What up yall. This is Jon Lowrance with Anesthesia Guidebook. This is episode #110 – How we do interviews with Alison Kent, MSN, CRNA & April Bourgoin, DNAP, CRNA.

In this episode, April, Alison & I talk about how we conduct CRNA interviews as a leadership team with our Department of Anesthesiology at MaineHealth – Maine Medical Center. Maine Med is the only level 1 trauma center in the state of Maine with 700-licensed beds. We run around 60 anesthesia sites of service a day with a staff of just over 130 CRNAs, 50 physician anesthesiologists, a physician residency & fellowship program and have clinical affiliations with 4 different nurse anesthesiology training programs.

Alison Kent is the Manager of CRNA Services at Maine Medical Center and completed her Master of Nursing in anesthesia at the University of New England in 2006. She’s been at Maine Medical Center as a CRNA for nearly 20 years and has served in the Manager role since 2017.

April Bourgoin is one of two Supervisors of CRNA Services at Maine Medical Center and completed her Master of Science and Doctor of Nurse Anesthesia Practice degrees at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2017.  Prior to becoming a CRNA, she served for eight years as an active duty commissioned officer in the Army as flight nurse with the 82nd Airborne Dustoff medevac team. She served two combat tours prior to transferring to the Army Reserves at the rank of Major.

April joined me on episode 93 of Anesthesia Guidebook where we talked about OR fires and this is Alison’s first, but certainly not last, appearance on the show!

These 2 folks are part of the core CRNA leadership team at Maine Medical Center. Together, they truly make the world go round for our team and are like the glue that holds everything together. It’s an absolute privilege to get to work closely with these folks on a daily basis and I couldn’t be more thrilled to have pulled them in on this podcast about how we do interviews.

So, let’s tee this up a bit.

In today’s anesthesia market, you can go anywhere and make a great money and do interesting cases but the thing that will differentiate your experience with a group is the culture of the team. And your experience of that culture begins with your interview. It actually begins a little earlier than that, even, with how the reputation of the team reaches you – maybe through things like this podcast, or when you reach out to inquire about a group or talk with friends & colleagues who may work or have worked with a particular group.

But a really important deep dive into the culture of the team will come on interview day. You should meet some core folks on the team – CRNAs, physicians, trainees, administrative specialists. You should get in the operating rooms and actually see the staff do the work that you’re looking to join them in. You should leave the interview with a very clear idea of what you’re potentially getting yourself into, both in terms of culture and with a thorough run down of the benefits and compensation package.

If you’re listening to this and you’re a practice manager or thinking about getting into a role in which you support your team as a leader, hopefully you find this podcast super helpful.

Alison, April & I talk through our process & structure for interviews, what kinds of questions we ask, what we look for in candidates and how we work to both recruit folks and protect our culture by making sure we’re bringing in people who are a good fit for the team.

A few years ago another chief CRNA asked me if I had any tips on how to conduct interviews. When we talked then, I of course knew that I wanted to get around to doing a podcast on the topic to share the same advice with you. And here it is!

Oh, by the way, what we describe is our process as a leadership team. Our opinions expressed here are our views and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of our employer. Seth Godin has this great definition of culture where he says, “people like us do things like this.” This is how we do interviews as a leadership team.

We hope you enjoy our story.

If you’d like to apply to work with our team as a CRNA, please reach out to chat or drop your application here: https://www.careersatmainehealth.org/jobs/search

Search for the CRNA roles at Maine Medical Center in Portland, Maine.

And with that, let’s get to the show.