Hire with Experience

Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:00
Hello everyone, welcome to your weekly motivational moments with Eric Vickery, President of Coaching at All-Star Dental Academy. With me is my fellow coach, Larissa, and we’re gonna answer the question, is it important to hire with experience? And I’ve got question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark for you. So I hear this all the time, Larissa, I wanna hire someone, but I wanna hire them with experience. And I always joke and I look off in the distance and I say, well,

00:28
I think I turned out okay in dentistry and I started with no experience. So what do you have to tell us about this when it comes to finding team members and the whole experience thing? So my question is, what is experience? I’ve seen this in real life. Some employees been in dentistry for over 20 years and when you go check on their skills, they really are not up to the number of years in dentistry.

00:58
So when we want to hire someone with experience, there has to be an understanding of what that means. I am all for hiring without experience for soft skills, because it’s important to look at those as well, especially the times we’re in today. So, and I also understand some offices can’t because they don’t have the manpower to train. It’s understandable, but.

01:22
What I see a lot is when someone is hired with a lot of years of experience and then that doctor owner will believe or trust that the work is being done. And I’ve come into offices where things were not being done properly. Yeah, of course. Of course. I had one office that lost about $60,000 in claims because it wasn’t being done properly. So being able to assess the experience.

01:48
in a way where you can identify what is known, what’s not known, the competency in design, as an effective training program. And the reality is most of us that are opening a new office, a startup, most of us don’t know what needs to be done. We don’t know what we don’t know.

02:10
Exactly. And it’s important to understand that dentistry is a different business. You could do, you could take business classes wherever you want, but they don’t teach down the revenue cycle. They don’t teach new patient conversion call rate. They don’t teach you all the things that you need to know. So it’s important that understanding that there are things that needs to be checked with this new hire. You may need help. You may need to hire out of course consulting

02:39
to help you gauge and making sure that this person you hired is really delivering what you want them to deliver. Now, there’s three levels of training. You either get someone with no dental experience at all, you know how much training you’re gonna have to provide. You get someone who is been in the industry for a while, then you gauge the experience and knowledge. You may need to give a little bit more training to that person, but not as much as the first scenario. And then you have the third scenario where this person really knows what they’re doing. And then, hey, it’s good to go.

03:09
But if you don’t make an assessment, how do you know where you fall under? So how do you do an assessment? Is that a checklist? What are you doing? We’re looking at understanding. In my view, it’s important that this person understand. If they’re going to do your billing, if they’re going to do your insurance, your coding, you need to make sure that they understand insurance and how to submit claims. So I will do a hard skills check for sure. I will ask real-time scenarios, real-case scenarios where…

03:38
The way that this first send brings me to the answer will tell me what’s their level of expertise and what kind of training they may need. See you’re making this come from the perspective that you know the answers and sometimes dentists are hiring and they don’t know the answer to those questions. They don’t even know what questions to ask and they’re hoping, hey, if I just hire someone with experience, they’re going to bring the answers I don’t even know about. I forget, and I was talking to a client about this earlier today, my father-in-law, he taught me.

04:07
how to answer the phone. He taught me how to bill claims. He taught me, I mean, he taught me so much because he knew each step of his practice. And I think so many dentists feel like they don’t have the time to know those things, but it’s so important to know the answers to questions you’re asking, right? Yeah, for sure. And understand that if there is something wrong at the end of the day, if you’re not getting your production, you know, your 98% production in, you’re not collecting that, during that, there are needs. Something’s wrong. Yep.

04:35
Something’s off. I love this, thank you, Larissa. We have an inventory’s checklist, a hiring inventory’s checklist that all our clients have access to. So if you’re listening to this as a client, you don’t have that, email your coach, we’ll get it to you. It’s got tabs along the bottom, it’s beautifully done. Our coaches have made it look really pretty. So thank you, Larissa, I really appreciate this.