As a dental practice owner, it’s almost certain you work with dental temp agencies when one of your employees is absent due to illness, vacation or personal reasons. Maybe you use a dental temp agency because it’s what you’ve always done. Or maybe you use one because you don’t think there’s a better way to find temporary staff. Whatever your reason for filling vacancies this way, it’s important you’re aware of how working with temp agencies damages your business.
And in a world where businesses develop so quickly, there are much better options open to you when you need to fill a vacancy in your dental practice.
Stop hurting your business and start nourishing it. Here are five reasons traditional dental temp agencies are outdated. You will want to avoid temp dental staffing agencies. Most dental practices find them to be a waste of time.
When you hire your staff via a dental temp agency, very rarely do you get to talk directly to the person you want to hire. Instead, you’ve often got to go through a middleman who will pass messages back and forth between you and your potential employee.
Thanks to smartphones and the internet, you can get in touch with pretty much everyone almost instantaneously. It should be entirely possible to connect with someone, have a discussion and hire them in less than an hour. Yet with traditional dental temp agencies, hiring someone can literally take days or even weeks. This setback can cost your business some serious cash if you have to do without an RDH or another valuable member of your team while you’re waiting for a third party to get back to you.
1. Expensive
Dental temp agencies make their money by adding a mark-up onto the dental professional’s hourly rate. The mark-up could be as much as a staggering 50% of the worker’s hourly rate. This means you’re either paying way too much for your temp dental staff or you’re hiring someone who’s being forced to work for less than they’re worth. Either way, you’re not getting value for money.
Instead of working with a company which takes money away from the professionals it’s supposed to help, it’s important you find a solution which allows workers to set their own rates and take it all home with them. This way, your temp staff are receiving the money they deserve and they’re much more willing to give you 100% when they’re working in your practice.
2. Don’t give you what you want
Despite technically being independent contractors, people who work for dental temp agencies don’t actually have as much control over their careers as they like. Their salaries, schedules and working locations are often controlled more by the agency than the workers themselves. This results in people working at places they don’t want to be at. And when someone’s forced to work somewhere they don’t want to be, they’re never going to give the job their all.
This seems such an antiquated way to work — and it is. You’ll get much higher quality dental professionals by opting for a solution which gives dental employees complete control over their careers.
3. Prevent growth
Temp dental staffing agencies don’t give dental practice owners much scope to show off their dental office and how great it is to work there. The best dental professionals are constantly in high demand and you need to stand out to those you want to work with to attract them. Unfortunately, when you’re just a name in amongst countless other brands, catching the eye of the right dental professional can be a challenge to say the least.
When you don’t have much means of attracting the best staff, you’re stuck with whoever the dental temp agency sends. Working with less than stellar employees means you’re not providing your dental patients with the optimal care they expect and deserve. This significantly inhibits your ability to grow your business. It’s much more in your favor to choose a staffing solution which lets you sell your practice and attract the best staff by highlighting your office’s strengths.
4. Create a never-ending cycle
Since finding the perfect staff first time from a dental temp agency is almost impossible, you’re forced to return to the agency each time you’ve got a vacancy to fill and begin the whole process all over again. The more you use a traditional dental temp agency, the more time you waste, the more money you spend, the more badly-matched employees you work with and the more you restrict the growth of your business.
It’s easy to get stuck in a never-ending cycle and professionally tread water for the rest of your dental career. It’s much more beneficial for the growth of your dental business if you find a solution which saves you time, saves you money, helps you find the best dental employees for your dental practice first time round. This will support you while you grow your dental business.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Trey Tepichin, is Co-founder & CEO of Cloud Dentistry, an online company that matches dental offices with specialists, dentists, hygienists, dental assistants and dental front office–all with just a few clicks. He is a successful Boston attorney with numerous multimillion-dollar victories and former teacher of economics at Harvard.