Find employees who fit
Atrium’s culture begins with employees who embrace the values of service, respect and compassion. McNeill calls for help to find them, drawing several people from his staff into group interviews.
“It’s helpful to involve people where a candidate may end up working and to involve, also, people at the highest level,” McNeill says.
For example, registered nurses who apply at Atrium may interview with their potential manager, other nurses they’ll be working with and even the vice president of nursing. The variety and amount of interviewers will paint a more complete picture of the candidate than one or two isolated conversations.
Besides the traditional questions about aspirations and expectations, McNeill and his team look for a cultural fit during those interviews.
“The key is really making sure that they embrace our values,” McNeill says. “We talk to them in terms of, not so much, ‘Is this a value that you can identify with?’ but really talking to them about their experience and how they can express those values and how they have expressed those values in prior work experiences.”
So rather than asking general questions like how they work with other people, ask for specific examples, such as how they reacted to a conflict with a previous co-worker. Current employees can pull other questions from their recent experiences.
“Several nurses might take a recent example of how we were dealing with a patient and a really concerned group of family members,” McNeill says. “[The nurses ask] how they would deal with those kinds of situations, how they’ve dealt with them in the past. It’s almost like a conversation.”
You should inform the candidate about your company, your culture and your values, as well. The interview is your first opportunity to begin setting expectations and requirements for new employees. But it shouldn’t just be a forum for you to preach about how you do things at your company.
“Really, what we try to do in these interviews is allow the candidates to do most of the talking,” McNeill says. “We’re really trying to learn from them how they’ve applied their life experience as they’ve dealt with opportunities that have been successful and those that haven’t, and what they’ve learned from it, what they’ve applied from those experiences, how they think that those experiences might apply this time.”
While new hires must adhere to the same set of values, McNeill treasures the diversity in how they apply them. In the same way, you must corral a group of individuals under the common ground of company standards.
“People come in many different packages. That’s OK. It’s not the package that separates one from success,” McNeill says. “Every package has the potential of embracing the right attributes. You’ve got to have a passion for helping other people.”
