The interview begins—and you have already reviewed the candidate’s resume’. They meet all the qualifications, and even have some excellent references. You hire the candidate, and around six months to one year later after their up and down performance you and the employee decide that it’s best to part ways.

So what happened? The interview went well…check. The references seemed to be great…check. Yet, once the candidate got the job — they had a fatal flaw that was impossible to overcome.

They just didn’t seem to care.

They didn’t care about the customers, didn’t care about their daily performance, didn’t even seem to care about their evaluations… Which ultimately meant that the product they were serving up to your loyal base was average at best. They had just enough good days to make you think maybe it would work out, interspersed with enough bad days to make you shake your head.

It’s pretty weird when you think about it. And naturally, you have to feel a bit disappointed. Typically, I’ll even replay their interview over in my mind; trying to figure out what I missed during my evaluation. Going through this process forces the manager to ask themselves what checkboxes are the most important to be checked before making a commitment to offer the candidate a position.

A few days ago, a colleague reminded me of her words on the hiring process prior to me taking on a management position. She’s held multiple management positions. And she said, “when you hire someone, find a person with good customer service…if the person has good customer service, you can typically work around some of their deficiencies…”

I would add to her statement — that the job candidate’s deficiencies can even be remedied with appropriate teaching and training. So, then the manager must ask themselves, “am I a good enough teacher/trainer to remedy the candidate’s deficiency or do I currently have someone on staff that can be an appropriate educator/mentor for the job candidate?”

I don’t know of any degrees/diplomas to my knowledge that are being conferred by colleges and universities in the field/study of CARING @ WORK. Thus, what questions could be asked to determine if a candidate meets your standards? I guess… you could simply just ask the magical question, “do you care… or will you care? But, unfortunately you will most likely just get a canned answer.

So I suggest going through what-if scenarios with your candidate using a diagram for what you consider to be right and wrong answers for each of your scenarios. This I believe is the best method for gaining a little more insight into determining if a candidate truly possesses the traits required to serve your customer base.

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Sam Blakemore is the Pharmacy Manager of Peds Rx Pharmacy Solutions. Connect with him via: LinkedIn