Tag Archives: hire

The Ins & Outs of a Medical Office Assistant

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What Does a Medical Office Assistant Do?

Regardless of location, size, or specialty, every medical office needs a medical office assistant — and most often, they need more than just one. Despite the already large and consistently growing need for medical office assistants, there’s still some confusion about what these professionals do on a day-to-day basis. Let’s take a closer look at the everyday role of a medical office assistant.

 

What Is a Medical Office Assistant?

The first person to greet a patient when they enter a medical facility, such as a clinic or private practice, is almost always a medical office assistant. Sometimes referred to as medical office specialists, medical administrative assistants, or patient coordinators, medical office assistants essentially perform the tasks needed to keep a healthcare center functioning effectively. Helping to deliver the best healthcare experience possible, these professionals may handle everything from administrative assignments to clinical ones.

 

What Does It Take to Become One?

Multitasking abilities, strong organizational skills, exceptional communication, and attention to detail are all essential to a succeeding as a medical office assistant. These professionals must be up to date on the latest record-keeping technologies and able to quickly and accurately input information. While many locations only require medical office assistants to have earned a high-school diploma, certain facilities may require them to obtain CMAA certifications or RMA registrations.

What Are Their Day-to-Day Responsibilities?

Medical office assistants wear multiple hats. While their responsibilities will vary depending on which type of medical center they work at, there are some job functions that remain the same just about everywhere.

 

Once a patient arrives, for example, medical office assistants may help by:

  • Helping them check in
  • Taking vitals
  • Measuring height and weight
  • Recording contact details and medical history information
  • Escorting them to the examination room

 

In between assisting patients, medical office assistants perform a range of tasks, such as:

  • Cleaning and sanitizing equipment
  • Cleaning and sanitizing examination areas
  • Scanning files and transcribing records
  • Scheduling appointments
  • Billing patients and accepting payments
  • Receiving and sorting inventory, mail, etc.
  • Responding to emails

 

Starting Your Career as a Medical Office Assistant

The role played by medical office assistants is critical to healthcare facilities small and large. If you’re interested in becoming one and connecting to the clinics, hospitals, or other medical offices with opportunities that match your professional goals, join the HealthCare Support talent network. Our healthcare recruiters will help you put together a professional resume, find relevant job postings, and ace interviews. To take the next step in your healthcare career, contact HealthCare Support today at 407-478-0332.

 

4 Tips for Finding and Hiring Top Healthcare Talent

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Finding and hiring top healthcare talent is your main priority — and your biggest challenge. Here are four tips to help you overcome healthcare recruiting hurdles and fill every opening at your facility with the right candidates.

Work on Your Job Descriptions

Job descriptions aren’t just a place to list the must-have qualifications you want to see in applicants. If you truly want to appeal to top talent, start looking at these descriptions as an opportunity to make your healthcare facility stand out. On top of detailing the experience, skills, and education a candidate must possess, explain some of the perks they’ll access when working for your medical center, such as:

  • Insurance benefits
  • Flexible scheduling
  • Paid time off
  • Retirement planning

Find the Right Place to Post Jobs

Pay careful attention to the job boards you use, because the places you post your job openings matter just as much as the effort you put into writing the descriptions for them. Along with the popular job search engines that any company can access, consider posting on websites exclusive to the healthcare industry. This will guarantee that your listings appear in front of even more clinical and non-clinical healthcare professionals.

Nurture Your Company Culture

If your facility struggles with employee attrition, you’ll have a hard time not only finding top talent but also retaining it. To make your medical center stand out to well-qualified applicants, establish and nurture a company culture that they’d want to be a part of. You can start by surveying your current staff, getting an idea of where your facility excels and where it could improve, and implementing actionable changes as soon as possible.

Partner With a Healthcare Recruiter

Finding top healthcare talent is a multi-layer process. Without the time and resources available to put in extra effort every step of the way, your healthcare facility will have a much harder time attracting the best candidates. That’s why more and more medical centers are partnering with healthcare recruiters that know where to find the perfect fit — every time.

At HealthCare Support, we specialize in placing healthcare professionals in both clinical and non-clinical roles across all 50 states. From administrative openings to executive-level positions, our healthcare recruiters quickly and effectively find, screen, and recommend top talent. And once we find the perfect match to fill your position, we continue to monitor their progress and offer continual support. To learn more about our search process, contact HealthCare Support today at 407-478-0332.

The Role of Social Media in Healthcare Recruiting

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Social media is no longer a place reserved exclusively for personal photos and social updates; it’s now a digital platform for building networks and sharing information. That’s why more and more healthcare recruiters are leveraging these channels to search for job-seeking medical professionals. Let’s take a closer look at the role of social media in healthcare recruiting to understand how these digital networks can connect your medical facility with the right candidates.

 

Sharing Job Postings

Healthcare recruiters use websites like LinkedIn and Facebook to share job postings, which makes it easier for your private practice, clinic, or hospital to be seen by even more candidates. As they track down the right professionals to fill one position, for example, recruiters can post your other openings in healthcare groups or related online communities filled with qualified professionals.

 

Promoting Specific Positions

When there’s a shortage at your facility, social media is the perfect tool to turn to. Healthcare recruiters can put extra focus on specific positions by posting them more frequently and sharing them in more online spaces. And to reduce traffic from unqualified professionals, recruiters can list key details of a job position — such as location, work hours, and years of experience required — right within the text of a social media post. This tactic will make your job listings better stand out to skilled, relevant, and interested candidates.

 

Quickly Scanning Candidates

Social media websites assist recruiters in discovering more candidates than ever — faster than ever. Websites like LinkedIn allow users to share resumes, portfolios, and certifications right on their profiles. This makes it easy for recruiters to search through an applicant’s work history and education to quickly decide whether they’re fit to work at your facility. Furthermore, by filtering through social media channels to target applicants based on location, language, experience, and more, healthcare recruiters are less likely to waste time screening and interviewing the wrong candidates.

 

Social, Savvy Healthcare Recruiters

At HealthCare Support (HSS), we use the best job boards and the latest social media channels to track down healthcare professionals with the education and experience to match your jobs. Once we connect with candidates, we then use a multi-level screening process and conduct personalized skills assessment tests to decide which recommendations are best to run by your healthcare facility. To learn more about our team of healthcare recruiters and how we can use social media to staff your medical center, contact us today at 407-478-0332.

How to Save Your Healthcare Facility From the Growing Talent Gap

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While there’s a constant influx of new talent entering the healthcare workforce, there’s an even larger outflow of existing talent leaving the industry. This poses a serious problem for medical facilities as they struggle to fill positions that are continuously opening within their practice. If your healthcare organization has a talent void to fill, take a look at the following practices that will help close the gap.

Carefully Fill Open Positions

Gaps can open up at every level, but the way you fill them will make a significant difference in the long run. For example, if a senior employee retires, you could either bring in an outside candidate to fill that role or promote an existing employee to fill it. If you decide to promote someone within your facility, you then have to consider who will fill the role left behind by that employee when they move up. To ensure that you hire a professional that can serve your facility and leave gaps filled long term, consider searching for younger talent. Younger employees have a longer professional timeline, which means they have more room to develop and grow within your organization.

Constantly Focus on Retention

A talent gap in your healthcare facility can force professionals in your understaffed workforce to work even harder than they already do. Until you’re able to put the right candidates in the right positions, you need to double down on employee retention practices. While employee satisfaction should always be a top priority, it becomes even more in-demand when your staff members are clocking in more hours, expelling more energy, and offering more effort. To prevent a gap from growing at your facility or stop your current one from widening, put stock in an employee retention program that includes bonuses like:

  • Wellness packages
  • Mentorship programs
  • Recognition perks
  • Team-building exercises
  • Performance reviews

Consistently Train Your Talent

Controlling the talent gap is easier when you’ve fully mobilized your staff. By placing more resources into training and empowering your employees, you can better prepare members of your own workforce to fill the most critical talent gaps. And by dedicating more time to continual staff training, you can better plan for the future needs of your facility, reduce the likelihood of under-staffing, and even prevent your organization from over-staffing.

Partner With a Recruiter That Knows Your Industry

At HealthCare Support, we’re dedicated to helping our partners fill any talent gaps in their facility. That’s why our team of experienced healthcare recruiters takes the time to understand the professional dynamic of your organization and the types of candidates that will make a perfect fit. Moreover, we’ll keep both your current and future needs in mind when selecting talent for you to interview. To learn more about how we can help you close the talent gap, contact us today at 407-478-0332.

Soft Skills to Look for When Hiring at Your Healthcare Facility

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Out of the many qualities that make a great healthcare candidate — quality education, relevant experience, and strong letters of recommendation — soft skills are perhaps the most overlooked. While these can’t be measured, graded, or certified like other skills, soft skills are essential indicators of how well a candidate will fit in your facility and excel in their position.

Whether you have some current open positions to fill or are looking for ways to improve the operations of your facility in the future, these are the soft skills to look for in potential employees.

What Are Soft Skills?

Hard skills are the trained techniques and knowledge that candidates accumulate over the course of their schooling, internships, and entry-level jobs. Soft skills, however, are the personal characteristics that candidates can also apply to their job, including professionalism, critical thinking, and creativity. While hard skills are specific to the individual duties of each professional, soft skills are useful to employees in any position, and they help to determine the way that an applicant will interact with members, patients, and associates of your facility.

Which Soft Skills to Look for in Applicants

You need to know that the next person you hire can perform, but you also need to know that they can successfully collaborate with your other employees, adapt to the ever-changing needs of your patients, and manage their time accordingly. Therefore, the top soft skills to look for when screening candidates include:

  • Communication — Whether it’s with a patient, third-party provider, or member of the same department, your employees must always clearly and professionally communicate.
  • Adaptability — Every patient, treatment plan, and medical claim are different from the last, which is why healthcare professionals must be able to adapt as needed.
  • Patience — Hiccups and holdups happen all the time in healthcare, which is why your future employees must be patient enough to provide excellent service at all times.
  • Time management — In the healthcare industry, workloads change on a daily basis. Therefore, it’s imperative that your staff can prioritize their daily and weekly tasks accordingly.
  • Teamwork — Being able to effectively collaborate within and outside of their own department is critical to the success of any healthcare employee.

Where to Find the Right Candidates for the Job

If you want to find candidates with not only the right soft skills, but also the right experience, education, and technical expertise for the job, partner with HealthCare Support. Our team of healthcare recruiters will find top talent for your open positions based on a range of factors. We’ll also use personalized skills assessment testing, screen each candidate with a multi-level system, and measure their performance with quality assurance calls. When you’re ready track down the best talent, call us today at 407-478-0332.

Attracting Quality Talent with Job Postings

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Attracting quality talent has its challenges (or let’s face it, you wouldn’t be reading this!) You could just seek the help of a local staffing firm (or better yet, ours!), or you might decide to take on the challenge of finding your dream hire alone. If you do, you’ll want to know the tips and tricks used by recruiters to help you get the process going.

Job boards are arguably the best tool a staffing agency has. But signing up and paying the monthly fee alone won’t make the magic happen. You’ll need to understand how to narrow your searches using string searching such as Boolean and be able to write the ultimate job description. Since posting jobs are typically the most effective use of job boards, let’s learn how to guarantee you’ll receive lots of qualified candidates!

Keep it Simple!

Job titles should not be more than a couple words long. They should be short and descriptive. Try to avoid internal job names if they vary from the industry’s terminology. For example, if the industry uses the title Call Center Manager – Chief Chatter might not attract the right talent!

Be Specific.

The core of any job post is the responsibilities section.  This section should tell an interested candidate exactly what they’d be doing in your opening. Keep the responsibilities concise and specific. Instead of saying the individual hired would be responsible for answering phone calls, routing calls, taking messages and returning voicemails it’d be better to say they would be responsible for managing a multi-line phone system which receives an average of 100-200 phone calls per day. We’ve quantified the latter description to make sure your applicants are comfortable with that type of call frequency and given them an idea of the pace of work.

Qualify, qualify, qualify…

When listing the qualifications for the position try to list them in order of importance. You may not find candidates that meet all of the bullet points on your list, but they might fill the top 3 and be just what you need. Limit this list to 5 items as too many qualifications can discourage even the most confident candidate.

How About the Perks?

Let’s give them something to get excited about! With the lowest unemployment rate in the last 50 years you’re in serious competition. You need to motivate them to apply by putting your best foot forward. This is where you can list things like the pay structure (where it’s base plus commission or bonuses), opportunities for career development, company culture, health programs and benefits, vacation time, company vehicles, etc., etc.

If you check all of these boxes you’re off to a good start. Remember to keep your post concise. It’s a job seekers market and most applicants today are applying from mobile devices. The goal is to capture their attention, help them envision their role with you and prompt them to apply. Don’t drop the ball in the last second of the game and remember to respond quickly to quality candidates or you’ll miss out.