7/8/09

 

Jessica Griggs - HR internship

 

I believe I have all the information I need to complete my project here at the hospital.  Of the 10 SME surveys I distributed, I managed to receive 7 of them back and these have been used in the analysis.  Although I would like to have 100% return rate, 70% isn't so bad, especially considering my supervisor was surprised that I received that many back.  All of the nursing supervisors who returned their surveys to me have indicated that they would like to receive a copy of the results of my study, which will include a technical report as well as a structured selection interview that I designed.  

 

Over the past couple days, I have devoted the majority of my time to my main project here.  I have started working on the paper.  After developing a detailed outline of what I want in the paper, I have begun both the introduction as well as the method section. I have also been quite productive in terms of developing my interview questions.  I had been dreading writing the questions, because I was not quite sure what to put in them, but I used my SME surveys for inspiration and picked out the most important task and KSAOs according to the survey to help aide in the development of these questions.  For example, active listening skills was extremely important, so in one of the questions, the interviewer reads the hospital's mission statement aloud and asks the applicant to recite the key points from memory.  I also have a few practical application questions as well as previous experience questions.  I provide a scoring key for each question to aide the interviewer when scoring the applicant's answers.  Thus far, I have eight questions developed (the guidelines suggest having 5-15).  I plan on working on these a bit more, but what I have so far seems pretty sound.  

 

I also completed a small project assigned to me by the HR Director here.  In this project, I had to go through all of the disciplinary action forms from the previous year and put all of them into an Excel spreadsheet.  There were quite a few disciplinary action reports filed in the past year (more than I was expecting), and quite a few of the people who had more than one filed against them were terminated.  I also noticed that the majority of the individuals were written up based on a new corporate policy that pertains to attendance and tardiness.  This policy details the corrective action that should be taken if an employee is perpetually tardy or absent.  I noticed that many of the employees that were written up in accordance with this policy were also suspended for a few days without pay.  This, I am sure, is part of the policy and was implemented to help with the bad tardiness and attendance records here.

 

I plan on spending a few hours a week working on my technical report and hope to have it completed by the end of the month.  My experiences here at the hospital have opened my eyes to many of the problems faced in HR everyday, and I am glad that I was able to experience this.  My time here is not yet completed, but the end is in sight.  Hopefully those of you reading my postings have learned a bit from my experiences as well.  

 

I'll report back next week!