5 Tips for Permanent Dental Staffing Success

Finding and retaining rock-star talent is a critical business challenge facing dental practices today. The process of hiring and managing human resources is a very involved process that takes a dental office a lot of time and energy. It used to be that a dentist could open up a practice and the odds of succeeding were great. In today’s world that is far from the truth. Today, success of your dental practice is closely aligned with the team you have assembled.

To help, we've rounded up 5 tips for permanent dental staffing success:

5. Clarity is Key

Preventing employee churn and dissatisfaction in a dental practice starts with a clear job description. In order to prevent employee loss, a well-written, clear job description is vital. Create the ultimate employee description for your open positions, and have it reviewed and revised by another person to prevent grammatical and spelling errors. Re-read it once again and make any necessary changes until it is clear, detailed and structured, and presents every aspect of the position.

Remember to include educational and work history requirements to ensure each applicant is a great fit for your dental practice.

4. Interview with a Genuine Interest

After you've searched through the resumes, a few applicants look to be a potential match for the position and interviews are scheduled to make a better decision. Before you see any interviewee, create your own set of interview questions. Utilizing generic interview questions will not produce the insight you need to make an informed decision or hire the person with the right competencies and skills you are in search of. Behavioral-style interview questions require dental staff candidates to relate stories about how they handled challenges related to the skills sets the dental practice requires for the position. First, identify areas that you are wanting the new hire to excel at. Secondly, design behavioral-style interview questions to identify a qualifying applicant’s performance history relevant to the competencies and skills you identified for the “open” position.

Be sure to include a few questions around task management, delegation and prioritization. Answers to these questions allow you to gain insight into the interviewee and make an informed hiring decision.

3. When in Doubt, Test the Applicant

No, we don't mean any psychological tests. Create and administer skill tests for all interviewees to complete in order to assess their personal skill level with required skill sets and unique personality traits that would make a great fit in the office. Skills Assessment Tests are designed to highlight required job skills, giving you the information you need to know if any applicant needs additional training or will feel right at home in your dental practice.

2. Always Call References

References are an often overlooked aspect of any resume. References should always be contacted to gather detailed work and skill descriptions of any applicant. This gives you an additional perspective on your applicant to ensure you make the best permanent placement choice.

It may be beneficial to create a list of standard questions to ask all references that touch on information you may have missed during the interview. A great question to end a reference call with is, “On a scale of 1-10, ten signifying outstanding, where would you rate the overall performance of  ______”. If the referral source comments anything less than a “10”, follow up with, “What would make them a “10?”. You will be surprised at the additional information you will obtain just from these two questions.

1. Focus on Team Work

There are hundreds of personality types and work styles. Why not maximize your team’s ability to work together with a personality profile tool? DiSC is a recognized and highly successful tool that categorizes and informs the test taker with information to maximize their natural work style and how to interact with others that do not share a similar disposition.

A lot of dental practice drama stems from a lack of team work, and can easily be resolved through DiSC-like supportive training.

Simply put… Your team makes or breaks your dental practice

Having the right hire is critical in maximizing dental practice production and profitability. It’s too important to leave to chance; it’s too important for just ‘good enough’. Strategic Practice Solutions has a unique 2-phase permanent staffing process to assist in finding, hiring and retaining roc-star dental team members.

Phase 1 involves creating a profile for the position and assigning a recruiter to the open order. Candidates matching the employer’s profile are selected and the interviewing and hiring process begins.

Phase 2 includes a DiSC personality/behavioral profile assessment of candidates. DiSC is a personal assessment tool used to improve work productivity, teamwork and communication.

Strategic Practice Solutions’ permanent talent acquisition provides:

• Access to a pool of candidates not actively looking for employment
• Active marketing of the open position within SPS’s Social Media database and a classified posting of the open position on our job board
• Assigning a full time recruiter dedicated to working on the talent acquisition & prequalification of candidates
• Creating a "job profile" containing the skill sets required for the position
• Customizing interview questions designed to measure applicant skill set required for the open position
• Thorough employment references to establish the candidates performance history
• Human Resource coaching
• 180 day service guarantee

Do you have the right team in place? If not, call us at 888.421.1808 for help with permanent and temporary dental staff placement.