5 Recruitment Strategies to Best Attract and Find Dental Candidates

Does your dental organization stress about hiring and recruiting?

If so, believe it or not, that’s pretty common across the dental industry. Primarily, due to the talent pool for dental candidates being much smaller when compared to other industries. And also because many times organizations jump into recruiting without properly analyzing what their dental staffing needs really are.

Before discussing recruitment strategies to attract and find dental candidates, there are a few items employers should keep top of mind.

One, when looking for dental candidates, be flexible and open minded. Yes, it’s important to identify and have a clear understanding of the type of dental candidate you want and need, but don’t make your candidate search extremely specific, chances are you won’t find a candidate that fits your exact criteria.

Two, when evaluating dental candidates, try to focus on their hard vs. soft skills. Let’s quickly recap the difference – hard skills are skill sets you can quantify. For example, knowing a second language, a computer program, or obtaining a marketing degree. On the other hand, soft skills are harder to quantify as it includes your people and interpersonal skills such as your attitude, eagerness to learn and your communication and leadership skills.

When identifying the roles you are trying to fill, be proactive and develop a “must-have” and “nice-to-have” list. This way, when recruiting, you know what skills and requirements are a must and what is negotiable.

Therefore, if you come across dental candidates that don’t meet your “ideal” criteria, you know to analyze their soft skills and personality traits vs. immediately disqualifying them. As an employer, always remember that if a candidate has a great attitude and willingness to learn, that the technical parts of the job can be taught.

Now that you’re ready to start your dental candidate search, here are 5 recruitment strategies to best attract and find dental candidates:

1. Refine Job Postings / Messaging: When looking for dental candidates, don’t make your job posting so specific that no one qualifies. Instead, summarize the position, list key responsibilities, but also highlight what you offer. Yes, competitive pay and benefits are important, but include other items such as training available, opportunities to advance, continuing education, flexible schedule, great culture, paid time off, retirement savings etc. The job posting should also state why a candidate should apply. Remember that not every candidate is going to do research on your practice beforehand, so think of your job posting as the first opportunity you have to best market your practice – make it clear and interesting to read, allowing the candidate to take immediate action.
2. Referrals: Employee referrals uncover some of the best people/talent. It is likely that your current employees will know other like-minded people who can make good employees. Speak to your employees so that they are aware of the dental positions available, and even offer them a small incentive for referrals they provide. Other ways to get referrals can be through colleagues, partners and patients.
3. Careers Page: As dental candidates look for opportunities across several online platforms, one of them is likely to be your website. If your website doesn’t have a careers page, now is the time to develop one (or at least consider one). A careers page will allow candidates to browse through all open positions by title, location, and/or status (full or part-time). As mentioned earlier, when listing job postings, make sure your message is clear, easy to read, and simple. Avoid making them too lengthy and make sure your process to submit applications isn’t too complicated either. You want to avoid making candidates feel under qualified or overwhelmed.
4. Online Job Boards / Social Media: Traditional job boards still exist today. In fact, once you generate job postings for your website’s career page, you can utilize the same document (with small tweaks) to re-post it on job boards like Indeed, Monster, CareerBuilder, Zip Recruiter etc. It doesn’t take too much time to post and as a result you may immediately hear back from interested dental candidates. Outside of your traditional job boards, social media is another recruiting avenue. Nowadays millions of people are on social media, so why not leverage that engagement? Make sure when posting a job through social media, that you are very specific and targeted to avoid getting traction from non-qualified candidates – it is easy to engage a broader audience on social platforms. You can also have your employees share the “job posting” on their page to get more traction.
5. Dental Recruiter: Many dental practices have their own internal recruiting person or team. However, if you don’t then one way to find top dental candidates is with the help of a dental recruiting firm, like MASC Medical. Yes, it’s an investment, but it’s probably one of the most efficient and effective recruitment strategies. Dental recruiters are recruiting experts, have access to a wide network of dental candidates, and utilize proven strategies to get you the candidates you’re looking for within a reasonable amount of time.

Hiring the best staff equates to the success of your dental practice.

We hope that these 5 recruitment strategies help your dental organization find qualified, motivated and committed dental candidates who work well with your existing team and continue to create an amazing patient experience.

Click here to learn more about dental staffing.