by By DEO MAP
Finding the right candidate for the job is one of the biggest challenges facing businesses everywhere. It’s a time-consuming process and is ultimately a gamble on someone that could ultimately not be the right fit for your organization.
How can we simplify this process without losing the efficacy of our recruitment systems? The best tool in your arsenal is the core values of your organization.
Culture as a tool
When you are ready to hire new team members, make sure that your company culture is where it needs to be to hire the right people for the right seats. Start off by ensuring that you have a clearly defined mission and vision for your practice.
If not, you need to establish one that defines what you want to accomplish with your dentistry. Are you looking to elevate the patient experience? Is your team focused on improving full body health? Once that’s established, check your core values. What’s important to you? How do you want your team members to conduct themselves?
Your company culture is the combination of shared values, goals, attitudes, and practices that make up your practice. It’s not free chips and Casual Fridays. A strong company culture is your single greatest asset in hiring. When the culture is healthy, the employees are happy – it’s that simple. Use your culture as a recruiting and retention tool to help you bring in the best people available for the job at hand.
Our systems should start with engagement, which is what builds our company culture. When you have engaged team members that can join in on the hiring/recruiting process, not only have you built a strong internal support system, but it makes your company look significantly better. It’s one thing to make a video talking about how great your culture is, but if your team members are actively talking about how great it is to work for your company, it will mean so much more. Recruits will see that your team members are genuinely and excited to come to work – use that to your advantage.
Who is your customer?
Your patient base ends up being the customer of your associates and your team members. Those people are most responsible for the patient experience within your practice, which makes customer service a powerful tool in these scenarios. Your primary customer, as the leader, ends up being those team members and associate doctors that work for you. Shifting that mentality and thought process as you grow your business is a really big deal, helping you to refocus and reprioritize your efforts.
In the dental industry, one of the big talking points we discuss with our teams is patient experience. What’s your patient experience? What’s the process? What’s the workflow? Are you meeting expectations? You need to be just as intentional about your team member experience with workflows, graphics, expectations, and metrics.
If you aim to build a practice that people will want to work for, it will create an environment that your patients will want to keep coming back to. In order to do that, you need to target your customers (your employees), and the results of those efforts will trickle down to your patients. Leverage your core values to create the environment that your team wants to work in.
