The Secret to Hiring for a Great Culture Fit

In your practice, culture is everything, but it may be more fragile than you realize. You’re only as strong as your weakest link, so a single bad hire can erode that culture, frustrate your team, and cost your practice far more than the time it would have taken to hire right the first time. It may sound counterintuitive, but a candidate’s skills aren’t everything!

You need candidates with the right credentials, technical abilities, and experience, but without that crucial culture fit, you’re going to experience more problems. Like Kirk says, “Nothing frustrates a great team member more than when you consistently tolerate a bad one,” so to avoid team friction and high turnover, you need to use behavior-based questions to hire people that are a great culture fit!

Behavior-based questions are a powerful tool for finding great candidates who fit your core values, because they provide the most information about how well the applicant will fit the position and meet your expectations. Anyone can say they possess the qualities you’re looking for — a team player, positive, adaptable — but behavior-based questions force them to demonstrate evidence of those qualities. Some examples of great behavior-based question are:

• Describe a time when your supervisor indicated that your performance was below standards. What did you do to improve? What was the result of your actions?
• Every job produces different levels of stress. What was the most stressful aspect of your previous job? How did you react to it?
• Describe a time when you were selected as a leader of representative of a group. What project(s) did you lead? What was the result?

By making the questions about a specific, real situation, you’re able to learn about their actions and an outcome, which helps you evaluate if they naturally demonstrate the qualities your culture values. To truly take these questions to the next level, you can tie them to specific core values. For example:

• If you value Accountability: “Tell me about a time you made a mistake at work and how you handled it.”
• If you value Team Collaboration: “Describe a time when you stepped in to help a teammate, even though it wasn’t your responsibility.”

The responses will reveal far more than any resume, and you’ll immediately see if they’ll fit with your values.

Remember, your practice is unique from every other dental practice, so the hiring system you create will be different from every other practice’s. I recommend using Bent Ericksen’s Hiring FAQs as a starting point, and then creating a series of behavior-based questions tied directly to your core values. It’s a simple step, but when you pose these questions to every candidate, you’ll dramatically increase your ability to hire for a true culture fit/

To learn more about ACT and how we can help you build a Better Practice and a Better Life, reach out to Gina!

Tune in next time to get some clarity around your cash flow!