The 3 Hiring Habits That Keep Good Staff For Years And The 2 That Will Drive Good Staff to Quit
Human resource management can be one of the biggest challenges for dental practice owners. Maintaining staff that are well trained and provide an exceptional patient experience takes time and leadership. Making a “bad hire” is a time sucking nightmare. A “bad hire” impacts the rest of the team, your patients and your reputation. The time spent on performance management and the potential cost of turnover is high.
3 Hiring Habits that Keep Good Staff
- You have a hiring process in place to ensure you get the best possible staff
- You do due diligence prior to offering any new staff a position within your practice
- You have a performance based job description developed
Those three habits are important because high staff turnover is costly to your business. And the quality of the staff you hire contributes to the culture of your practice.
2 Hiring Habits that Will Drive Good Staff to Quit
- All new staff begin with a contract that has a three-month probation period. Do not keep probationary staff if they are not fitting in.
- Involve your senior staff in the hiring possess. Successful hiring is about more than their qualifications and experience! It is important that all new staff fit into the culture of your practice.
What level of due diligence do you practice?
When hiring for a new position is more important to consider personality or qualifications?
Key things to consider before you begin the process of hiring new staff:
- Do you have a “performance based position description” developed?
- What is more important for your practice – their skills or their personality?
- How important is the potential of this new staff person? Do you want them to grow within your practiced or is the position you are hiring them for always going to be the same?
Hiring process
Identify the type of person you’re looking for. Include as much detail about the position in the job posting as you possibly can.
Review all resumes. When you review resumes what is the feeling or impression the resume gives you? Great example is if the grammar or spelling is poor. That might indicate a lack of attention to detail and in a dental practice attention to detail is critically important.
Depending on the size of your practice and whether you have an office administrator or team leader it might be valuable to have two people review the resumes and agree on which ones will make the cut.
After reviewing resumes the next step is to do a phone interview. This is a 10 to 15-minute interview so that you can get a sense of how they present, how they communicate, and to develop a general impression of them?
If they pass the phone interview, then ask them to come in to the practice for an interview.
What should you be paying attention to during the interview?
Experienced interviewers will tell you that paying attention to body language is important. What feelings or impressions do you get when sitting across the table from them? Do they make good eye contact? Do they smile? Do they take the time to consider their responses to your questions? How do you feel patients would respond to this individual?
Other things to consider: are they nervous? Are they over confident? Overconfidence may be a warning flag that they have their own way of doing things and are not open to learning new ways.
At the close of the interview give them a tour of your practice.
Are they a viable candidate?
If so ask your manager or one of your seasoned senior staff to interview them. If both you and your senior staff agree then the next step in the process is having them come in and do a working interview. During the working interview – how did they interact with you? Your staff? Your patients?
Ask your staff for their feedback and then if everyone agrees they are a good fit do a thorough reference check.
Best practices are clear – all new staff begin with a contract that has a three month probation period. The contract should be accompanied by a signed performance agreement clearly outlining all of the expectations they must meet in order for their contract to be approved beyond the probation period. It is your performance based position description that evaluates their work and provides you with the criteria to determine if a permanent position is the right decision.
Be diligent during the probation period – if they struggle during this time – identify why – then determine what steps to take. If you follow all of the steps above – it is likely that you will have made a good hiring decision, but don’t be so tied to your decision that you do not evaluate closely during the probation period. It is easier to dismiss staff that do not meet your expectation during the probation prior than it is after they become permanent staff.
How Healthy is the Culture of Your Practice?
Successful hiring is about more than their qualifications and experience! It is important that all new staff fit into the culture of your practice.
Healthy culture in practices strongly discourages behavior such as gossiping. Healthy practices understand that while everyone in the practice is an individual they are there to work together as a team, bringing all their individual strengths to the benefit of the practice, to the rest of the staff, and to your patients.
A positive culture within the practice is about helping others. So even if it is “Heather‘s” job, if she is sick others pitch in and make sure that that job gets done. They do this without being asked and without complaining. Do we respect each other? Is there a culture of common courtesy? And are they fun to work with? No one wants to work with someone who constantly complains or is critical of the work of others. Someone like that can be very toxic to a work environment. Your practice culture is a huge component of hiring the right person.
So what are the bottom line costs of a “bad hire”? It will be different for each practice but add up:
- $ in hiring costs
- $ total compensation
- $ cost of maintaining the employee
- $ disruption costs
- $ severance
- $ mistakes, failures, poor patient experience
Add to that the fact that your experienced staff may have to work harder to make up for what a bad hire isn’t doing, putting your practice at risk of losing your good staff!
Your team is a reflection of your leadership!
Dedicated to your success,
Kathy D. Harris