What if you hire the wrong people in your pharmacy?

“I don’t know why the good Lord blessed you, but whatever you do with it, don’t mess it up.”

-Walter Gretzky to his teenage son Wayne

Life and business have a ruthless policy when it comes to time spent: no refunds.

Once we invest (or waste) time doing (or not doing) something, we do not get it back. Staffing your pharmacy is much the same, since time spent recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, training and support a new employee will never be given back. Thus, bringing on the wrong person comes with significant costs.

If we bring someone in that turns out to be the wrong fit, we invest a heroic effort to coach without seeing the required progress. They cause turmoil within in the team, damaging the relationships we have worked hard to establish. Culture suffers and ripple effects among the business and patient care ensue.  

Since that person can be extremely difficult to move, the longer they are around the deeper the problems become. Having them consume more than their share of our non-refundable energy causes us to shift away from other important components of the operation.

What if we adopted the Walter Gretzky approach to simply not mess up?

This means we need to be meticulous about hiring in the first place. We need to treat onboarding new people as a rate-limiting step, the one that takes the most time and holds up other steps in the equation. Committing to this mentality will require a system for posting jobs, interviewing and hiring that I detail in previous articles in my Pharmacy U blog series.

The scope of this article is to convince an understanding of the critical importance of hiring properly the first time. By not having to restart the process after it has gone too far down the road, we are subtracting interference.

A focus on ensuring we avoid the wrong candidates can go a long way to ensuring we follow Walter’s advice and not mess up what we have been gifted.

Other important articles by Jason filling out this topic:

Solving the Pharmacy Hiring Drought – Part 1

Solving the Pharmacy Hiring Drought – Part 2

Line Change: When All your Staff Quits

Hiring: Our Biggest Problem

Is Your Pharmacy Staff High Maintenance