Working Interview or Watching Interview?

When your dental consultant helps you find a new hire, there are a lot of steps to the process. We recently discussed creating a great ad, so now let’s go a bit further. We had a brief phone interview and decided to meet the applicant in person. That went well, so we’re now at the point where we set up a working interview. This working interview can be fairly simple….a trained op assistant can just jump in and show you what she can do, and you then decide if she has the right skills and temperament  for your office and your patients. The working interview gets tougher, however, when you’re hiring for front desk. While you can certainly have the applicant answer the phone and process simple, easily trained computer tasks….how do you know how she’ll handle patients in a fuller context? One great way that our Mosaic consultants utilize is to create scenarios for situations encountered in the practice and have the consultant and applicant role play to see the responses. While someone unaccustomed to doing this may be a bit stiff at role playing, you still get a really excellent feel for how they respond and how well they think on their feet. If you always remember that a “working interview” is never just a “watching interview” you can utilize this tool to its fullest potential.