It’s hard enough finding skilled staff, but how do you find people who are going to fit in to your practice? By Catri Menzies-Pike
There’s a truth about recruitment that’s not often acknowledged: someone has to work with the people you hire. No matter how big or small your practice is, and whether you’re hiring a temp hygienist or looking for a dentist to permanently join your team, it’s critical to work out whether a new staff member is the right fit for your practice. It’s straightforward enough to work out from a curriculum vitae what a candidate’s skills and experience are, especially if they have used some online resume guidance but what about their attitude?
If you want to find a staff member who can do the job, and is a good cultural fit for your practice, you need to start thinking about what kind of person you want to bring in early in the recruitment process. That’s the advice of Jo Burrows, who has been working in dental recruitment for 24 years. Her company Dentafind (dentafind.com.au) helps place permanent and temporary dental auxiliary staff in Sydney and in Melbourne. She encourages practice managers to ask themselves at the outset: “What sort of person do I want working here?”
Different practices will have different needs. “You might find there’s a practice with a dental solo operator who needs someone who is great with patients and customer service, who can help out with sales and ordering, an all-rounder. That’s going to require a particular personality type,” says Burrows.
When she is supporting practices to find new staff, she typically undertakes a site visit to get a sense of the workplace and its culture. Skills are often not the issue-“It is all personality.”
Rita Yong Gee agrees that employers need to think more about how potential employees will behave in the workplace. She’s a psychologist who owns a busy dental practice in Brisbane and provides advice to practice owners and managers. Her approach to recruitment draws on her experience working with positive psychology. In an ideal world, all hires would go through testing for emotional intelligence to assess how they will perform. Yong Gee explains that this provides information about how potential hires make decisions, their empathy skills, and how they influence other staff and patients.
A candidate “might be great at talking to a patient but not able to cope with stress very well” or they might be a person who takes a long time making decisions-“not great in a leadership role”.
Standardised testing might not be practical for all employers, but Yong Gee has some tips for assessing how a potential employee might behave.
“Always ask situational and behavioural questions,” she advises. Rather than asking abstract questions, she recommends asking specific questions about past behaviour, such as “What did you do when faced with XYZ stressful situation?”. Why? Because past behaviour is a great predictor of future behaviour, she says. Like Burrows, she recommends being clear about what you want from employees before starting the interview process.
In a relatively small industry, referrals and references carry a lot of weight. “Unless we have exhausted all other options, our dentists come to us through one or two degrees of referral,” says Dr Ramesh Sivabalan of My Dental Team, running two practices in Shellharbour and Bella Vista, New South Wales. “If a dentist is willing to put their name behind another professional, it really means something.”
Rita Yong Gee makes a point of checking up on referees-and there’s one question that is always on her list. “I ask ‘Would you hire this person again if they come knocking on the door?’. If there’s a pause, I don’t believe them.”
She wants to make sure staff will work in the long term, so she also asks things like, “Is there anything that’s going to come up in six months?” and “What needs to be said that isn’t been said?” The answers to questions like these are such as important as technical skills, says Yong Gee.
References and reputation are what Anthea Clarke relies upon to place dental support staff in Perth. She’s been working in the industry for 30 years and has run recruitment agency Contact Point Dental for a decade.
Her local knowledge means she has very few failures when she is placing staff. “It’s all about fit,” she says, “and matching the type of practice to the type of candidate.” She can tell a lot from a curriculum vitae provided by a local candidate, not just about skills, but also about standards. Jo Burrows agrees that a curriculum vitae can be surprisingly revealing. This is why the quality of a candidate’s CV is so important. “We explore what sorts of activity they’ve done in their previous roles and what their career aspirations are.” Talking to a candidate about their ambitions can be helpful too.
There are lots of temps working in the dental industry but Burrows says that both employers and employees tend to prefer permanent arrangements. Of course there are exceptions. For staff, temping can be, she says, “a great way to find out what you want to do”. And of course, some practices favour temporary staff because it’s financially easier and there is less risk of mismatch in the practice.
Ultimately, paying attention to getting the right staff-and keeping them-makes good business sense. There’s a strong correlation between the bottom line of a dental practice and keeping staff, points out Dr Ramesh Sivabalan. And to keep people, “you need culture”. That’s what he is trying to foster in his dental practice.
“We have 14 dentists working across two practices and definitely the issue that’s driving is culture. We’re trying to create a culture where the culture doesn’t just clinically deliver consistently but also offers consistent support.”
So when interviewing dentists for permanent or casual roles, Dr Sivabalan is not just looking at experience: “The clinical pathway is important, but so is the philosophy and the energy and the culture that they bring to the business. It’s the key to running a successful group practice.”
