“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
As you work to grow and scale your home care agency, you’re going to run into this problem. You have a rockstar caregiver who is well-liked, and you need a second person to help with scheduling and administrative work. Do you pull them into the office and have them work as a care coordinator? Or is it better to hire that awesome friend you have from outside of the company? If you pull the caregiver in, you’ve lost a reliable and strong caregiver and gained (at least for the short term) a weak office member. Is it worth it?
How about this scenario? You’ve decided you need an outside salesperson to drive growth by consistently connecting with your referral sources. Your care manager is really pushing you to promote a scheduler who she says will be excellent in the role. She says that person should come from inside the company, so they really know the services. Is that true? Or should they come from outside the company, and be tightly connected to the long-term care community?
What I’m putting out here is purely opinion, but from my time managing a home care agency here are my thoughts on hiring from outside and hiring from inside.
The first thing I believe you should get clear on when you’re in the process of formulating a new position is exactly what that person will be doing.
It’s basic, I know, but getting that granular clarity is essential to the next step. If you’re simply replicating a previous position to double the capacity, the work is likely already done for you. If you’re creating a hybrid position, taking separate things off people’s plates, it can be more complicated. But let’s say for the sake of argument, you have a clear job description. Here are two critical questions to ask.
First, what strengths does this person absolutely need to have to be excellent at this role? Second question; what is more important? Is it knowledge of the internal workings of the company, things like the personnel and processes? Or is it more important that they are connected to external resources? Things like having close connections with referral sources and caregivers not currently in your company, or other resources?
Here is my personal rule.
For internally-facing positions, hire from inside the company, for outside-facing positions hire from outside.
Is it possible that you could have a potential “rockstar” salesperson working as a caregiver? Yes, but it’s not likely and if they were, they would most likely not have connections in the industry or training to make them cost-effective quickly. Remember, salespeople are going to need to be highly compensated. And if they are not creating value to outweigh their cost, they are dragging you farther from your goals as they “learn the ropes.”
How about hiring from “Outside” for an inward-facing position? Is it possible to hire someone externally to be a care manager or similar position? Yes, but there are some drawbacks.
First, you want to create in your company a very real belief that those who work hard and are committed, are rewarded with career growth and opportunities. Hiring from outside the company for an internally facing role throws a wet blanket on that belief. That action has the risk of discouraging your best performers who were wanting to move up the ranks, embittering them.
Second, those who come in from the outside don’t have pre-built relationships so getting cooperation from the caregivers is harder because they have no shared history to draw from. Is it impossible to do? Not at all, but it takes time to have the new hire reach out to the staff, make connections and build trust. And in organizations, trust is everything.
Back to critical skills…
Let’s take an example, that external salesperson. What are the critical skills or personality traits they need to successfully do the job? Here is a possible list.
- They need to be immediately likable and persuasive.
- They need to be persistent, driven, and have grit.
- They need to be intelligent and organized.
Just a note here, these are critical skills, not a full wish list. There should be no more than 3 or 4 items unless you are willing to spend a long time and a lot of your budget to find that perfect person.
So, when looking for the right salesperson, I would look outside first. If that fails, I would look inside the company. If instead, I was looking for a scheduler, that process would be in the reverse order. But in both cases, I would be using the critical skills list as the guide.
The upside (and downside) of hiring outside.
People that come from outside of your organization can inject new ideas and fresh perspectives. Oftentimes, people coming from outside will spot problems that are sitting squarely in your blind spot. They also can come with connections, friends, and other resources that they will happily leverage for your benefit and their success. Finding the right outside person can truly turbo-charge your efforts bringing new capacities and relationships into your sphere of influence.
But also, be careful, because people bring their old work habits with them. I would be very cautious of hiring someone if they had worked for a company that has a troubled reputation in the community. Is it possible that they were the shining star in the middle of that mess? Sure, it is, but they’re still going to bring a certain set of habits and behaviors that were normalized in that environment. Tissue donors get through very rigorous cancer screenings prior to being able to donate, there’s a reason for that. Imported cancers are seriously bad news, Organizational and otherwise.
In closing, filling the critical roles within your organization really can be a make-or-break choice. (And by the way, onboarding and integrating that individual is just as critical as the initial hiring decision.) It seems in our culture we fixate on the leader of an organization as if they are the key to a company’s success or failure. But more often the case is the team surrounding the leader who deserves a large share of the credit in any company’s final outcome.
As the old African proverb goes “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”