Tips for Interviewing Dental Office Staff Members

It’s the goal of most dentists to hire and retain loyal and hardworking staff members who will stay with you into retirement. However, it’s likely that you’ll lose employees and find yourself in the position of needing to hire a new staff member. The interviewing process can be grueling and it’s difficult to weed out the people who simply interview well but would be disastrous if hired.

Interview Tips for Dental Practice Employees

No matter what position you’re hiring for, there are people who will know how to come across great in an interview, but wouldn’t actually be good employees. There are a few things you can do to make sure you’re hiring the right fit for your dental office:

• Make conversation – Engage the potential employee in casual conversation before the interview begins. This will help him or her feel at ease and will also let you better glimpse the prospective employee’s personality. People are more likely to be themselves during casual conversation.
• Discuss job history – When discussing the employee’s past job history, pay close attention to how they describe former jobs. Are they focusing on the positive aspects or simply discussing all the things that went wrong? This will allow you to see if they’re more likely to focus on positives or negatives.
• Stance on dentistry – If your employee admits to avoiding visits to the dentist or neglecting their own dental health, he or she may not be a great fit for your office. Obviously, it’s a good idea to hire someone with a positive outlook on and knowledge of dental hygiene.
• Hypothetical scenarios – Lastly, you can use role-playing of hypothetical situations to see how the prospective employee would react in certain scenarios. It’s normal for people to get a little flustered when put on the spot, but if the employee is willing to try and gives appropriate responses, you may have found a winner!

The best thing to look out for is a prospective employee’s communication skills and general outlook and attitude. For help hiring new staff members or better training current employees, please contact CTC National today. We are a dental start-up and dental consulting agency.