When you review a candidate with decades of healthcare experience on their resume, do you focus on where they have been or whether they are a good fit for you? The difference in your hiring focus could define your next chapter.
It’s tempting to assume that extensive industry experience equals a guaranteed great fit when hiring a healthcare executive. After all, someone who has been in the field for 20 years must know the ropes, right? Qualifications matter, but they should be a starting point. Go deeper to hire someone who thrives within your organization and can lead you into the future.
Overfocusing on Experience
If you’ve ever hired someone based on experience alone, only to be disappointed, you know that credentials aren’t the whole story. Relying solely on healthcare experience has a couple of pitfalls that can derail your entire organization.
Meaningless Titles
A big title—Chief Medical Officer, VP of Nursing, Hospital Director—can seem like expertise when you look at a resume. If you are shopping for experience, you might be shopping for candidates with impressive-sounding titles.
But titles are context-dependent. The VP of clinical services in a small facility will have managed details across the clinic, while the radiology director from a large academic center will have specific and intense knowledge of managing their department.
The lesson? Titles don’t tell enough about your candidates’ experiences. You need to understand what they did, what challenges they faced, how they navigated challenges, what they learned, and what they need to learn to evaluate if their experience fits you.
Bad Habits
Some highly experienced candidates operate in the same environment for years, and they bring deeply ingrained habits to your team. That doesn’t mean you dismiss experience. It means you evaluate whether the candidate has the mindset and flexibility you need to go with their years in the field.
For example, a physician leader from a large system may be unfamiliar with the operational constraints of a rural hospital, or a seasoned administrator used to paper charts may struggle with digital innovation at your tech-forward clinic. Maybe these candidates can learn and grow through their challenges. But you have to look deeper than their experience if you don’t want to spend months undoing bad habits in your healthcare leadership.
Going Beyond Experience
Opening your hiring process to look beyond experience helps you see candidates with the most critical quality, one that makes or breaks success in healthcare leadership: humanity. When you look at leadership style, adaptability, communication, values, or cultural alignment, you are looking for the human who will fit your needs. Here are three areas you can prioritize as you look beyond experience with your candidates.
Emotional Intelligence
You’ve probably met candidates who can rattle off clinical achievements, accreditations, and awards. A seasoned healthcare executive may be brilliant clinically but struggle to relate to frontline staff, leading to tension, turnover, and disconnection.
What you’re looking for is emotional intelligence. More than being in tune with your feelings, emotional intelligence focuses on relationship-building skills in five areas: social skills, self-awareness, decision-making, self-regulation, and empathy.
A candidate with emotional intelligence can read a room, lead teams through a crisis, understand what motivates others, inspire trust across a diverse workforce, and respond with empathy in difficult conversations.
If you want to build a resilient organization, you need leaders who are emotionally attuned and technically strong. Emotional intelligence isn’t guaranteed by experience or found on a list of achievements. You have to intentionally assess candidates for their relationship skills.
Growth Mindset
When you prioritize candidates who are curious, adaptable, and open to feedback, you are looking for a growth mindset. A growth mindset is when you view skills and intelligence as talents you can improve through training, effort, failure, and collaboration. A candidate with a growth mindset combines experience with adaptability.
Maybe you have an experienced director of nursing coming from a fast-paced and highly structured emergency department to your relaxed and collaborative nursing home. If your new leader isn’t adaptable, you will likely see all their bad habits causing your nursing home to stumble. But someone who is flexible, curious, and open to feedback will not only learn to work within your organization, they will also contribute from their diversity of experience to help your nursing home thrive.
By broadening your view of candidates to include a growth mindset, you position yourself to find people who meet today’s needs and can evolve with tomorrow’s challenges.
Cultural Fit
Every healthcare organization has a distinct internal culture. Whether you lead a nonprofit hospital or a fast-growing private practice, your values influence how you deliver care, resolve conflict, and pursue growth.
That’s why defining and protecting your culture is as important as checking off qualifications. You’re integrating a leader into your complex, mission-driven ecosystem. When you ignore cultural fit, you invite friction. That cultural friction has consequences for staff morale and retention, patient care and satisfaction, and your professional reputation.
Say you are looking for a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at your faith-based medical center. Suppose the leader you consider is antagonistic towards your organization’s faith or flippant about values your board of directors holds dear. In that case, that candidate’s experience will never compensate for the cultural friction they will cause.
On the other hand, maybe you or a CEO search partner looked deeper and found you need a leader who prioritizes respect and considerate communication to align with your cultural DNA. Now you can purposefully select candidates who will integrate into your organization and lead in harmony with your values.
Deepen Your Interview Questions
If you’re serious about finding a candidate with emotional intelligence, a growth mindset, and culture alignment to go with their experience, you need to rethink your interviews. Ask questions that reveal a candidate’s thought process, adaptability, and values. These aren’t trick questions. They’re insights into the person behind the paper.
Here are some examples of interview questions and what they reveal:
- Tell me about a time when you had to implement change that wasn’t popular. How did you approach it? (This evaluates emotional intelligence in conflict management and communication.)
- How do you balance patient outcomes with operational efficiency? (This reveals the priority of their values and cultural fit for your organization.)
- Which previous position influenced you the most? Why? (This evaluates values and adaptability)
- What does a healthy team culture look like to you? (This gives you a feel for a candidate’s ideal culture.)
- Tell me about a difficult conversation with a physician in your department. Would you approach it differently now? (This reveals their emotional intelligence and their ability to learn.)
- Would you prioritize patient satisfaction or personnel morale when implementing system changes? Why? (This examines the priority of their values and how they handle difficult decisions.)
- What does ideal team communication look like to you? (This gives insight into a candidate’s emotional intelligence and cultural values.)
It might take longer to evaluate candidates this way, but the payoff for an aligned candidate is massive: better engagement, longer tenure, stronger leadership, and smoother onboarding.
Humanity Matters Now More Than Ever
The healthcare industry is transforming rapidly. There’s a greater focus on value-based care and digital innovation. There’s also a higher rate of workforce burnout than in past years. As any healthcare executive search firm will tell you, the stakes are high for leadership decisions amidst these changes.
You need people who will do more than fill a position. You need people who will advance your mission, build cohesive teams, and meet change with resilience. That kind of fit goes far beyond experience. It’s about humanity and alignment with your healthcare organization’s needs now and into the future.
