Hire Better Dental Team Members, by Asking Better Questions

“That, Detective…is the right question.”

– Dr. Alfred Lanning (I-Robot movie character)

Click Here If You Would Like a Free Download Template of 25 Questions You Could Ask Next Time You Interview a Dental Candidate!

Hiring the “right” team members is one of the most difficult and chronically perplexing aspects of business ownership.  There are so many apsects of a human being that do not show up on a resume.  There are so many details of a potential team member as a person beyond simply the techincal skills which they may or may not have.  However, by and large, the necessary skills of a job in the dental office can be taught and coached over time.  Typically, a relatively short period of time at that.

When you listen to older dentists discuss the topic of hiring theam members you will often hear them say, “Hire for personality.” As if that is an easy task.  Very often the dentist who gave you that advice will not elaborate any further – as if you would ever intentionally hire someone with a bad personality.

Hiring for personality is a more complex task than one might initially think.  First off, you have to evaluate the potential team members personality.  2nd off, you have to evaluate if their personality resonates and meshes with yours.  3rd off, you have to evaluate if this new persons’s personality meshes well with the other multiple personalities on the rest of your team!

The following statement is a tale as old as time in a dental practice: “Team Member A is great, she is so good at her job BUT they are always causing drama or not getting along with the other staff.  It is stressing me out.”

If only the dentist had known ahead of time that the team member would be a source of stress, despite their skills, then maybe they would have hired differently.  Usually, if a team member is causing stress to you they are also causing stress to other team members in the office and dragging the entire team downward.

So what does a Good Personality or Bad Personality even mean?  You can throw out all the buzz words you want: Happy, smiles, bubbly personality, good with people, positive attitude, no drama, optimistic, and so on.  But guess what?  That prospective hire can throw out the SAME buzz words when you are interviewing them.  If the person is showing up to interview to get a job with you, they likely want to impress you and give the ‘right answer’ and society has all taught us those very same buzz words.  They know the words to use.

Business CEO, author, and workplace culture guru Rich Sheridan once said something to the effect of, “The definition of the common job interivew is when someone shows up and lies to you for an hour straight.”  Here is a link to a great book on workplace culture by Rich.  

People are very great at faking it during the interviews and you will never be able to weed out all of the fakers.  To make matters more convoluted, many of these people do not even realize they are faking.  When they tell you that they ‘get along well with others and are a team player’ they might not even realize that at their previous job it was they who were the source of conflict and not the other person. 

Personality tests have come into play more in recent years as well.  I have seen dentists distrubting DISC Personality assestment quizzes to potential hires.  The same issue arises – most people know what the ‘right answer’ to these sorts of quizzes is supposed to be.  They know they are ‘supposed to’ select the answers which make them sound more agreeable and less disfunctional.

Sometimes you can ‘cheat the system’ and make hires from referrals who are highly recommended by existing team members (which can present a different world of challenges down the road if the owner later decides they are not so fond of the recommended team member).  However, a quality recommendation of a future team member from a current team member can be excellent.  But what about if you are a brand new practice? Or if you team members don’t have any awesome friends or family members who could and would work for you? We are relegated back to the interview process.

So how can we improve our interview questioning process?

Most job interviews conducted by dentists consist of “Informational Questions” and “Casual Banter.”  I will give examples of a questioning philosophy I believe can be much more practical and effective which is the “Situational Question.”

Informational Questions are the types of questions allued to above: 

-Why do you want this job?

-Why did you leave/are you leaving your last job?

-What are your strengths and weaknesses?

-Why do you like dentistry?

-How much salary do you want?

Those questions all prompt the interviewee to provide you with some factual information to aid you in your decision making and getting to know them.  But again, society has conditioned them to know what the ‘right answer’ to make them ‘sound good’ is supposed to be.

When we get to Casual Banter in a job interview we see the light-hearted questions like:

-So what do you like to do in your freetime?

-How was the traffic getting here?

These Casual Banter Questions provide no factual information related to the job, but rather serve to extract bits of their personality so that you can evaluate ‘how you would get along with them’ and to ‘see if they have a good personality.’  Many times, dentists will even have the potential new hire have a casual lunch or casual style interview with the existing team in order to evaluate the candidate in terms of casual banter.  The Casual Banter can be a nice tool, but again...anybody seriously applying for a job will already know that they need to be on thier best behavior and ‘play nice’ during these casual banter moments.  Unless they are so bad that they can’t even fake nice for this short-period of time. As with Informational Questions, Casual Banter Questions require zero critical thinking and zero introspection from the prospective hire.  Meaning you can only evaluate them at their most surface level character.

Utilizing Situational Questioning:

In the 2004 science fiction movie I-Robot we see Detective Spooner (played by Will Smith) searching for clues to solve a complex mystery. Along his search, he is aided by character Dr. Alfred Lanning who holds many important answers.  The twist is, Dr. Lanning is only able to reveal the proper clues and answers once the right question has been asked.  The wrong questions will keep the Detective running in circles and repeating the same mistakes again and again.

Much like the questioning in I-Robot, when we are asking questions during the interview process – these questions must truly be the right questions to move us forward.  Our questions should reveal critical personality aspects, problem solving abilities, and real world situational information about the person we are interviewing.  The questions should also require some critical thinking and be harder to fake the right answer to than the simple questions discussed above.

A Situational Question is simply a question posed to the prospective team member which either drops them into a hypothetical scenario or calls upon a previous scenario they have actually lived through.  These types of questions will force them to utilize critical thinking (very important skill at nearly any job) and can reveal much more about how this person may or may not get along with you and your team.

Recall earlier in our discussion, most of the on the job skills needed for jobs in a dental office can be trained, learned, and improved on the job if the team member has the right personality.  We run into trouble when we hire somebody who causes stress to ourselves or our team members (and thus eventually ourselves).

Here are some samples of Situational Questions you could ask:

–If you felt like another team member was not pulling their weight – what would you do or say?

-If another team member made a negative comment about the physical appearance of one of our patients, how would you handle that situation?

-You accidentally slept in because your alarm did not go off, how would you handle this situation?

– You feel like the other hygienist never sharpens the scalers during down time, and you find yourself as the only one doing it.  How do you handle this situation?

-A team member is chronically arriving late to work, what would you do or say when you notice this?

-Tell me a memorable situation that occured related to customer service at your previous job?

-An assistant on our team is complaining that the doctor sees 3 columns of patients, she confides in you that she wishes that the doctor only saw 2 columns of patients so they could all go home early more often.  What would you do or say in this situation?

Click Here If You Would Like a Free Download Template of 25 Questions You Could Ask Next Time You Interview a Dental Candidate!

As you can see, these types of questions will prompt the candidate to really paint a picture for you far beyond a ‘Yes/No, A-B-C’ style of questioning.  You can watch their brain work and you can see how they process challenging situations which may actually come up in a dental office or perhaps have come up at a previous job they have held.   Ideally, you can truly have a fully fleshed out conversation around the topic of any one of these prompts. Follow-up questions to explore their answers further should be utilized.

Such as:

“Oh really, tell me more about that?”

“Why would you specifically handle it that way, as opposed to another way?”

“What if…”

“How do you think that would make that person feel?”

At the core of these questions, we really want to see how the team member handles conflict resolution.  In-office conflicts with other team members are one of the major factors that can hold back a dental team.  When Jane the Hygienist and Megan the Assistant are not getting along — everyone in the office knows it and feels it.  When team members don’t get along, this is usually traced back to a root conflict that they have been unable to solve.

Such as complaining: “She is always a Debbie Downer, I always get stuck taking out the trash, she is bossy and I don’t like it.”  When the team members are unable to solve these conflicts among themselves the conflicts will devolve into passive aggressiveness or at times outright agressiveness.  By the time this happens, their conflict is in your lap to solve and is detracting you from providing quality dental care and making quality big picture decisions for your business.

Wouldn’t it be great if the team members already had the conflict resolution skills and situational awareness to solve these problems among themselves?  Some team members are great at this and some are terrible at this.  Utilizing Situational Questioning can help critique the ability of the team member in this area before you make the hire – and hopefully save you a lot of stress along the way.

 

-Dr. DeAngelo S. Webster

Kaizen – Improve yourself a little bit…every day.