Gunz Dental Insight

I have never met anyone that deliberately set out to hire a poor performer for their business. Why then, is it that studies tells us we get it right only about 25% of the time?

Recruitment is a tricky process. Regardless of size, businesses in Australia struggle with one common problem: difficulty finding, attracting and onboarding top performers. This issue is common in every business segment, no one is immune, not even ASX 200 companies! This stuff keeps business owners awake at night!

It doesn’t matter whether you are seeking to hire a Dentist, Hygienist, Dental Assistant, Front Office Manager, or Receptionist, you need to find the best person to fill a position; not only someone who is capable of doing the job well, but also someone who will fit in with the rest of your team.

To ensure you’re getting the fit right, you also need to predict whether the candidate will feel fulfilled, valued, and part of the culture.

This is where things can get a bit muddy. Small to medium size practices often struggle with the recruitment process as they may not recruit that often and therefore are not going through the process of recruiting and interviewing enough to maintain a consistent standard.

In fact, regardless of who is managing the recruitment process, using an intuitive hiring approach only, that is, making a hiring decision based on ‘feeling good’ about or “liking” someone, will mean increasing the risk of making a bad hire.

Think about the last major purchasing decision you made, it’s highly probable your decision was not solely based on intuition but that you researched and obtained as much data as possible on your potential purchase and a combination of both informed your final decision. Why should the process be any different when hiring someone for your business?

Relying solely on resumes which may be embellished, interviews and reference checks does not provide the objective data we need to increase our success rate of hiring the right people.

Businesses need to do more and need to know more!

The importance of Fit

Like with many issues in our businesses it comes down to cost. A recruitment “failure” can cost between 50-60% of the person’s annual salary, according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). For this reason, it’s important that before you even start the recruitment process you need to be able to define and articulate your dental practice’s culture and then weave this understanding into your hiring process.  Sounds easy? But how can you do this objectively and apply it consistently to your selection and recruitment process? A few tweaks to the standard recruitment process holds the key to tripling your success rate with new hires.

The process

Once you have developed your job description you should create a “benchmark” for the position. There are tools out there to help you do this but we recommend JobFit assessments as they are the most accurate on the market and have unique validated benchmarking capabilities that allow you to scientifically measure and quantify the critical success attributes that are unique to your practice and the role.

Using the information from the role benchmark you can develop a targeted job advertisement that “speaks” to the candidate by outlining the attributes required to be a successful member of your team.

Once you have reviewed the resumes, it’s a good idea to screen candidates initially by phone. Then develop your shortlist and invite potential candidates to attend for their first face to face interview. It’s in this interview where you confirm the candidates possess the skills, qualifications and experience required to do the job.

Following the first interview, create your final shortlist and invite those people to complete their online job fit assessment.

The assessments we recommend include Interview Guide reports that show you at a glance how the candidate compares to the benchmark for the role. These assessments not only measure a candidate’s “fit” to a role and provide in-depth information about the candidate, information that would never be ascertained by using interviews, but also provide customised behavioural interview questions prepared specifically for each candidate based on their results to help the interviewer drill down into any areas of potential concern. 

This process of identifying and quantifying the critical success attributes, establishing JobFit and then using targeted, high level behavioural interview questions will increase the success rate of employing future high performers by up to 300%.

This will also ensure a consistent and robust recruitment process in your business and will prevent selecting people based on “like”. 

Overall, the best thing you can do for your business is to determine fit, rather than just verify the details on the candidate’s resume. Your goal should be to use the final interview to determine whether your candidate is a fit with the role and whether they will fit into your existing team culture.

Adding the science of the JobFit assessments to your selection and recruitment process gives you a critical advantage in the hiring process.

Where to from here?

If you are tired of hiring the wrong people for your business? or want to learn more about JobFit, Contact us today for an obligation free discussion and trial.

David Leahy Director Directions Unlimited M: 0405-691-845

About Directions Unlimited: We are a specialist provider of customised people solutions and services to local and international clients. We provide state of the art assessment and development solutions to help you select, match, on-board, manage, develop, engage and retain top talent.