5 Strategies to Hire Great Staff for Your Dental Practice

By Anna L. Davies, Digital Marketing Specialist at Whiteboard Marketing

Like every industry, dental offices are facing staffing shortages. According to the American Dental Association, more than 80% of dentists say the recruitment process is extremely challenging.

Finding the staff and talent you need can feel overwhelming. Here are five strategies to help you recruit staff to your practice.

Strategy #1: Use Your Website to Hire New Staff

“Your website, if optimized, can be one of your most valuable recruitment tools,” says Sean White, CEO and owner of Whiteboard Marketing. “Prospective employees look through websites to get a feel for day-to-day life in your office.” In fact, the second most-visited page on a website is your team page.

To optimize your website for staff recruitment, work with your web developer to:

• Add a careers page to your website so prospective employees can easily find postings.

This helps qualified, prospective employees find essential information about your practice and available positions.

Add individual pages for each job posting linked from the careers page. This makes the job posting easy for prospective employees to locate and help search engines like Google show your webpage when people search for dental jobs near them.

Strategy #2: Use Facebook to Attract New Staff

“With 71% of the U.S. population currently using Facebook, finding your best candidate is just a job post or advertisement away,” says White. “For our dental clients, we have had the most success recruiting quality candidates for front desk and office manager positions.”

Work with your social media manager to:

• Post open positions on your Facebook business page.

Include the link to your careers page so prospective employees can go to your website and learn more.

After posting, boost this post to reach a wider audience. It will appear on your Facebook business page, in the “Jobs bookmark” and on Marketplace.

Facebook provides easy steps when boosting a job post. The platform considers job ads a “special category” and has a strict non-discrimination policy with limited audience segmentation capabilities.

• Advertise open positions with Facebook ads.

Facebook advertising allows you to run your hiring ads longer than a boosted post. Use high-quality team images, positive messaging and strong calls to action.

For example, if you’re looking to hire a dental assistant in the Fort Lauderdale area, you can target Fort Lauderdale as your ad radius and people with “dental assistant” as an occupation or interest on their profile.

• Join your area’s Dental Peeps Facebook group.

Dental Peeps is a private Facebook group for dental staff. Ask your staff to post on the wall and encourage others to apply.

Strategy #3: Post on Key Job Search Websites

Accounting for more than half of all online job postings, job websites serve as the primary recruiting source for employers and employees.

“Indeed is the No. 1 job site in the world with more than 250 million active unique users each month,” says White. “Because every dental market is different, research the best site for your area.”

Consider using:

• Indeed
• ZipRecruiter
• SimplyHired
• FDA Career Center
• GlassDoor
• Dental sites like IHireDental and DentalPost
• OnDiem

Strategy #4: Ask Your Employees to Refer Potential Staff

According to CareerBuilder, 82% of employers say their best employees come from referrals.

“Employee referral programs are one of the most effective and efficient recruitment strategies you can implement,” says White. “Your current team members understand your practice, patient philosophy, culture and work ethic. They also have the best idea of peers who may be a great fit for your business.”

Motivate your staff to refer employees through an organized incentive program. Some incentive ideas include cash, gift cards or extra vacation days. You also can ask team members to review your practice on hiring websites.

Strategy #5: Maintain an Inventory of Potential Employees

As you navigate the hiring process, you will collect resumes of qualified candidates. Keep these resumes on file for future opportunities at your practice.

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Whiteboard Marketing is a national dental marketing agency, based in Dublin, Ohio. With more than 17 years of experience, Whiteboard Marketing creates unique, customized solutions that attract, acquire and retain patients for your practice.