Hiring Practices in the Compliance Environment

EDITOR’S NOTE: Healthcare attorney David Glaser is a permanent panelist on Monitor Mondays.

Hiring is both difficult and important, yet we rarely discuss strategies for making it better. I am lucky enough to regularly present at Health Care Compliance Association (HCCA) conferences. As a result, I have heard dozens, if not hundreds, of presentations at HCCA functions.

But I cannot think of a single presentation I saw that offered strategies for hiring the right people. That surprises me a bit. If you think about it, hiring wisely may be the single most important thing that you do in your line of work.

You can establish policies, train people, and have the best practices to review claims, but if the professionals executing the tasks do not do a stellar job, your effort is all for naught. So, how can you improve your odds that you are identifying the best talent? 

Obviously, it can be very challenging to hire well. I have certainly had some spectacular failures in my hiring. But there are a few tricks I have learned over the years. 

I try to ask unusual questions or put a small twist on the questions everyone is asking. I want to have the candidate caught a bit off-guard. For example, instead of asking someone how they would describe themselves, I will ask how friends and co-workers would describe them. Instead of asking “what is your biggest weakness,” I ask candidates to tell me what traits they have that drive the people closest to them crazy. 

In a regulatory environment, you want colleagues who are critical thinkers. But it can be very difficult to determine whether someone is analytical during an interview. I think it can be useful to use real-world problems as a tool to explore a candidate’s talents. Pick one of the more challenging issues you have had, and then ask how they would handle it. Ask them about the most difficult decisions they have made at work, and what factors they considered while they worked through the problem.   

One of my favorite questions is “have there been situations where you have had a disagreement with a supervisor? If so, please tell me about the disagreement and how you approached it.” In the context of healthcare, I might even ask specifically about potential refunds and whether there have been situations in which they disagreed with a recommendation to issue a refund or to retain money. I am hoping to get a sense of whether the candidate is open-minded.

Do they listen to advice from co-workers and legal counsel, or are they too strident to consider other’s opinions? Can they see shades of grey? Are they a creative thinker? I also want to assess their independence, so I may ask if they would prefer to be told what to do or figure it out themselves. 

None of these questions are guaranteed to work, and candidates are certainly capable of misrepresenting their skills, but by asking for specific examples of real-world problems, I think you can get much more insight than if you rely solely on the candidate’s self-assessment. 

Programming note: Listen to healthcare attorney David Glaser every Monday on Monitor Mondays with Chuck Buck, 10 Eastern.