Whether you are the owner of a dental practice or a hiring manager at a dental office, you are in charge of choosing the highest quality dental candidates. 

Hiring is not only a matter of finding the best dental employees, but also hiring employees that will work with you long-term. 

While some interviewees appear to be great options for your dental office, they might actually turn out to be bad employees while on the job.

This is why it is important to properly weed through the applicants you receive and through the interviews that you conduct. 

The job interview is a crucial part of the hiring process, and it is the time to choose who you would want to add to your dental staff. 

Here we are going to talk about 5 tips for interviewing potential dental employees, so that you find the best fit for your open role.

1. Use your job description as a guide for your interview questions

A great way to ask proper questions during the interviews that you conduct is to use your job description as a guide for your interview questions.

In your job description you should explain all of the essential skills and experience you are looking for. 

Make a list of all of the essential skills and experience you have in your job description, and create questions directly related to each of them. 

For example, if communication skills are important for the open position, you can ask questions such as “how do you define communication skills?” and “how do you exemplify communication skills in the workplace?”.

2. Do an initial phone screen interview

Before you bring candidates in for an in-person interview, it is a good idea to do an initial phone screen first.

This will help you to determine if their experience, qualifications, and workplace culture are in line with the open position, as well as with your dental practice. 

Based on how the phone screenings go you can weed out candidates that are not a good fit for the position already, and can focus on the ones that seem like a good fit after the phone call. 

3. Prepare well for each individual interview ahead of time

In addition to creating questions based on your job description, you should also build questions that are specific to each individual candidate you are interviewing.

Before each interview, read over the candidate’s resume and create questions based on what is listed. Be sure that you bring a copy of the resume to the interview as well. 

Link what is required in your job description to what is written on the candidates resume, and ask how they will use that past experience to succeed in this new role.

If there’s anything in their resume that you are unsure of, make sure that you make a note of it so that you ask them to clarify during the interview. 

4. Create possible scenarios and see how the candidate will handle them

While on the job, dental employees can run into various challenges and difficulties that they will have to know how to deal with. 

During the interview it is beneficial to give a couple possible scenarios that the potential employee might experience while on the job, and ask how they would handle it. 

Demonstrating possible scenarios and understanding their reactions to them will help you to see if they would be a good fit for the position, and if they have good critical thinking and problem solving skills. 

This will also help you to identify if they would be a good culture fit for your dental office. 

5. Take notes during the interview and come back to them

Taking notes during the interview and coming back to them later on in the interview is crucial to truly evaluating your candidates. 

Write down specific details and exact numbers and dates that candidates give during the interview and on their resume, so that you can ask them about it later in the interview to be sure they are correct and not exaggerated. 

People will remember exact numbers and dates that are truthful, and most likely won’t if they are not. 

Note taking also allows you to look back at the information that you wrote down about each candidate after the interview is over, so that you can compare notes that you took about the other candidates to see who would be the best fit.