Sick of Worrying About Recruiting? Get Better at Retention.

We know — most dentists are sick of worrying about recruiting. But the truth is that the hiring market is still extremely competitive for employers.

That makes today an especially good time to focus on retention so you can steer clear of hiring new talent as much as possible.

Now, salary and benefits are an important part of retention. After two years of rising wages for associates and hygienists, though, most practices don’t have much wiggle room left to try and compete with each other on pay.

That means that your culture is more important than ever. 

Culture is a huge challenge. But one specific area worth focusing on is training and skills development — making sure that everyone on your team knows how to actually do their jobs and gets the resources needed to continue to improve.

Let’s take treatment planning as an example. If you hire someone inexperienced to do treatment planning at a location where they won’t have a more seasoned treatment planner to learn from, they probably won’t perform very well. 

You’ll see subpar results. They’ll be frustrated by their own failures and soon enough, start looking for a new job. And then you’ll be back on the hiring market hoping for better luck the next time around.

But if you make sure that each of your locations offers enough support and training opportunities to get your team feeling confident about their roles, then you can avoid that whole scenario. Your rookie treatment planner will learn on the job, get better, and probably want to stick around.

And you won’t have to put up yet another job listing. 

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