Having qualified and trustworthy dental professionals on staff make everything easier for dental leaders trying to run a competent practice. Qualified practitioners immediately win clients’ trust, especially as clients demand more transparency and personalized services nowadays. Whether you’re looking for associates, admin staff, or dental temps, you want to know that as a dental leader you’re working with people who have the necessary credentials and abilities to thrive in your practice.
Having a multi-pronged approach is the right way to garner interest from qualified dental candidates. By casting a wide net and opening your horizons to engage these credentialed professionals, you open up your candidate pool and attract a good flow of qualified candidates, optimizing your hiring strategy and potentially sparing you extensive hiring costs. Here are five tips for finding qualified dental candidates during the recruiting process.
Always Go To Your Referrals
Your best referrals are your dental employees. They will know people in the profession who are the best fits for particular positions, having worked with such prospects in previous jobs. Or, they might know people who are experienced in administrative work at other types of jobs that would fit in dental admin roles. They can also recommend dental temps with multiple skills who can be adaptable and take on multiple roles within a dental practice.
Some of the strongest candidates will emerge from referrals. For dental associate positions, for example, dental service organizations (DSOs) report that half of the dental associate hires emerge from referrals. From those referrals, dental leaders can leverage technology to further look into the credentials these candidates have and then determine whether the leads provided by employees are worth pursuing.
Keeping in Contact With Past Candidates
Sometimes, the most qualified dental employees are the ones you already passed up during the recruitment process.
Each time that hiring advertisements are placed, there are tens, hundreds, or thousands of applicants who aren’t hired, some of whom may have had the qualifications you sought but either overlooked or had a preference during the selection process. A smart way of finding qualified candidates is keeping a database of past applicants, then pushing future job openings to these previous applicants to see if they are a better fit for the role you’re offering now than they were when they initially applied.
Keep the resumes of past applicants close by and establish content with the most promising ones every few months to retain interest.
Enlisting Dental Temping Services
You can also try dental temping services to get high-quality dentist tips and leads to find qualified dental job candidates.
Dental temps are temporary workers who can come and fill in when a permanent role becomes vacant. Dental temps are readily available and can come in at the last minute to fill dental office needs. By enlisting the services of dental temp agencies, they can directly connect dental offices with local dental assistants, hygienists, and more. Leveraging mobile and web technologies, dental temp agencies pair dental leaders with the qualified dental professionals they need to fulfill their objectives.
Empowering Candidates Before Hiring Them
Following interviews with candidates for dental office positions, dental leaders should consider asking existing team members whether or not they can become references for incoming candidates. As a result, prospective employees receive a ringing endorsement from the current employees who can speak about aspects of the dental office, such as the work culture and how the leaders take care of their staff.
Following the endorsement of prospective employees by current employees, there is an improved chance that these qualified applicants will continue communicating with you to continue the job interview and reach an agreement to work at your practice.
Conducting a Working Interview
A working interview allows you to see just how qualified a prospective employee is while in action, handling adverse situations, helping team members, and simpler things like their presentation.
Working interviews have potential drawbacks given that they take longer to set up than traditional sitdown interviews and may confuse candidates into thinking that they have sealed the job already.
However, the benefits outweigh the potential pitfalls because you get an in-person look at the actual skill level of applicants compared to how they worded their skills in their resumes and cover letters. Some may talk a good game but show their weaknesses once they’re put in practical situations they weren’t prepared for. Qualified dental employees will prove themselves in these situations by being agile while showing the kind of personality and chemistry needed to work in a dental office.
Make expectations of the working interview clear to applicants before proceeding. Dental leaders and the candidates themselves can make assessments after the interview to determine whether the proposed position and work requirements are best-fitting.
TempStars ensures you can identify the qualified dental employees for your practice so dentists and clients alike will be satisfied. Sign up today and learn more about our trusted services!
