Interviewing and Hiring for the Best

A difficult task for women dentists is hiring exceptional, self-directed team members. If your mindset is still what we women were taught in our formative years, namely, “I need to do everything possible to be liked, admired, and accepted,” then you'll be challenged in hiring.

For that process, you need to switch your focus 180-degrees to: “I need to find others who will do everything possible to have me like, admire, and accept them.” The failure to make this transition successfully has resulted in women dentists spending 5 to 10 unhappy years (and sometimes their entire career) practicing in a hostile or ineffective environment. In these instances, the tables seem to be turned from the dentist owning the practice and setting the vision to the employees running the show. This doesn’t have to happen to you. You can learn to hold your present and future firmly in your own hands.

In filling a vacancy on your team, the first thing to recognize is that your small business is like your very own party. This means that you get to decide the guest list—and you don’t have to invite just anyone. Hiring always reminds me of the old StarKist commercial in which cartoon mascot Charlie the Tuna is perennially sent away with the exclamation: Sorry, Charlie, only good-tasting tuna get to be StarKist. The same thing applies to your hiring: Only the best-tasting tuna should get to join your team. With the StarKist vision in mind, you can find and retain quality employees who exceed expectations. The challenge is: How do you attract only the best tuna? Here is some bait to lure them to your net.

Your Ad

Your first communication with your prospective tuna is your help-wanted ad. Whether it be traditional newspaper or Internet advertising, trust me, we have seen a lot of bad ads, including the following:

Is it time to make a move? Compare our office with your present situation. Must speak good English. Better pay than any practice in the area.

What does this ad communicate about the practice? It suggests that the most essential skill is to "speak good English." It also conveys that the dentist is looking for dental staff members who are willing to make a move exclusively for better pay.

Here’s another bad example:

Staff member wanted. No phone calls. Reply to p.o. box only. Exp. pref., sal. negot.

This ad suggests that the doctor is hiring behind the staff member’s back, so applicants cannot openly call the office. When people accept jobs advertised like this, they may assume that they, too, can be replaced at any time in the same covert way, generating constant job insecurity. (Isn't it better to let a poorly performing team member go as soon as you’ve made your decision, even if it means working short-handed until you find a suitable replacement?) The abbreviations in the ad suggest that the dentist is unwilling to spend money to spell out the words, so why would she invest significant time or money in grooming new team members?

A more effective employment ad may sound like this:

If you want to love coming to work, then join our team of dedicated professionals. We seek a self-directed appointment coordinator [or whatever position you are recruiting for], who will appreciate our high-quality, patient-centered, growing dental practice. . . .

This ad works because it briefly communicates something about you and your practice vision, and it doesn't abbreviate words. You can expand the ad to indicate the specific skills, abilities, and attitudes required. An effective ad should result in your phone ringing with excellent prospects wanting to swim into your fishing net.

Next, you will need to evaluate your applicants through a series of meetings conducted by you and your team to identify those who match the vision and values of the practice and who could become long-term contributors. This process includes the telephone screening, initial interview, reference checks, second interviews (also called working interviews), and the very important, often omitted, team interview. If you are thorough in following the process, you will greatly increase your odds of hiring the right person who will turn out to be simply the best.

Telephone Screening

Before you spend time building a relationship, it’s important to establish that the tuna in question is of the proper grade. Use telephone screening to pre-qualify applicants prior to meeting them. The screening consists of a few questions you ask to observe the applicant’s communication skills and to give you an indication of basic skills, talents, and abilities to perform the key tasks of the job description.

(For example: “Why did you choose our ad to respond to?” “What kind of work do you like to do?” “What is it about our job that appeals most to you?”)

The purpose of the telephone screening is for you to get an overview of the candidate. Avoid specifics, such as a discussion of salary compatibility or the details of the person’s prior experience. You want to meet many applicants, so don’t screen too tightly. Don’t fall into the trap, as many dentists do, of feeling as if they have to make a hiring decision after meeting only a very few candidates. This creates a perceived scarcity of qualified candidates, which can throw a dentist into a panic, causing her to hire the first person she interviews. Often the scarcity is imagined or exaggerated as a result of the leader's anxiety over the hiring process.

In the long run, as hard a lesson as it is to learn, you will invest far less time, money, and resources, and maintain a higher quality practice, by always leaving a position vacant for a while than by hastily hiring someone who just doesn’t fit.

Initial Interview and Reference Check

The initial interview and reference check, when done well, establishes rapport with the candidate by creating unity of purpose and clearly defining expectations. These essential tools will help you discover whether you've caught catfish or tuna in your net.

The Initial Interview

There are two types of questions to ask the applicant when you first meet him or her: job-related and behavior-based questions. Each category is vital for establishing a relationship that could be long-term and productive.

Job-related questions pertain to transferable skills the applicant may possess from a prior job in a non-dental field or to actual skills from previous experience in dentistry. These skills can be useful in performing the new job, such as past experience making professional appointments, billing and collecting fees, taking digital x-rays, etc.

Ask job-related questions to understand the applicant’s current or past experience, the ways in which he or she believes that prior skills and knowledge can be applied to your position, and the applicant’s self-assessment of past job performance and potential for future growth.

Examples of job-related questions include: “What key skills have you already acquired in past jobs that could apply to the role of financial administrator?” and “What knowledge and skills would you need to acquire in order to enhance your ability as a financial administrator?”

Whereas job related questions unveil the potential staff member, behavior-based questions unveil the human being. Behavior-based questions are broader, revealing the applicant’s character, values, needs, desires, and motivation.

They may include questions like the following: “Take me through the key moments of your career up to now, and tell me what achievements you are most proud of.” “Describe the ideal employee that you think would fit this position, and tell me how you resemble that person.” “What do you think your references would say about you?” “How would past co-workers describe you?” “Tell me about a challenge that you faced as an employee and how you handled it.”

Women dentists often are naturally more comfortable and effective at asking the all-important behavior-based questions, more so than their male counterparts. This is a definite advantage because neglecting behavioral aspects can result in hiring someone who lacks the “softer” skills to develop positive relationships with your patients and team.

The ability to communicate effectively, to be a good team player, to treat patients exceptionally, etc. are extremely important, especially when you consider that most staff conflicts in a dental office are not about technical issues, such as whether an x-ray technique is effective, but about such things as personality clashes, communication failures, and behavioral issues.

The Reference Check

We know dentists who failed to check references, only to get rude awakenings about the people they hired! Avoid problems by calling references—not just the names that prospects give but also their former employers—to validate information given on the application and to learn more about the applicant. If you encounter former employers who are tight-lipped, their silence in response to your questions (such as “Did the person leave under pleasant circumstances?" or "Would you rehire this person?”) can be telling.

Second (or Working) Interview

If you have a highly favorable impression of the applicant after the initial interview and reference check, and you think he or she might be a long-term contributor, proceed to the second interview. At this point, your intuition is based on your perception, rather than on a solid demonstration, of the person’s talents, knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes. You need the proof of the pudding, which is why it is very important to follow up your initial interview with a working interview for the most promising applicants. During this interview the applicant actually performs key tasks of the position.

It’s relatively easy to structure a working interview for a clinical person. Simply enlist yourself, staff, real patients, or even your somewhat helpless spouse to be the patient and to experience tasks performed by a dental assistant or hygienist, such as taking impressions or cleaning teeth.

You need to be a little more creative in structuring working interviews for front office staff unfamiliar with your systems, or for inexperienced staff in any position. If you are willing to train a promising but inexperienced candidate, use methods such as case studies, customer-service examples, or question-asking to reveal the applicant’s talent and potential.

For example, an applicant unfamiliar with the dental practice, but experienced in the financial tasks of a medical office, can walk you through how he or she would process a claim or discuss payment options with a patient. An applicant unfamiliar with the health care field can still demonstrate judgment by handling a patient complaint that you posit in a role-play. Such exercises can spotlight essential skills that will be transferable to the new job.

Team Interview

Invite the most promising candidates, those who have done very well on their initial and working interviews, to advance to the team interview. This is a minimally scripted, informal interview, often conducted over lunch, in which your team members get acquainted with the applicant. (Sorry, you’re not invited.)

By having your team meet the "finalists," you can judge whether the candidate will be compatible with your staff and work well with them. When you allow your staff members to meet the potential employee and participate in the hiring process, you can benefit from their impressions of the person. Also, by giving your team an opportunity to participate in the hiring process, you make it much easier for them to embrace and support the new person.

Keeping the Tuna After You Net Them

The problem with hiring quality team members is that once they come on board, they expect a supportive, quality relationship with their leader. Just like a fresh tuna needs a great recipe to taste delicious, a team member requires a training recipe to be excellent. So, the bar is raised for the dentist.

The first thing to do in welcoming new staff members is to create a training plan (recipe) that gives them black-and-white expectations. A training plan clarifies job responsibilities, prioritizes tasks, offers resources (team members and materials for the trainee to consult as needed), and provides follow through so that it will be easy for the person to succeed.

Regarding the need to set priorities, consider, for example, the job of dental assistant. If it includes a list of 50 tasks, you’ll want to make clear that greeting patients as soon as they enter the operatory is a higher priority than making coffee. Without your setting the priorities, staff members will set their own, generally selecting those tasks they feel most comfortable doing for the top spot. This can result in difficulties, such as in the case of a patient sitting in the reception area for 40 minutes without being acknowledged while the new staff member filed insurance documents (a true story).

After you identify the priorities, diagnose the training needs by examining the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that the new employee already possesses versus what is lacking and needs to be learned. This will be the baseline for the individual’s training plan.

The last step of the training plan is to create benchmarks by which the new team member can demonstrate increasing mastery of tasks and skills, with you and your team trainers giving feedback to measure the person’s progress and to support further growth.

For example, if you are training a new assistant to take x-rays, the training plan would include having the trainee: 1) observe you or your designated team trainer performing the task, then 2) take x-rays with supervision and feedback, and finally 3) master the art of taking x-rays without supervision.

The entire hiring and training process can seem daunting at first. However, we known from many years of practice failures that the time that you invest in hiring and training will save you substantial time in the long-run and give you the opportunity to be the dentist you want to be. The strength of the relationship that you have with your staff and that they have with you and your patients is worth the investment in proper hiring and training. So, my advice is to adopt these tools immediately.

Once you’ve master the art of hiring and retaining your quality tuna, you’ll never have to worry about catfish getting tangled in the net to spoil your catch. Happy fishing!

Amy Morgan is CEO and lead trainer of Pride Institute.

Originally published in Woman Dentist Journal , October 2007