How to Find Dental Assistants

You'll want to think hard about the way you advertise your dental assistant vacancy. Try to sell them on your dental practice and its ethos. What can you offer them? A fun and close-knit work environment? Rewarding work? Great health benefits?

Going beyond the minimum requirements for a job description will help you attract dental assistants who want to make a difference.

Use a dental assistant job description template will provide much of the boilerplate information you'll need, such as responsibilities and qualifications, making your task a bit easier.

Start by posting to general job posting sites such as Indeed. This is a great place to start because they get plenty of traffic and they're free.

Google for Jobs allows your posting to be seen in search results. This can greatly increase your job visibility. You can get it picked up by Google by having someone properly format it on your website, or by using a service that creates a properly formatted jobs page for you automatically.

This will narrow your search to people who work in dentistry. Use a job posting site for dental professionals to advertise vacancies and recruit a dental assistant.

Some dentists prefer training their dental assistants when they're fresh out of college or high school.

• Start by targeting dentistry schools in the vicinity of your dental practice.
• Contact each school's campus career service office and inquire about forming a partnership.
• Ask about attending campus job fairs.
• Speak to the campus career service office about the process of creating a dental assistant internship with their school.
• Talk to them about the opportunities your dental practice can offer to promising students.
• Connect with dentistry professors and teaching staff and build strong relationships with them. They're your best source of identifying promising students.

Internships are the best way of hand-picking the best students to supervise and train as prospective employees of your dental practice.

• Create an internship as part of a dentistry students' degree program.
• Meet the legal requirements for internships in your state, such as minimum wage and workers' compensation. The rules differ by state.
• Speak to your partner college to determine whether your internship can count towards college credit. This will further incentivize students to seek an internship.
• Promote your internship at campus job fairs.
• Interview and select students you feel have potential.
• Treat their internship as you would any employment. Give them a proper onboarding, allocate resources to them, and make them feel tended to.
• Ensure that the internship is well-structured and emphasize the educational benefits. Provide clear learning objectives and goals, as well as assignments and daily responsibilities. These can include assisting dentists with teeth cleaning, taking X-rays, sterilizing equipment, managing administration, and more.
• Agree on a length of time that corresponds to a semester.
• Market your interns as testimonial figures who speak about the benefits of a dental assistant internship with you.
• Ask your interns to refer you to other students at their college whom they rate highly.
• Offer your interns the chance of full employment pending the success of their internship.

People often overlook job requirements and apply anyway. Filter out the unqualified ones by sending out a short email that asks a few basic questions, such as:

• How long have you worked as a dental assistant?
• What year did you get certified by the Dental Assisting National Body (DANB)?
• Are you available to work on weekends?

This way, they cannot ignore your questions. If you're worried that your applicants may not be responsive to an email, you may want to try delegating someone to make short phone calls to ask these questions.

Once you've narrowed your candidate pool, you'll need to conduct background checks to verify their employment history, application details, criminal record, and more.

In-person interviews take up a lot of time for everyone involved. You can schedule short phone interviews and quickly learn which candidates are the best to continue investing your time in.

During these interviews, review the screening questions to see if their answers are consistent, check that their expectations for salary and benefits line up with yours, and find out why they no longer are at their previous job.

Example questions:

• What brought you to the field of dentistry?
• Why did you leave your last dental assistant job?
• What do you expect for salary and benefits?
• What days are you available to work?
• When would you be able to start?
• What made you interested in this job?

Use this step as an opportunity to identify red flags. If they left their previous job because of issues that you know will be present at the position you're offering, for example, having to work weekends, the candidate won't be a good fit. The same if they want a salary that's outside your range, or they cannot work during your business hours.

At this point, you've got most of what you need to know if a candidate is a right fit for your practice, but an in-person interview will give you insight into how you'd work with them if they are reliable, and how they'll fit in with the rest of your staff.

More importantly, it's a chance to continue selling them the job. Introduce them to co-workers, show them around, review the reasons they want to take the job, and discuss the benefits you offer.

You've figured out how to source a dental assistant that fits your practice, so you'll want to make them an offer fairly quickly, to take them off the job market before another company finds them. This is often best done in an informal call first, followed by a letter or email that provides the job description, as well as salary and benefit information.

Onboarding is a key final step in the hiring process that is not to be overlooked. Make a good first impression and get new hire up and running fast by having a detailed and organized onboarding process.