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Hiring Right: Key to a Successful Dental Practice
Flying below the radar screen of most dental practice systems is a fast-approaching threat. Whether it remains as an unidentified object or is intentionally ignored, it will critically impact bottom lines and impair lifestyles. It may also put a few dentists out of business, or at least dramatically change the way they practice.
While a few doctors recognize the “blip on the screen” and have the savvy business sense to detect its implications, most are oblivious to it. These doctors and managers adopt a wait-and-see attitude. Complacency breeds avoidance and even a tinge of arrogance.
What is this blip -- this warning signal -- on your radar screen? It is the labor shortage.
The declining birth rate and incredible pace of job creation for skilled positions in the service industry are leaving many practices understaffed. To make matters worse, the peak of the shortage, many futurists and analysts believe, won’t even happen until 2010.
Employee turnover and the deafening silence to calls to fill open positions in practices from Maine to California are beginning to weigh heavily on many doctors. The competition for employees may well be the most serious management challenge doctors have had to confront -- ever.
Dental practices, nevertheless, have a thriving opportunity. The independent private practice has the flexibility and delivery style to remain small but profitable, personal but high-tech, and able to remain in touch with patients over long periods of time more than most other businesses. Small, personable high-tech practices, however, require people -- good people, exceptional people -- to stage an experience that patients will pay for over and over again. People -- not chairs, hand pieces, computers or clinical skills -- provide dental services.
Without the right people, dental services cannot be effective and efficient. Finding and retaining successful people starts with a successful hiring process.
Hiring the right people -- and retaining them -- is difficult, but not impossible. From the records of the Han dynasty over two thousand years ago until today, people have struggled with hiring the “right” people.
So what has changed? Why are dentists from coast to coast finding it so hard to hire “good” people? The answer in part has nothing to do with dentistry.
A highly mobile society, the most diverse and independent young labor force in history, and the escalating influence of technology is forcing every employer to re-examine their priorities and discover new creative ways to reach their goals. The labor shortage has just added another layer of complexity and urgency to the laundry list of “things to do” when owning and managing your own business.
Hiring the right people can feel like an emotional and financial landmine, but it does not need to be that way. Corporations are learning to select the right people the first time. And they hire hundreds and thousands of people each year. Big business, in an ongoing effort to maximize profits and returns on investment, has realized that turnovers and mis-hires are the real profit killers. Can dentists learn from their mistakes? They can and they must!
Most interviewers, dentists included, are untrained to qualify job candidates. They interview only as needed in a reactive or crisis mode, and lack the training and skills to accurately assess the risks and rewards of each candidate before putting them on the payroll. At best, traditional interviews have less than a 15 percent prediction index of reliability for identifying candidates who might be successful once hired. Even worse, many highly qualified candidates are rejected for simply not interviewing well, or are judged negatively by the doctor or manager because of subjective, not job-related, assessments of personality.
Hiring people with the expectation of high performance, but lacking the right attitudes, behavioral and motivational skills, is unrealistic and delusional. High expectations and low performance torpedoes morale and dooms even the most highly skilled clinicians to mediocrity and frustration.
How can you avoid hiring situations and mistakes and instead seize the opportunity for the unrelenting demand for dental services that’s predicted for the next 50 years? Where do you begin to look for a reliable, predictable employee who is so good that you can go back to practicing dentistry and get out of the hiring business?
First Things First
The first step in hiring right begins with identifying the “nice-to-have” and the “need-to-have” requirements of the job. Experience is no longer the best teacher or predictor of success when it comes to hiring. According to Daniel Goleman, researcher and author of Working with Emotional Intelligence, the “soft skills” required to do a job well are nearly twice as important as intellect and expertise. In fact, in some positions the intangible, but measurable soft skills contribute close to 90 percent of the exceptional performance of successful people. How do you predictably measure these soft skills of behaviors, attitudes and motivations?
The selection process must start with identifying where you are now -- what are the successful behavior and attitude styles and motivational skills of your best employees, and what are the same styles and skills of your “less than the best” or non-performing employees? Contacting previous employees who you would hire back in a minute are also great sources for this information. What are the differences between the best and the not-so-best? And which styles are relevant to success in your practice? This crucial information is easily obtained with two assessments: the Managing for Success® (MFS) survey and the Personal Interests, Attitudes and Values™ (PIAV) survey.
A Clear Destination
From the results of these surveys, a job analysis template of desirable, successful job-related behaviors and attitudes is developed for each position. This job analysis determines how you are doing with your recruitment, interviewing and hiring process. For multiple doctors, different locations and different teams, templates might be modified to select the right people for the right job in the right practice on the right team.
These reports, when shared and discussed with current employees, encourages communication, feedback, job satisfaction and increased productivity, in addition to
helping create a behavioral and attitude benchmark for new employees.
After identifying the top competencies most likely to enable superior performance, a bank of at least five questions for each required competency should be developed. In addition, each candidate who qualifies for an interview completes the MFS and PIAV reports, and the results are compared to the job template and practice profile.
Using SELECT
To minimize time screening candidates, and in order to do it consistently and legally, a pre- employment screening tool called SELECT is recommended. Three options are available for health care practices: SELECT for Health Care, SELECT for Administrative Support and SELECT for Customer Service. SELECT can be completed either on paper or on the computer.
SELECT helps identify health care workers who:
- Are energetic and productive
- Have a service orientation toward patients
- Are compassionate
- Remain composed under pressure
- Cooperate with other staff members
- Are willing to adapt to change
- Have integrity
The SELECT Survey is simple to administer, takes less than 30 minutes to compete, and is easy to customize and validate for your practice. SELECT minimizes the time you invest in interviewing the wrong people for your practice. SELECT also provides recommended interview questions based on “flags,” which are questionable or inappropriate responses identified as possible employment risks. It is well worth the investment.
A word of caution: Candidates should not necessarily be rejected exclusively on differences in their style from the template, or accepted based on their profiles alone. The selection process requires a multi-faceted evaluation. The goal is not to clone people, but to determine how people will respond to job-related situations, including uncomfortable or stressful ones, and to determine if that response is appropriate and acceptable.
Minimal Training Required
Minimal training is required to administer the surveys and little, if any, training is needed to interpret SELECT. Interpreting the MFS, self-scoring and generating the PIAV, and developing a structured interview process do, however, require some training -- or the consultation services of certified professional behavioral and values analysts. Training is also available to certify doctors, managers and staff in how to use the behavioral and attitude programs for hiring, customer service, team building and conflict resolutions.
Summary
Hiring right is much more complex than just interviewing and offering an applicant a job. Success in today’s environment depends on intangibles and rarely the resume. Hiring right means developing the foresight to position your practice to attract, select, hire, promote and retain successful people. Hiring right starts with creating a practice environment that makes people feel like they belong. Hiring right encourages acceptance of diverse values and attitudes. Hiring right creates opportunities for people and a practice culture where people from the doctor to the cleaning people can thrive.
Dentists who recognize the impending threat of a labor shortage should develop their skills and foresight to grab the best employees for their practice. Dentists should also develop a systematic hiring approach in order to negotiate the rugged terrain of selection and retention. These methods will help dentists experience new opportunities and rewards in the early years of the twenty-first century.
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