2021 AAPC ELEVATE Leadership Conference Session.

Applicants have not made any commitment to an organization and asking them to invest that kind of time and effort is asking a lot.Gianatasio said she used to just ask folks selected for interviews to submit mock-up presentation slides, but eventually realized that the 2D version wasn’t enough — she wanted to take five minutes to hear interviewees present, as if to a provider, as well.

“In that time, I can see if they can articulate clearly the coding concepts that we’re trying to convey, and I’m also able to ask some questions that a challenging provider might ask,” she said.

She also recommended that organizations take the time to evaluate the written communication skills of any customer-facing candidates. In business, importance of writing and presenting oneself through the written word can’t be understated, she said.

“Unfortunately, I’ve made hires where they’ve come through the traditional interview process, and I wasn’t aware of their lack of quality communication skills in the written form,” she said. She suggested creating a short assessment to gauge how interviewees might respond to an email from a provider and then check the mock-up responses for salutation and title choices, and correct grammar and spelling, and concise communication.

If you do implement a screening process, build feedback into it. “Even if they bombed the test, be like, here’s where you need to go back and do better; this is the reason we didn’t choose you, based on your assessment,” she said. “Feedback is so important; it’s a fair thing to do if you’re using people’s time.”