6/4/09

Jessica Griggs

As you may recall, I am currently working as an intern in the Human Resources department of a hospital.  The project I am working on pertains to the selection system in place here to hire nurses.  I have found their selection system to be unstructured and inadequate, so I have been meeting with head of different departments within the hospital and asking them about their selection interviews.  I have gotten some very interesting responses about what they include in their interviews (ie - one supervisor says she looks for a 'sense of humor' in her nurses), but have found vast differences in the selection interviews between different departments.

 

Although I know each department in a hospital does different things, I believe it is necessary to develop a structured interview for these supervisors to use when hiring.  I am currently doing a job analysis on the position of a registered nurse.  From this, I plan on developing SME surveys and sending them to department heads to find out how important each task/KSAO, etc.  I hope to have these circulating sometime next week.  From my job analysis, I will develop a set of interview questions that every department head should be able to use when hiring nurses.  I plan on leaving a few open-ended questions at the end of the interview that pertain specifically to each department, but in general, I believe it is important that similar hiring practices are used throughout the hospital.  As I mentioned before, nursing is an extremely important field and I believe that by improving this selection procedure, more qualified, better-fit nurses will be hired, thus increasing retention and saving the hospital money.  

 

Where this is my main project, I have also been dabbling in other HR functions here at the hospital.  Today I reviewed applications to fill both a medical assistant position as well as a receptionist position.  I have been working on updating job descriptions and performance appraisals for the Cardiopulmonary unit here as well.