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The Best Way to Evaluate Your Applicants (It's Not a Working Interview)
CEDR
Working interviews are pervasive in the dental industry. Even if you’re not using them as a standard procedure for testing out job candidates, chances are good that you know another office manager or doctor who is.
It makes sense that dental professionals would want to test out applicants before hiring them -- especially when it comes to clinical positions. After all, you wouldn’t want an unproven candidate working on actual patients, right?
In reality, though, holding a traditional working interview is exactly that -- an unproven candidate working on your patients or handling PHI before you’ve had the chance to refresh their HIPAA training.
Not only does this leave you vulnerable if the applicant is injured at work, causes a HIPAA breach, tries to claim unemployment benefits from you after the “interview,” or otherwise puts your practice at risk because you haven’t had the chance to properly vet them beforehand, but it’s also illegal from an employment-law standpoint.
“Did you say ‘illegal?’”
That’s right -- working interviews, as they are often performed, are actually illegal.
Without getting into too much detail, this is because any person who performs work for your practice that both contributes to your company’s bottomline and is typical of the work your business performs is considered an employee, according to the Fair Labor Standards Act.
This means that, before allowing an applicant to perform actual work for your business, you need to have all of the proper paperwork in place that you would for someone you had actually decided to hire. (For more on the legal requirements of working interviews, including the “Temp Agency Loophole”, check out our free eGuide, Making Working Interviews Work).
“So, how am I supposed to qualify my applicants?”
Let’s be honest with ourselves, here.
Though you might feel like a full day of work is enough to judge an applicant’s ability to perform the functions of their job as well as the likelihood that they’ll be able to gel with the rest of your team, deep down you know it probably isn’t.
Think about any time you’ve been forced to interact with someone in a position of authority for a brief period of time. Whether it was a weekend company retreat with your colleagues and superiors, or sharing a meal with your significant other’s parents for the first time, no doubt you managed to be on your “best behavior.”
Translation: you managed to suppress certain mannerisms or traits that might be a normal part of your day-to-day life, but that you thought might reflect poorly on you in such a setting. The same is true of applicants during a working interview.
For this reason, at CEDR HR Solutions, we always recommend that employers in the dental industry take a two-pronged approach to testing their applicants by performing a behavioral interview followed by a series of skills tests.
The Behavioral Interview
The difference between a traditional interview and a behavioral interview comes down to the questions. In a traditional interview, questions tend to be abstract (“What does being a dental assistant mean to you?”) or hypothetical (“How would you handle the following situation?”).
In a behavioral interview, on the other hand, the questions are focused on challenging applicants to describe actual scenarios in which they’ve illustrated the types of qualities you are looking for in the past.
For instance, if you were looking for an applicant who was able to leave personal problems at home, rather than asking them “Are you able to leave personal problems at home?” (which would no doubt leave you with a nondescript, one-word response of “Yes”), consider asking them to describe a time when they were facing a personal issue previously, and to explain how that issue affected their work.
The answer you get from the behavioral iteration of the question is likely to be much more telling than the traditional answer would have been.
The Skills Test
Rather than testing applicants out in an actual work setting with actual patients, use skills tests to have applicants demonstrate their abilities without having them do actual work for your practice.
Ask other employees to role play specific scenarios with applicants. Have applicants review anonymized charts or x-rays. Have them walk you through procedures, set up work spaces, or sterilize instruments -- just don’t have them work on actual patients.
The skills tests you choose to use with your applicants will depend on your office’s priorities and the position for which you are hiring. And you can modify your particular program with time and experience, of course.
But, by employing a behavioral interview technique and then testing your applicants outside of a real-world, working scenario, you can avoid the labor laws associated with bringing employees into the fold of your business and still get the information you need. That way, even without performing an illegal working interview, you’ll still be able to determine if your applicant is a potential difference maker, or if they’ll just lead you right back to the applicant search as soon as you bring them on board.
(For more on working and behavioral interviews, including more example behavioral interview questions, how to perform working interviews the legal way, and 9 example skills tests you can use for clinical and office positions, download our free eGuide, titled Making Working Interviews Work.
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