Read This Before You Hire Your Next Dietitian
Looking to hire the right clinical dietitian for your healthcare facility? Let us help you by sharing a few important points to consider. Years of working with renowned global and local clients and over a thousand successful placements, has branded us experts in this field. Read this before you hire your next dietitian and avoid making classic mistakes that could cause delays, or even sabotage your healthcare operations.
Working with a Recruiter with Limited or No Experience in Clinical Dietitian Hiring
Although recruitment agencies can make life better for any organization, not all recruiters are equipped with the right knowledge or skills to hire a good clinical dietitian. The reason being that this is a speciality niche and constantly evolving part of mainstream healthcare. Even traditional recruitment companies that facilitate healthcare staff hirings have difficulty in sourcing quality dietitian candidates.
The usual metrics of hiring such as educational background, experience or salary range cannot be solely used to hire a good registered dietitian. The candidate should be further evaluated on their certifications, area of expertise, soft skills, experience with nutrition care, leading teams, creating processes and ability to work in coordination with other clinical staff. All of this cannot be judged by a traditional hiring agency, therefore, it is essential to use recruiters who are experienced in clinical dietitian hiring. For example, we at Dietitian Careers cater solely to the recruitment of registered dietitians. We have thousands of global as well as local dietitian profiles that we source, filter, verify and then place for our clients according to their customized needs. Our company is dietitian owned, and our executive team has a combination of 90 years in the nutrition field with varying degrees of Registered Dietitian experience in every facet of nutrition imaginable. With our extensive backgrounds ranging from clinical nutrition to nutrition research, nutrition education and more, we know exactly the type of talent, personality and cultural fit needed for your organization to thrive.
The key to hiring a good clinical dietitian is understanding the organization’s needs which leads us to the second important point:
2. Not Having Clear Requirements About the Job Role
A clinical dietitian’s role within the healthcare industry has changed dramatically over the last ten years. In today’s world, as nutrition care becomes a fundamental process in healthcare, dietitians have new roles to fulfill. A clinical dietitian is now expected to prevent, manage, educate and diagnose diseases on a more focused and individualized level. They are required to be competent in planning a multitude of customized nutrition care plans for patients and to work with other clinical staff to provide a complete healthcare plan. Furthermore, increasing number of dietitians have focused areas of speciality where they work only with patients suffering from diabetes, eating disorders, digestive issues, chronic disease etc. They are trained, certified and experienced in these specific areas which is why it is imperative for a health facility to have a very clear understanding of the roles to be performed- which will indicate important requirements such as the educational level, skills and background needed for their dietitian hire.
Failing to have a clear requirement of the kind of dietitian you want for your facility would severely diminish your chances of making the right placement. You should be aware of the kind of credentials, additional certifications and license needed to practice in the speciality area, and the competency level required to achieve the facility’s goals and objectives. Even if you hire the best recruiters, your chances of getting the right dietitian is drastically reduced if your requirements, goals and objectives are not clearly aligned. This is why at Dietitian Careers, we work in close coordination with our clients to derive their main goals and objectives as well as identify the kind of person they need for the job. Based on this, we then begin to source from our pool of top 1% talented candidates and place them in the respective organizations.
3. Having the Wrong Person Interview the Candidate
Nothing is more frustrating than having the wrong person to interview the right candidate. Plenty of people we’ve worked with over the years have made the classic mistake of letting a general HR manager or a specialist from a completely different field interview a dietitian. The result? The organization ends up losing valuable candidates who could have been their ideal hire. It is important for the person conducting the hiring to be well versed in ‘dietitian lingo’, and to also have a clear understanding of how to appeal to these candidates. Even more troubling is when organizations fail to vet their candidates thoroughly and end up hiring someone with inappropriate credentials.
Most people are not aware that a dietitian is completely different from a nutritionist, and this can lead to a drastic hiring failure where a nutritionist takes on the role of a dietitian. Nutritionists and dietitians fundamentally differ in terms of their educational requirements, certifications, legal backing and rights to deliver individualized nutrition care. Legally, only Registered Dietitians are conferred with the ability to provide individualized nutrition care, and to also practice in a clinical setting. If you are a healthcare facility and has made the dire mistake of hiring a nutritionist- you have opened yourself to legal trouble.
Although it is pertinent to have an experienced dietitian interview another dietitian, it is a challenge if you don’t have a dietitian member on your team. At Dietitian Careers, our executive team is made up of Registered Dietitians and we help you overcome this difficulty by vetting and interviewing the candidates ourselves.
Hiring a dietitian can be daunting but at Dietitian Careers, we handle the entire process for you - from sourcing the right candidate to recruiting, from vetting to interviewing, from negotiating to finalizing the candidate, we do it all for you. If you’re looking for a customized dietitian hiring solution, give us a call and let us help you find the right candidate for your organization’s needs. Contact us Here.
