Robyn Reis, Director of Hiring, discusses an important step in the hiring process: the interview. Learn how to build successful teams with careful screening and team collaboration.
Resources:
- All-Star’s Hiring Service
- All-Star’s Podcast – Dental Job Description
- Dental Practice Growth Webinar
About Robyn Reis
Robyn began her dental career in 1998 as a marketing and communications director for a large group practice, and instantly fell in love with the world of dentistry. She has spent every waking moment since learning, growing and collaborating with dentists and their teams utilizing her expertise in all aspects of dental practice management, marketing, communications, HR, continuing education, and laboratory sales. Robyn’s personal goals are to make a difference in someone’s life every single day and to give the best of herself to those around her.
About Alex Nottingham JD MBA
Alex is the CEO and Founder of All-Star Dental Academy®. He is a former Tony Robbins top coach and consultant, having worked with companies upwards of $100 million. His passion is to help others create personal wealth and make a positive impact on the people around them. Alex received his Juris Doctor (JD) and Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Florida International University.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
01:15:36:18 – 01:16:20:15
So the five steps to hiring include one, which is your dental job description. This is your recipe for success. Understanding the person and the characteristics and traits that will be a successful team member on your team. Step two was then using your recipe for success to create a job posting that’s going to attract the talent you’re looking for.
01:16:20:17 – 01:16:47:09
This brings us to step three, which will be the interviewing process. Step four is then make an offer and do your due diligence. And finally, step five is the onboarding program. And I’m super excited about each one of these steps because, Alex, as we always have conversations about mentors, many dentists don’t know what to do for each step.
01:16:47:09 – 01:17:04:10
And so what makes me joyful in this process is to help dentists and give them the tools and resources to create a program that really works for them.
01:17:04:12 – 01:17:24:22
Let’s dive deep into dental interviewing now. We could probably spend hours, Alex, on creating questions to really elicit the responses that dentists and their team members want to hear from potential candidates. And
01:17:24:22 – 01:17:35:21
what we have found and what research has shown is there are specific themes that come to light from high performing dental team members.
01:17:35:21 – 01:17:49:13
And this goes way back to the 1960s and the research that was done to find out what does make a successful high performing team member on a dental team.
01:17:49:15 – 01:18:32:20
And what we have found is that interviewing is really a process of elimination. It is not going out and being able to find that one unicorn that exists somewhere on this planet. But it it’s more about creating opportunity and a funnel so that you have lots of applicants that show up, that apply to your position, and then it’s your job to eliminate those that are not going to fall into the category that you’re looking for and then also create a pile of applicants that do meet a majority of the criteria that you’re looking for.
01:18:32:22 – 01:18:59:04
And oftentimes when I have conversations with dentist about this process, they think it’s a very straight line from point A to point B, And what we have found and it’s really not it’s kind of that little squiggle. Mark Right. Getting to narrowing down your funnel to create opportunity to to meet these applicants that fit some of your criteria.
01:18:59:06 – 01:19:38:22
Just great question. A lot of times just teams don’t know where to start. They don’t know what questions to ask. And of course, putting my h.r. Hat on. I always want to help teams stay away from the no, no questions. What things will get you into hot water? You don’t. There. There are so many restrictions on what you can and cannot ask applicants.
01:19:38:22 – 01:20:14:14
So my high recommendation is to make sure as you venture into interviewing questions, make sure you’re asking the right ones. Really focus on the job and the responsibility and what you want. This person to do. Like I mentioned earlier, talking about themes that really are part of a high performing team member, themes such as agility or discipline, people who are flexible and are good problem solvers.
01:20:14:16 – 01:21:22:14
There’s a Cheever, there’s Wu, as we well know, is how to win others over People that have that sparkle, that are interested in helping others. And we find in dentistry that people that have that what I call servant’s heart, people that are altruist Dick, that want to help others, will work really well in the dental profession because they just have that innate desire to help and that some things that cannot be trained for you either have it or you don’t.
01:21:22:16 – 01:22:37:15
But it’s so true. We do. Yes, we do. And there’s a three part process. But even before that, Alex, it’s really about getting yourself organized and having those questions pre-planned so that you’re not winging it and potentially getting yourself into trouble with going down a rabbit hole of questions that you shouldn’t be asking. And some of those are like, you know, Well, can you get here on time?
01:22:37:15 – 01:22:55:22
Do you have a car? How are you going to do that? Oh, you’re married, you have kids. Great. What are you going to do for day care? Those are things you cannot ask. So So you have to be careful about that. You want to get personal, but not too personal. And you want to rephrase those questions to understand.
01:22:56:01 – 01:23:36:04
You know, the at the beginning hours are you have to arrive at 630 in the morning. Would anything prevent you from arriving on time? That’s one way of getting around that question. So going back to having a plan and having those questions organized, we do it in a three part process. We do a phone interview first, 5 to 10 minutes, about five questions to really just get a sense of this person, ask them about their resum√©, verify some information that you’ve already provided, Ask some of those theme questions to see if, again, they give us a response that we’re looking for and then we advance them to the next stage, which is a Zoom interview
01:23:36:08 – 01:23:57:20
where we actually get to see them face to face without anybody leaving their home office and hopefully get to to know their personality. This really takes the pressure off the doctor to because he or she is most often seeing patients during the day and don’t have time to step aside and spend an hour or a half an hour with an applicant.
01:23:57:22 – 01:24:26:10
So the zoom in or interview is really a great way to see the personality. We’re asking deeper questions, situational questions that again, helps lead us to is this a good candidate for the position and the practice? Are they are culture fit? Even more importantly, are they a culture add to our team? Are they bringing additional skills and experience that maybe we don’t have enough of on our team?
01:24:26:12 – 01:24:56:09
So the Zoom question or the Zoom interview and those questions really dive a little bit deeper. And it also takes the pressure off the applicant and the doctor so that they can be a little more natural and the doctor gets to observe this person and hear their responses. And then after that, the candidate will then advance to an in-person interview where the doctor gets to meet and the team gets to meet the applicant in person.
01:24:56:09 – 01:25:44:20
They get a tour of the office, they get a sense of, you know, could I see myself working on this team in this office? And they get to, again, dive a little deeper into the the true details of the position. It’s a total elimination process. You’re right, Alex. If they don’t show up for the phone interview or if they have struggles with the technology and your practices all digital, that could be a potential deal breaker, that this applicant isn’t who you’re looking for.
01:25:44:20 – 01:26:20:04
So each stage of the process has intention not only behind the questions that we ask, but also the steps in which we do it. Because again, in this competition for for talent, we want to act quickly and we also want to make sure we’re intentional about what we do to get that talented person on the team as quickly as possible.
01:26:20:06 – 01:27:05:02
Right? Slowly. And we’re only as good as the practices that we work with. If they’re taking a long time to get back to us, we’re texting them, we’re emailing them, we’re calling them. You know, we understand that they have patient care during the day, but when we find in a contract a good, talented team member what we believe to be a good, talented team member, we want to respond to them quickly and we want to accelerate the process as well and get them in front of the client as soon as possible
01:27:05:04 – 01:30:24:10
So again, you know, those practices that take a long time to get back to us, we we oftentimes will lose good people because there’s no timely communication. Absolutely. And that was a great way to articulate it. It is following that process. And when we skip steps or try to shortcut it again in in our our sense of urgency, sometimes that backfires on us because we didn’t do our due diligence in that step four, which we’ll talk about next right?
01:30:24:12 – 01:32:01:04
We can’t do what we do well, yeah. You know, one thing I do want to kind of reiterate what I said early on was it is a team sport, right? Interviewing is a team sport. It cannot be left up to just one person on the team and it certainly can’t be dumped in the lap of an administrative or office manager position because there are so many layers to the interviewing process.
01:32:01:10 – 01:32:39:16
You want more than one set of eyes, more than one set of ears, listening and interacting with this applicant because it is a team effort, right? It’s a team effort as a dental practice team and it’s also a team effort when you’re trying to onboard somebody new. So you want to make sure that at every stage of if you’re going to do it on your own in your office, one person does the phone interview, another person does the Zoom interview, and then yet another person is in charge of the in person interviewing and, of course, meeting with the doctor.
01:32:39:18 – 01:33:06:16
So at every stage you want more than one person involved because that also helps eliminate what we call the halo effect. If you hear somebody on the phone and you think, Wow, I really like this person, let’s hire her or him, you can sometimes again find yourself in trouble because you haven’t done the extra steps to then have them meet with somebody else and then yet have them meet with the third person.
01:33:06:20 – 01:33:48:14
So even if you’re only a three person office, everybody can take part in each stage or even if you’re a two person office, you want more than one person doing the interviewing.
01:33:48:16 – 01:34:17:04
I’d be happy to. Alex All star hiring was born out of the need to help clients who didn’t have the time to do the recruiting process, and that is creating those job ads, screening those resumes, talking to those applicants and then getting them in front of dental practices. So we have developed a team of dental professionals who have all sat at least one one seat in the dental practice.
01:34:17:06 – 01:34:50:19
You’ll also have hiring and recruiting experience, and we’ve gathered them together to really create a incredible team of hiring specialists who are dedicated to finding those right team members for our clients. And so it’s a done for you service. You don’t have to worry about anything except for filling out that questionnaire, which helps our team be very successful at what we do, and then meeting the candidates that we find for you that meet or check most of your boxes that you’re looking for.
01:34:50:23 – 01:35:56:17
So occasionally we we create some magic and do find those unicorns that check all the boxes. But for the most part, we are there to again take the time and stress and time consuming burden off the practices so that they get to focus on what they do best. And that is taking care of your patients. You can find us here.
01:35:56:17 – 01:36:12:13
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental Allstars. Visit us online at all. Star Dental Academy dot com.
