Hire for your culture
Feinberg could spend 99 percent of his time meeting patients
and working with current employees and still miss the mark. In
order to light a fire under employees he has to make sure
UCLA is continuing to hire those that have the right spark for
the culture.
“You need to hire people that want to care for people,” he
says. “The place that we always need to continue to improve is
that we can’t get so focused on [medical technology] exclusively so that we have a nurse that doesn’t have the time to sit
down and hold the hand of a patient who is dying.
“We need to balance the high tech with some high touch, so
we need to find those that really have that unique combination
of being both brilliant and human — that’s the challenge.”
Calling that a challenge may be a bit of an understatement,
but Feinberg says you can start the process by admitting that
technology can show you a bit more than you think. Instead of
continuously dealing with false positive interviews that allow
potential employees to talk about how great they are with people, UCLA has started using Talent Plus Software, an assessment for personality and recruiting used by famed luxury hotel
chain Ritz-Carlton, to get to the core of how people’s personalities truly match up with the job of taking care of people.
“You need to be a little more thoughtful in that process,” he
says. “It’s a very time-intensive interview, but in the end, it tells
you this is the kind of person that would go out of their way for
a patient or a guest, so we use that as part of our hiring.”
That doesn’t mean that interviewing should be thrown out
the window; it just means that Feinberg and his team see the
benefits of relying on technology to help them make the harder decisions on candidates they can already see as qualified.
“Often in an interview, everyone talks about how they want to
care for people,” he says. “It doesn’t necessarily translate when
they get the pressures of their daily assignments, so we’re trying to be a little more thoughtful and objective in using this
tool to get at that exact team because I know that you can’t do
all that very well in an interview.”
HOW TO REACH: UCLA Health System, (800) UCLA-MD1 or www.uclahealth.org