Hiring dental staff: The Onsite Interview

A quick review of our hiring process so far:

In Part 1: Where place ads? we reviewed how to attract candidates for your dental position. In Part 2: Telephone interviewI shared the questions and approach to eliminating unqualified candidates. Today, we will discuss how to do an onsite ½ hour interview.

When your candidate arrives, give them your patient brochure or some information about your practice. It’s best if you create a one page profile of your practice to answer the standard questions: what are the hours? What is the job description and career advancement opportunity? Give this profile page to your candidate to read – that also gives you a few minutes to wrap up with your patients and get to your interview.

When you meet your candidate, introduce yourself (and your role if you’re a staff member) and shake hands. Invite your candidate to come to a private room and start out by letting her know that you’ll plan to spend 30 minutes together where you will ask a handful of questions, she can ask some questions and we’ll see if this position looks like a fit for her. This starts the meeting off in a positive manner.

First, ask to see a copy of her resume. Read through her resume to look for a logical path of jobs and find out why she left each position and why she accepted the next one. If something doesn’t make sense in her explanation, ask follow up questions. Does accepting your position seem like a reasonable fit with her background and skills? By reviewing her resume, you can find out if she is a job hopper or if she has negative things to say about all her past employers – both warning signs.

Your next job at this interview is to make a decision about the appearance and professionalism of your candidate. While you were asking questions about her resume, how was her speech? Political correctness aside, this is your practice and you get to set the appearance guidelines for staff. If you decide that this person doesn’t match the professionalism you expect from your staff, then you can speed up the interview by asking a few questions and then letting the candidate leave.

Now it’s time to ask a handful of questions. We ask:

1. What prompted you to call us regarding this position?
2. How would your present employer/co-workers describe you?
3. What’s the most important thing you’ve accomplished at work this year?
4. What did you learn from your last job?
5. What do you see as the next step in your career development?
6. Have you ever read a book that had a deep and lasting effect on you? Tell me about it.
7. What have you done in work situations to improve teamwork?
8. Tell me something you have recently done for yourself.
9. Have you ever committed to a class or project that required one evening/week of your time? What was it? When?
10. To build your career at HealthPark, it will take 2-3 hours/week of your own time to complete our training. It will take 3 years of this time commitment to move into level 5, how do you feel about that?

Since our practice uses an organized dental staff training levels approach, questions 6, 9 and 10 are specific to our group. These may not apply for an office that doesn’t require significant reading and training, doesn’t expect staff to use personal time to develop their career or doesn’t offer career advancement opportunities.

During the question/answer part of this onsite interview, I recommend taking notes. You’re listening for intelligent, positive answers and stories that tell you this person has some real skills that would fit into your practice. If you’re unimpressed with the answers, you can put an x through each question you feel that the candidate answered poorly – that may help you decide if you want to invite her back or not. You also want to evaluate how enthusiastic your candidate is about her work experiences. If she is energized by talking about what she has accomplished and learned in the past, then you can reasonably expect the same in your practice. Watch how often your candidate smiles – if you’re interviewing for a secretary, it’s nice to hire someone who smiles easily and often since they will set the tone for your patients as they enter and exit the practice.

Watch your time during this interview. Hold yourself to 30 minutes even when you really like the candidate. When it’s time to wrap it up and you like the candidate, it’s easy. Hand them the application questions (in my office we have about 5 pages of questions they are expected to fill out & bring back with them – we do this on purpose to see if they are motivated to work on their own time and to see what kind of effort they put into homework that will be expected once they are hired) and let them know that they have completed the first 2 steps of the interview process for the practice (telephone and onsite) and now you would like to invite them to come in for the final step which is an observation. They now get to spend ½ day observing the practice – meeting the dentists and staff, seeing the work up close and getting a feel for the culture of the group. Again, the focus is to find if this position is a fit for them.

If you have decided not to invite this candidate back, then it’s time to look her in the eye and say “I sure appreciate your coming in for our interview today. After talking together and reviewing your resume, I realize that I have other candidates that have more experience than you do and I have to give them preference. So, I can’t invite you to come back for a final interview. I wish you the best of luck with your job search.” Then shake their hand, stand up and walk them to the door. This is tough to do at first, but I promise it gets easier. Plus you are being so good to your candidates by being up front and letting them know they are not getting the job that many of them will thank you for being honest.

Step 4 in the hiring process is the observation day. If you’ve handled the onsite interviews well, then you should have no more than 3-4 candidates coming in to observe. The telephone interview and the onsite interviews usually happen in the same week. So although this seems like a lot of work, it drastically improves your hiring process and it can go quickly. Here’s to hiring successfully in 2012!