Where to Find the Best Front Office Staff for Your Practice
When considering hiring for concierge practices, our minds often jump to medical roles: physicians, nurse practitioners, and other medical personnel. But, as you know, there’s more to membership-based practices than just their medical expertise.
One of the significant advantages of concierge medicine is the less harried, more pleasant overall experience for patients. And that experience begins long before they enter the exam room.
By the time patients see their physician, they’ve already interacted with other staff members — an experience that sets the tone for their entire visit and perhaps beyond. This is why getting the right people in those front-facing roles is in everyone’s best interest: the patient, the physician, the practice, and even the front office employee, too.
Today, we’ll discuss some oft-overlooked but valuable skills to watch for when filling this critically important position and where to find the best prospective employees to represent your practice.
The Pivotal Importance of Front Office Staff
A front desk person, or receptionist, fills a vitally important role. We all know first impressions can be profound and long-lasting, and it’s helpful to apply that principle in medical offices.
The front office person, or team of people, is the “face” of your business to anyone who walks in. They’re the first up to bat; the first to greet potential patients, new patients, and returning patients. While the quality of patient care in appointments is, of course, of vital importance, front office interactions have the power to elevate the experience into something beyond the typical.
Front office personnel set the stage for the patient’s entire interaction with your office. To a large degree, their people skills, or lack thereof, determine your office’s atmosphere.
Best Practices for Hiring Front Office Personnel
We frequently find front office positions filled by people with a more profound interest in healthcare than the role satisfies, such as a receptionist who is also an aspiring medical student. While hiring someone on a healthcare trajectory may seem logical because of their baseline medical knowledge, they may lack the necessary skills to be successful in a front-facing, non-medical role.
Numerous “soft skills” enhance the interactions between front office personnel and patients. Soft skills differ significantly from measurable, technical “hard” skills. The medical paper “Soft Skills Are Hard Skills” describes soft skills as “generic skills, essential skills, key competencies, employability skills, emotional quotient skills, and life skills… which enable individuals to deal effectively with the demands and challenges of everyday life.”
There’s an entire population of experienced, intelligent people who dedicate their professional lives to guest-facing roles. They enjoy it, and they cultivate the soft skills intrinsic to the profession. You just have to find them.
Hospitality as a Candidate Resource
Though it may seem counterintuitive, one of the best places to look for skilled front office staff is outside of healthcare, especially in hospitality.
The hospitality industry requires a great deal of its professionals from the get-go, and the application of those skills reaches far beyond hotels and restaurants. Hospitality hones skills that make excellent front office staff in concierge medical practices: perceiving psychological nuance, reading the room, picking up on demeanor or intonation, assessing when to joke and when to give space, and knowing how to respond to each of those subtleties appropriately.
If it looks like a lot, that’s because it is, yet it all falls under the seemingly small label of “soft skills.” And a front office employee who doesn’t speak the language of soft skills isn’t going to pick up on the cues your patients are sending.
Think about a particularly fantastic experience you’ve had at a restaurant. Remember the server’s ability to resonate with your mood, to steer you through the menu, to keep up the kind of banter you like, to deeply listen, to anticipate your table’s needs, and to deliver the product in a way that felt natural, and to maintain a level of enviable efficiency. Many elements are at play in hospitality, and the same is true in your medical practice.
Why Front Office Staff Don’t Need a Medical Background
One of the most significant objections to hiring from outside the medical industry is that front office staff need a baseline understanding of medical topics. And in most cases, that’s absolutely true! But it doesn’t preclude outside hiring as much as you might think.
While front office staff often need medical knowledge, that doesn’t mean it’s a prerequisite. In reality, it’s usually easier to teach medical information to someone from a hospitality background than it is to teach hospitality skills to an aspiring medical practitioner.
Many people with clinical, scientific, and mathematical inclinations are drawn to healthcare, and many with specific innate soft skills are drawn to hospitality.
Why does this matter? These differing baseline inclinations lend to expertise in certain areas. So while an analytical bent might serve a clinician exceptionally well, it doesn’t mean they’d make an outstanding receptionist and vice versa. However, a receptionist doesn’t need the same level of medical knowledge as a doctor or even a nurse — just enough to do the front office job well.
Even if this generalization doesn’t hold true in all cases, it makes sense to attract professionals who want the specific job you’re hiring for, rather than people who want it as a stepping stone to other aspects of medicine.
Where to Find Excellent Front Office Candidates
So, where exactly can you look for promising front office staff? Your imagination is the limit, but we’ve found universities, hotels, and restaurants to be fruitful areas for exploration.
- Universities. Students studying certain subjects are more likely to have the innate soft skills you need, and you’ll likely have the advantage of being the only medical practitioner speaking with them. Students are, of course, coming in at an entry level, which includes advantages like being able to train in good habits from the start.
- Specific majors:
- Hospitality Management
- Learning and Development
- Human Resources
- Campus job fairs
- Alumni resource groups
- Specific majors:
- Hotels. Hotels vary wildly in size, type, and expectation, thus providing a wide range of experience for employees. People with this background will likely have volumes of real-world experience with highly relevant, transferable skills:
- Front desk staff
- Concierge
- Valet
- Bellhop
- Pool staff
- Restaurants. Restaurants also vary, but the work is service-oriented and people-focused. It’s also often physically demanding and can come with hard hours. Many excellent employees might be ready to switch industries for better hours (no overnights or double shifts, plus the ability to eat meals at regular mealtimes).
- Maitre d’
- Host
- Waitstaff
- Manager
- Barista
Not Just Nice, but Skilled
While personality is essential, one caution: General niceness doesn’t necessarily indicate a strongly developed soft skill set. A person can be nice, friendly, and likeable and still fall short when it comes to other necessary abilities.
Let’s return again to a memory of a meal, except now recall a time when a nice, well-intentioned, likable server was terrible at the actual job of serving. Unfortunately, niceness did not equal skilled.
To differentiate between simple likeability and strong soft skills, remain observant when you visit any of the above venues, and try to notice when someone creates an instant connection with you or others. Do they communicate warmth and make you feel cared for? Do they deliver on the promise of wherever you find yourself — whether that’s a fantastic meal well executed, a cozy stay at a bed and breakfast, or a perfectly crafted coffee handed off over pleasant conversation?
A person who can connect and manage guest experience details provides a crucial service for your practice. And they can learn what medical knowledge they need just as they can learn the details of a menu or the nuances of delivering a world-class experience.
Frank Hernandez serves as the Chief Executive Officer at ROAMD, where membership-based, concierge, DPC and private medicine, all come together to transform the traditional healthcare industry as we know it. Frank’s experience in world-class luxury hospitality and network-based organizations gives him a unique perspective that he is passionate about in sharing with the world.
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