Gunz Dental Insight

There are currently 875 Job advertisements for Dental Assistants on Seek, but how do the potential employers know which of the potential candidates fits their practice needs and more importantly will be a top performer kin the role?

The School of Dental Assisting in Vancouver provides great information on the personality and traits required to be a successful dental assistant. These include:

A cursory glance at many of the current Seek job advertisements reveals that these traits are certainly in high demand. A few additions also appear in some advertisements looking for attributes such as Team Player, Motivated and Passionate about the dental industry or the need to be in alignment with practice values such as Respect, Responsibility, Tolerance and Generosity and Friendliness. It is quite a “laundry list” of requirements, but the question is how can you be sure that the person sitting in front of you at the interview possesses these?

 Recruitment roulette.

Most business/practice owners agree that people are key to the success of the business and recruiting the “right “person for the role is critical. I have never met anyone who deliberately set out to hire the wrong person for the job, so why do we get it wrong so often?

The following scenario may also be familiar. Your new Dental assistant, who seemed perfect on paper, blitzed the interview, and seemed to have all the required traits and experience, arrives at your practice for their first day. By the end of the first few weeks, your “inner voice” is telling you this new hire may not be right for the job. But, do not beat yourself up too much, industry statistics tell us we get it “right” (i.e. A superstar, not just an average employee) only 25% of the time. What action would you take if any other process in your practice delivered the right outcome only one quarter of the time!

How robust is your recruitment process?

Think about the last time you recruited a top performing Dental Assistant, a team member who consistently exceeds your expectations, goes above and beyond, and adds real value to your practice.  Now, think about the last time you recruited a Dental Assistant who was a poor performer.

Did you do anything different in your recruitment and selection process? Probably not, yet you got very different results, and cost your practice 6 times their monthly salary, or in real money $25,000!

It is clear you need to be able to identify why some Dental Assistants you hire are more successful than others. Your current recruitment process is likely not doing that, so is no longer fit for purpose. If you want better results, you must fix your hiring process.

When your process does not identify who will (and will not) perform, you waste:

• Time
• Energy
• Money

You can save significant money immediately by simply adopting a new selection process.

Improve your success rate

By improving your recruitment process, you give yourself much better than just a 25% chance of getting it right. By taking a more scientific approach to recruitment, you remove much of your practice’s downside costs.

These include:

1. Frequent employee turnover – even from good people
2. Recruiting & training of replacements
3. Lost business and extra stress through an empty seat during recruitment & induction training
4. Wasted investment in salary & training for someone that does not make it

Rely on 21^st century solutions

When we talk to people about behavioural assessments, most think of various well-known names that were developed many years ago, in some cases more than 90 years ago! These are fixed assessments that measure the same traits, regardless of the role. What we offer is different.

We provide the next generation of people assessments that deliver solutions for 21^st century problems. Our behavioural assessments work on the principle of Job Match – assess a role using current top performers, assess the candidate(s) and compare the two. Choosing from a range of more than 60 contemporary dimensions we can precisely measure those items on your “laundry list”. If, for example your practice needs to measure values, resilience, working with generations or generosity to name just a few, our state of the art assessment platform will develop precisely what you want, and there is no cost for customisation either!

If you are happy with the status quo, then there is no need to change anything.

However, if you want to improve your success, talk to Directions Unlimited about our Great People Inside next gen customisable assessments.

To request a free trial or demonstration please Contact Us