In today’s post-COVID world, the dental industry is facing major staffing shortages like many other industries across the country. More than 80% of dentists hiring for at least one position have said the recruitment process is extremely challenging, according to the American Dental Association.
Finding the great staff and talent you need can feel overwhelming. We have outlined below five important strategies to help you recruit dental staff to your practice. These recommendations are based on our own client successes.
Tip #1: Use Your Website to Hire New Staff.
Your website, if well designed, written and optimized, can be one of your most valuable employees and recruitment tools. It’s an absolute wealth of information for your prospective patients — and prospective new employees, too. Based on our own client analytics, the second most-visited page on a website is your Team Page. Prospective employees are looking at this page, as well, so make it work for you.
Add a Careers page to your website so prospective employees can easily find postings.
Adding a Join Us page to your website helps direct qualified, prospective employees to important information about why they should join your practice and specific positions for which you are hiring.
- Be sure to list all of the open positions currently available at your practice.
- Then add individual pages for each job posting that link from your Careers page. These new pages make the job posting easy for prospective new employees to locate, and helps search engines return your webpage when people search for dental jobs near them.
Add “structured data” to your hiring pages to ensure they show up on Google Jobs Board.
Structured data is HTML code that your website manager adds to each hiring page that tells Google to include these positions when someone searches for a job near them. If someone types “Dental hygienist jobs near me,” for example, Google will aggregate that subpage of the site you’ve coded and display it on its Google Jobs Board results.
Showcase your office culture on your website.
Make sure that your “Join Us” page showcases your office culture. Prospective employees often look through websites to get a feel for what day-to-day life would look like if they were to work there, so it’s important to convey your practice philosophy and team dynamic through personal images of team members and interior office photos.
Tip #2: Use Facebook to attract new staff.
With 71% of the US population currently using Facebook, finding your best candidate is just a job post or targeted advertisement away. For our Whiteboard Marketing dental clients, we have had the most success recruiting quality candidates for front desk and office manager positions from Facebook.
Post Open Positions on your Facebook business page.
- Start by posting your hiring post directly on your Facebook page, like the example below. Be sure to include the link to your website Careers page in your post so prospective employees can click directly to your website and learn more about the position.
- After posting, “boost” this job post to reach a wider prospective employee audience. Facebook provides easy-to-follow steps when boosting a job post. Boosted job postings will appear on your Facebook business page, as well as in the new “Jobs bookmark” and on Marketplace.
- Keep in mind that Facebook considers jobs ads to be a “special category” and adheres to a strict non-discrimination policy. This means audience segmentation capabilities are limited.
Advertise open positions with Facebook ads.
Utilize Facebook Ads to augment your social post and boost strategy. Facebook advertising allows you to include multiple images and graphics to run your hiring ads for longer than a boosted post.
- For example, if you’re looking to hire a dental assistant in the Columbus area, you can target Columbus, Ohio as your ad radius and people with “dental assistant” as an occupation or interest on their profile.
- When creating your Facebook hiring ads, use high-quality, engaging team images in your graphics, positive messages and strong calls to action to apply. Make sure to consider how your ads will look on mobile, as 98% of users access Facebook via mobile phone.
For a step-by-step guide on how to advertise on Facebook advertisement creation guide, check out this blog post from our Whiteboard Marketing team. Keep in mind, however, that Facebook’s audience segmentation policies also apply to Facebook ads.
Join the Dental Peeps Facebook group.
Dental Peeps is an industry-focused, private Facebook group with dental staff-only members. Most likely, one or more of your team members is a member of the Dental Peeps group. Ask your staff to post your job post on the Dental Peeps wall and to provide a great “reference” to consider applying. Employee reviews and referrals are important decision-making factors for prospective staff.
Tip #3: Post ads on key job search websites.
Online job sites include millions of listings and posts for every position in the dental industry. Accounting for more than half of all online job postings, job websites serve as the primary recruiting source for employers and employees alike.
For our Whiteboard Marketing clients, we have had the most success with Indeed for hygienists, dental assistants and EFDAs and office staff. Indeed is the number one job site in the world with more than 250 million active unique users each month. Because every dental market is different, research the best job search website for your area. Here are a few to consider:
- Indeed
- ZipRecruiter
- SimplyHired
- GlassDoor
- Handshake
- Dental-specific sites like IHireDental and DentalPost
- OnDiem
- Job boards hosted on key dental association websites, including ODA Jobs Board, ADHA Career Center and the State EFDA Job Board
A bonus of advertising on third-party job websites is that Google Jobs Board aggregates these job listings and displays them when someone searches for a specific job in their area.
Tip #4: Develop a staff referral program to incentivize team members to recruit peers.
Consider this: 70% to 80% of new patients come from current patient referrals. Why not utilize a similar referral philosophy to attract and acquire new team members? Employee referral programs are one of the most effective and efficient recruitment strategies you can implement. According to CareerBuilder, 82% of employers say their best employees come from referrals. Your current team members know and understand your practice and patient philosophy, culture and work ethic. They also have the best idea of peers who may be a great fit for your business.
Depending on the effectiveness of your employee referral program, you may ultimately decide to redirect your jobs advertising budget to your staff referral incentives.
Offer staff incentives for employee referrals.
- Motivate your staff to refer new employees to your practice through an organized incentive program. Some incentive ideas include cash, gift cards or extra vacation days if they refer a qualified candidate.
- For our clients, the average referral bonus is between $500 – $1,000 for a qualified new hire employee. Ideally, the current employee would receive $500 upon hiring and $500 after 30 or 60 days.
- Develop an employee testimonials campaign. Ask team members to review your practice on key hiring websites like Indeed, GlassDoor and ZipRecruiter. These reviews convey to candidates what it’s like to work for your practice and be a part of your team.
- Record staff testimonial videos to post on your social media channels and website Team and Careers pages. We use VocalVideo to create our testimonial videos.
Tip #5: Maintain an Inventory of Potential Employees
Hopefully, as you navigate through the hiring process, you will collect resumes of multiple qualified candidates. Keep these resumes on file for future positions and employment opportunities at your practice. These candidates should be your first contact when hiring for the next position in your practice.
For additional practice recruitment and hiring strategies, download our Hiring Made Simple resource guide. Contact us with any questions at info@whiteboard-mktg.com.
Written by Anna L. Davies, Digital Marketing Specialist at Whiteboard Marketing, with assistance from Sean White, CEO + Owner.