Candidates, Don't Forget to Interview Your Interviewer

Candidates come in all shapes and sizes. There are passive candidates who are looking for the right opportunity.  There are candidates that have lost their job and been out of work for a while. There are candidates who have recently left their role for one reason or another and are looking for their next opportunity. There are college graduates who are seeking their first opportunity, and there are people that are re-entering the workforce. As a candidate which one are you?

Any way you look at it, all of the above need to ask the question: “Which job is right for me?” Sometimes as a candidate, there is a necessity to get back to work to pay your bills, eat, and support your family. Sometimes unemployment comes so quickly that you don’t have the flexibility to be picky about the kind of role you choose. The economic climate is uncertain and taking a reduction in pay for a job that you are overqualified for may be a necessity. 

This being said, if you are not in the above bucket, the most important thing you need to understand as a candidate is that you should be interviewing the interviewer more than they are interviewing you. As a candidate, you should consider these 10 following questions before accepting any offer:

1)   Is this something I would enjoy doing? Do the job duties align well with my interests and strengths? 

2)   Is this better than what I currently have, or comparable, if you are out of work? There is no sense in making a change if you can’t improve your current situation.  You should never compromise for the wrong position.

3)   Does the company culture align with me? Are the people you would be working with people that you could consider friends outside of work?  Do they have the same values that you have? How is the dress code? Are you okay with theirs?

4)   What kind of future opportunities does the company offer? If you want to advance your career, does this company have these kinds of opportunities?

5)   What are their expectations as an employee? Are they looking for a Monday- Friday 8-5 person, or are they going to ask you to work late, weekends and come in early. For some this may not be an issue, but for others, it could be a big concern.

6)   How is the company doing financially? You really don’t want to go from one bad scenario to the next, so do your research and choose a company that is growing, expanding or has a real future. 

7)   Money. Will this position allow you to live the lifestyle you need and want? If not, you may become disgruntled in the future. If there are perks other than money- it still may be worth considering.

8)   How is the commute? If the drive is an hour each way, how does this fit into your lifestyle?

9)   How are the benefits? What kind of benefits does the company offer? How do they feel about time off? What are the holidays offered? Are their stock options? How is the 401k? Does the company have an Employee Assistance Program? Does the company offer educational assistance?

10)   How well do you think you would work with your manager? The number one reason people leave companies is because of management, so can you see any areas where there may be any friction? 

original post by Will Thompson

Current Job Openings!

TITLE    LOCATION
Director, Business Development    East, DC preferred
Manager Clinical Support     Boston
RCM Consulting Manager    National/Remote
Director of Enterprise Accounts    Boston
EMR Group Sales (5-20)    Mid-Atlantic
Business Development Executive    East
Sales Director      n/a
Pre-Sales Engineer    ATL/National
Sales Executive    Long Island / Remote
Inside Sales Rep    Long Island 
Global Marketing Solutions Consulting    Chicago or Boston
Marketing Clincial Transformation    Chicago or Boston
Marketing Solutions Optimization    Chicago or Boston
Commercial Marketing Manager    Chicago or Boston
Sales Executive, Clinical Education    Northeast
Sales Executive, Clinical Education    Mid-Atlantic
RCM Sales    Pacific NW
RCM Sales    Southwest
RCM Sales    Great Lakes -  IL IN MI
RCM Sales    Texas
Implementation Manager   NJ / Greater NYC
Sales Director, Billing Services    Central Region TX or CHI

MRINETWORK Employment Situation August 2012

This Week in Healthcare IT!

M&A, Financial Reports and Funding

Mediware, a provider of hospital ancillary software, has acquired Strategic Healthcare Group, a blood management consulting firm, for an undisclosed sum.

EHR provider Allscripts Healthcare Solutions reported a Q2 2012 adjusted net income of $8 million on $370 million in revenue, compared with a Q2 2011 adjusted net income of $15.9 million on $356.8 million in revenue.

PatientsLikeMe, a health information sharing website for patients, has taken in $2 million in equity from 11 unnamed investors.

Contracts

Cape Cod Healthcare in Massachusetts has selected Allscripts' EHR system and health information exchange connectivity platform; Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, a United-Kingdom based health care provider, also has selected Allscripts' EHR system...Montefiore Medical Center in New York has selected Phytel's outreach and population health management tool...Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston has deployed Prodigo Solutions' electronic procurement technology...Windsor Health Plan, a provider of Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D prescription drug plans, will deploy MedHOK's care management platform for members in 28 states.

SimonMed Imaging, a medical imaging provider with locations throughout the Southwest U.S., will implement Merge Healthcare's radiology IT applications...The Iowa Department of Corrections and the Oklahoma Department of Corrections have awarded a new contract and a contract extension, respectively, to CompuMed for its electrocardiogram remote interpretation system and over-read services...Anderson Hospital in Illinois has selectedM*Modal's clinical documentation and speech recognition technology...Regional Medical Center at Memphis has deployed Surgical Information Systems' perioperative and anesthesiology IT system...Lone Star MSO, a medical practice management services organization in Texas, will offer CareCloud's cloud-based software and services to its medical practice clients.

Product Development and Marketing

Prior Knowledge, a provider of predictive database technology, is partnering with EHR vendor Practice Fusion's research division to identify and analyze new public health trends...Standard Register, a health care communications firm, has partnered with managed care consulting firm Cody Consulting to develop a health plan-specific suite of project management software and services...Hipcricket, a mobile marketing and advertising company, is extending its partnership with ISIS, a provider of technology for sexual health promotion and disease prevention, to provide mobile health resources to teenagers and young adults...Integrated Document Solutions has announced a partnership to integrate Health Fidelity's clinical natural language processing technology with its health IT applications.

Global Health Voyager, an international medical management firm, has entered into a memorandum of understanding to market, sell and distribute Janus Medical Systems' personal health record management system...The William Lehman Injury Research Center at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine has partnered with the Brazilian Olympic Committee on a pilot project to deliver telehealth services to Brazilian athletes at the London Summer Olympic Games...Alere Health, a health management services provider, has partnered with AT&T to develop and offer a mobile health diabetes management tool...Healthland, a hospital software vendor, has licensed and will market 3M Health Information Systems' medical coding software.

Personnel

Edwin Miller -- who formerly held leadership roles with EHR vendors Practice Fusion and athenahealth -- has been named vice president of product management at CareCloud, a provider of cloud-based EHR, practice management and medical billing software and services...Douglas Theide -- former vice president of business development at the Gerson Lehrman Group, a marketing consulting firm -- has been named vice president for business development at Qforma, a provider of marketing data analytics services for pharmaceutical and medical device companies...Dan Welch -- former senior vice president of global sales and operations at Mitratech Holdings, a provider of legal- and compliance-related software and services -- has been named COO at HealthEdge, a health insurance software company.

Randy Fox -- former CIO for GE Plastics, GE Supply and GE Energy -- has been named vice president and CIO at GE Healthcare; Karim Karti -- former regional president and CEO of GE Healthcare -- has been named vice president and chief marketing officer at GE Healthcare...Ralph Reyes -- founding partner at KLAS Enterprises, a health IT research firm -- has been named vice president of sales at ClearDATA, a health care cloud-computing platform and service provider; Jonathan Russell -- who formerly held leadership roles at GE Healthcare, Healthcare Management Systems and other health care companies -- has been named vice president of sales at ClearDATA...Frank Ingari -- former CEO at Essence Healthcare, a Medicare Advantage health plan -- has been named CEO at NaviNet, a health care communication network.

Read more: http://www.ihealthbeat.org/articles/2012/8/10/health-it-business-news-roundup-for-the-week-of-august-10-2012.aspx#ixzz23AgPTjY5

Purple Squirrels, Innovators and Gamechangers

by Dr. John Sullivan, published at www.ere.net

If you’re not familiar with the term, a Purple Squirrel is the moniker that denotes an extremely rare and talented recruiting target. Purple Squirrels are valuable because they are extreme innovators. Once hired, they can change your firm’s capabilities, direction, and marketplace success almost instantly.

The benchmark Purple Squirrel was Tony Fadell, who conceived of the concept of the MP3 player while he was at Philips. But Apple recruited him away, allowing them to dominate and make billions in a product area (the iPod) where they had little expertise before recruiting him. This single Purple Squirrel acquisition made Apple billions and set the expectation for future market dominating innovations at Apple!

The most stunning thing, however, about Purple Squirrel recruiting is the fact that there is literally a zero chance that these valuable game-changers and pioneers can be recruited using the existing recruiting process at 99.5% of the world’s major corporations. For example, everyone would agree that Steve Jobs, even in his youth, was a Purple Squirrel, but the fact is that he was rejected by the recruiting process at HP, despite all his talent, simply because he had no college degree.

These purple squirrels are true pioneers with the capability of not only coming up with original ideas but also in successfully implementing them. Purple Squirrels are generally not senior executives, but instead, they are often mid-level employees in product development, technology, mathematics, social media, or the monetization of products and services. Each of these areas are essential for market domination.

For six reasons companies should develop a process for recruiting purple squirrels or more on why traditional corporate recruiting approaches fail, continue reading here.

SaaS EMRs gaining favor, says KLAS

 written by Mike Miliard, Managing Editor at Healthcare IT News

OREM, UT – More and more providers are taking software-as-a-service EMRs seriously, according to a new KLAS report. They're intrigued by the systems' lower price and easy maintenance, and reassured by advances in the security of cloud-based data storage.

The study, "SaaS EMR 2012: Is It For You?" assesses the performance of software-as-a-service EMR products from vendors including AdvancedMD,athenahealth, Bizmatics, CureMD, MedPlus/Quest Diagnostics, MIE, OptumInsight, Practice Fusion, Sevocity and Waiting RoomSolutions.


Its findings suggest that, in changing reimbursement environment where physicians are having to do more with less, the relatively modest hardware expenses and ease of use, combined with growing confidence in cloud storage continue to make Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions more enticing.

KLAS spoke with nearly 300 healthcare providers currently using SaaS EMRs to get an idea of which vendors offer the most comprehensive solutions. Providers identified four key areas that differentiated the vendors: EMR response time, customer support, product quality and "bang for the buck."

EMR response time compared to overall performance score:

"The SaaS EMR deployment model is becoming more popular for providers who want minimal up-front cost and prefer to give the responsibility of the care and feeding of the software to the vendor," said research director and report author Erik Bermudez. "Luckily for providers, there are plenty of good options."

Access the full KLAS report here.

How To Redesign Your Resume For A Recruiter’s 6-Second Attention Span

by mark wilson @ fastcodesign.com

 

THE AVERAGE RECRUITER SPENDS SIX SECONDS ON YOUR RESUME. 

SO THIS IS WHAT YOU DO.

It’s frightening. You’ll spend most of your waking life at a job, yet, according to a new study by TheLadders, the average recruiter spends just six seconds looking at your resume. By the end of that time, they’ll determine whether you’re “a fit” or a “no fit.”

“The only research that had been done in this domain was self-reporting surveys, which simply was not good enough for us to understand what drives recruiters’ decision-making,” Will Evans, Head of User Experience at TheLadders, tells Co.Design. So Evans led a study that followed 30 recruiters for 10 weeks. Or, more accurately, it followed just their eyes. Using eyetracking gear, Evans’ team measured what recruiters really see.

 

The result is this heat map tracking six seconds of someone’s attention span. (The darker the spot, the longer a recruiter’s eyes sat on that part of the page.) It’s absolutely jarring to see such a clinical view on resume analysis--a clinical view that Evans refers to simply as “a design problem.” Namely, it’s up to job seekers to design a resume that can fit within what are now known restraints.

“Both resumes and online profiles should have a clear visual hierarchy, following a format that matches recruiters’ mental model,” Evans advises. “To reduce the strain of visual complexity, focus on a balanced, grid-based design that gives affordance, has a natural rhythm, and tells a compelling story of steady progression in your career.”

He recommends liberal use of both typography and white space to enable effortless scanning of titles, company names, and education. And that approach makes sense when you return to our trusty heat map. The hot spots are routinely those left-aligned bold headings, and the recruiter’s entire workflow just cruises through the left side of the page. Meanwhile, any big blocks of texts aren’t read whatsoever.

So don’t consider headings pedantic; consider them what Evans calls “quick bursts of information,” or the type of information you can convey in a matter of moments. But at the same time, he also recommends to cut whatever you can.

 “A resume is not the time to write a screenplay or jam every activity or responsibility you have ever done in your previous roles,” writes Evans. “We firmly believe that a minimalist approach to the design that focuses on the most important data and removes all information that does not solve a recruiter’s or hiring manager’s need should be removed.” This minimalist approach should be supported from content all the way through formatting. And that means something very strange: To stand out, you actually want your formatting to conform. Even clever infographics should be cut. 

“Avoid unnecessary embellishment, or as Edward Tufte might call it, ‘chart junk.’ Visual elements that do not solve a recruiter’s need or goal should be removed,” writes Evans. “This may be somewhat controversial, but we have proven data revealing that visual resumes, images, and infographics are not a good idea--at least not at the initial screening part in the process. Save those for the hiring manager when you can present your portfolio and showcase your design acumen.”

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669531/how-to-redesign-your-resume-for-a-recruiter-s-6-second-attention-span