Building a good dental team starts with hiring the right candidate. We compiled a list of Do’s and Don’t’s for your dental team hiring process.

Having a strong dental team is a key factor in your dental practice’s success. Your dental team are people you work with every day, seek support from most often, and also the faces of your practice your patients see when they visit. A key position on a typical dental team, the hygienist, for example, is estimated to generate over 57% of your revenue and claim 14% in salary (Lanthier, 2013). Hiring dental team members that contribute to your productivity and patient satisfaction is no less important than being a good dentist yourself.

On the other hand, the turnover of a new hire whose earning is less than $100K can cost you as high as 14 times of their annual salary (Sibley, 2012). This is due to factors such as loss of production, cost of training, and opportunity cost of going through the hiring process again. Here we put together a list of things you need to make sure of when you hire a dental team member.

DO’s:Dental-Team

  • Plan the hiring process beforehand and schedule dates to avoid busy days/season
  • Be specific in position description and requirements in job postings
  • Keep in mind qualifications and skills you are looking for when reading resumes
  • Consider having a telephone interview to weed out candidates before in-person interview
  • Give weight to both hard skills such as education, bilingualism, and soft skills such as teamwork
  • Conducting a one-day working interview as the last round of the hiring process if necessary
  • Contact references and order a criminal background check if necessary

DON’T’s

  • Rush the hiring process and end up with a new hire that takes more time to train
  • Ask interview questions that are not allowed (marital status, religious belief, nationality, etc)
  • Use interview questions online that may not suit the job and your practice
  • Be the sole interviewer without involving any other dental team member in the process
  • Hire someone who cannot explain switching jobs very often in the past
  • Hire someone who has had major conflicts with or negative comments about previous bosses
  • Hire someone who does not fit your dental office culture

About the Author

Feda Bashbishi is the CEO and co-founder of iKlyk Inc., a Canadian dental software provider dedicated to raising the bar of quality in dental practice management software, patient privacy, and data security. Feda Bashbishi holds an MBA from Wilfrid Laurier University as well as a Master of Science in Software Development from San Jose State University in California. Prior to establishing iKlyk, for years, Feda has worked on enterprise level cloud-based applications. You can connect with Feda through https://goo.gl/ZLJiRV or email at fedab@iklyk.com.

References

Lanthier, T. (2013, August). Find and hire the right person for your dental practice or it could cost you thousands. Retrieved from DentistryIQ: http://www.dentistryiq.com/articles/2013/08/find-and-hire-the-right-person.html

Sibley, C. (2012, July | August). How to interview and hire the best dental team member for your practice. Ontario Dentist, pp. 51-52. Retrieved from https://www.hralacarte.ca/articles/OD_JA12_PM_Sibley_V3.pdf