Dental Practice Heroes

Hiring or Onboarding: What to Do When a New Hire Isn’t Working Out

• Dr. Paul Etchison • Episode 598

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Did you hire the wrong person… or is it your onboarding process?

In this episode, learn how to figure out if it’s a hiring mistake or an onboarding issue, why coachability matters more than resumes, and what to do when your new hire isn’t meeting expectations. You'll hear about our own hiring mistakes and get tips for spotting red flags early, asking better interview questions, and knowing when it’s time to let someone go.

Topics discussed in this episode:

  • Why your office isn’t the right fit for everyone
  • Questions to ask in interviews
  • Interview red flags to watch for
  • How to tell if candidates are coachable
  • When to let someone go

This episode was produced by Podcast Boutique https://www.podcastboutique.com


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Paul Etchison:

All right hypothetical situation here you hired someone, onboarding is complete, but they're still not meeting expectations. Is it your onboarding process? Or maybe you just didn't hire the right person? That's what we struggle with as practice owners. Which situation is it? Who's at fault? And that is what we're talking about today. How can you spot those early red flags with prospective employees, and what you should be asking in every interview, as well as what you can do to give new hires the best chance to do well on your team.

Paul Etchison:

Let's do this. You are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we teach dentists how to step back from the chair, empower their team and build a practice that gives them their life back. I'm your host, dr Paul Etcheson, dental coach, author of two books on dental practice management and owner of a large four-doctor practice that runs with ease while I work just one clinical day a week. If you're ready for a practice that supports your life instead of consuming it, you're in the right place. My team of legendary dental coaches and I are here to guide you on your path from overwhelmed owner to dental practice hero. Let's get started.

Paul Etchison:

Welcome back to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast. I'm joined with my two DPH coaches Dr Henry Ernst, the owner of an 18-op practice in Carolina, and Dr Steve Markowitz six multi-practice multi-practice six office multi-practice owner. Dr Steve Markowitz, you good, you got it out, I got it. That time the edit's only going to hear me say that once. So that's going to get cut out. That's going to be perfect. So Steve's got a good story that we just decided to hit record and I haven't heard the whole thing yet. But we're talking about gotcha onboarding and this is something that I've become better with as I've gone on in my career and it's something that I've really realized later in my career. Just, it's so important and it also is one of those things that you say one of these days I'm going to have some better onboarding protocols. One of these days.

Steve Markowitz:

One of these days.

Paul Etchison:

I'm going to have some better onboarding protocols One of these days, one of these days, until you finally do it, because it's one of those things you can sort of squeak by without, but once you get it you see the value in it. So I'm just going to pass it right to you, steve, I mean you had some interesting recent events.

Henry Ernst:

Yeah, I definitely had an interesting week at work. So I had a doctor start on Tuesday and by Friday she resigned. And as I was going through it she was asking me a bunch of bunch of questions like what kind of coaching have you had, what kind of consulting have you had? And uh, kind of took me back and I was like I just kind of learned from my own mistakes. At first I thought it was like endearing. She's like how have you done all this without, like what kind of coaching has allowed you to get here?

Henry Ernst:

But when I uncovered is like it was actually coming from a negative place Judgment and what she was seeing what I was thinking was helpful for her she was seeing as negative. And on the Friday of the last day of the week this was last week I was just like asking her are you sure you want to be here? And it wasn't like a negative place. I was like it doesn't seem like what I'm saying to you resonates with how you want to be treated or how you want to treat your patients. And at first I was like what the hell am I doing wrong?

Henry Ernst:

And I think a lot of my team took it as what the hell is Steve doing wrong? But actually I was really and when I reflect on it I'm like no, we're. I'm so clear on who we are that the mistake wasn't my onboarding or how we were doing it. The mistake was in the selection. I'm actually really proud of who we are and I'm not for everybody and we're not for everybody, and that's perfectly okay, and the sooner that we can figure that out, the better we'll be able to find people who want to be part of this group, want to be part of our tribe, and I think that was my lesson.

Paul Etchison:

I'd love to follow up with a question is that you're not for everybody. I mean, I think that's something we say out of humility, but in what world are we not for everybody? I mean, you're fair, you run a good practice that does the right thing. Sometimes I think that's like a humble thing to say, but I don't agree with it.

Henry Ernst:

No, no, no, I totally get that, because we're super intentional of how patients walk through our practice there's 24 doctors. If I walk in and say that tooth needs to come out and you say that tooth needs a filling, in my opinion the patient's the only one that loses, even though I may think I'm right and you may think you're right. So we do need some level of calibration, we do need some level of how, of consistency, and that isn't for everyone. There are some people that need to run their own ship and they don't want to be on someone else's ship. They say they want feedback, but they don't really want feedback. They just want attaboys, and that's okay too.

Henry Ernst:

Disney's mission or their vision statement says we are for everyone, but it's really for everyone who can afford that price point, and so it does eliminate a large portion of people, just because of the type of services and the type of attractions that Disney has. I'm not saying I'm a Disney of dentistry by any means, but there are certain things that we do. That I know, and I do that. I know people may find annoying or obnoxious or just flat out wrong, and that's okay.

Paul Etchison:

I had somebody that I really worked on case presentation-wise for a while. She wanted it, she wanted it, and then one day she said you know what, when I come in here, I just want you to know that I am so nervous. Now I feel like you're watching my every move, You're listening to everything. And that's when I realized that, oh, and here I am thinking like, oh, I am blessing you with my magical coaching skills and you are so lucky to be here. And she's just like can you back off me a little bit? A hundred percent, I mean, was there something that you was? It too much in some degree.

Henry Ernst:

It very well may have been. She came in with some experience, but not a ton of experience, and I looked at it out of the same way of like I am so excited to spew all this information at you and all of the things that I messed up and you get to learn and not have to deal with those things. How lucky are you. And meanwhile, she didn't want that. So I think even in this week, as I'm interviewing doctors, the question that I'm asking them is how do you want me to guide you? How do you want me to mentor you?

Henry Ernst:

Yes, obviously there's a lot that I can learn from this mistake, but I'm still proud of the outcome because I think it would have ended the same way. But I'm also learning. Like, when you ask anyone, do you want me to provide feedback? No one will ever say no, I don't want feedback to be better. So you do need to ask that question in multiple ways to really uncover, like, what does mentorship actually mean, and are they open to the type of way that you want to guide them as their supposed mentor?

Paul Etchison:

That's a good point, because asking somebody if you want mentorship or feedback, that's a stupid question. Now I think about it so stupid. Who the hell is going to say no to that? Never, henry. What are your thoughts here? Let's get some of the Henry perspective here. We need some balance of the yin and yang no-transcript.

Steve Markowitz:

We have to go 100% by personality traits and seeing how do they interact with me, what kind of questions are they asking me, and sometimes you can filter out people right from the get-go and I've said it before on prior podcasts. But we always have interaction with the staff and see how they act and stuff like that. But you're not going to be for everybody and I think what happened here was a win because moving forward you'd have pressed forward. I'm already a week into this. Let's just keep going and gosh, maybe two or three months from now. You got in a pain in the rear associate. They've got all this work in progress. Now you got to transition the patients and stuff. So it's good that you just it cut bait right away. You know, because I'll take it another place.

Steve Markowitz:

The two mistakes that we make a lot of times is we let somebody go and we said, man, I should have let them go so much sooner. Right, it's a different example, but I'll the other end of it. We had an associate that's one of my highest producing associates and he told us that he was he's moving. He's moving to another place in the state and part of me was happy, not because he's not a nice guy. He does a great job, his dentistry is good, but he's just the one type of person that doesn't 100% go with the flow.

Steve Markowitz:

You know we have four or five doctors, so we try to have the same endosystems, we try to have the same this and that, and he was always that one that's always trying to get something different or sometimes producing negative energy around the practice. So the point that I'm making here is, when he decided to leave, I said to myself I felt good for the last week. I'm like gosh. I should have just told him it wasn't working sooner, because even though we're losing a high producing associate now, we can calibrate and do a really good job, like we're mentioning. I'm glad that you brought up that story, because we're going to be doing some onboarding again here and making sure that we're bringing the right person on board and not having negative energy.

Paul Etchison:

Well, it's crazy when you think about it, I feel like it's one of those things we have so many things to do as a practice owner. It's like we've got to fill all these seats, we got to fill and check all these boxes, and we've got one that's checked, We've got an associate, We've got one that's producing really well, and the numbers are great. Except for that, just that one little damn thing. If they could just stop doing that one damn thing, everything would be perfect. And we lie to ourselves that we can change that.

Paul Etchison:

And the longer I do this, the more I realize people are just people the way they are and you can't change much of them. Like the internal character qualities. It just doesn't change. It's unfortunate. And then maybe that, and then maybe that's where that it's not not. We're not for everybody. That's maybe. That's what it means. I feel like I'm for everybody, but maybe not everybody's for me. You know, it's like. It's like I am going to, I am accepting of everybody, but if you don't do things the way we do them here, it's like we know who we are. That's what I think is a better way of saying it.

Steve Markowitz:

Yeah, and I think that's a great way to say it, and I think it's a hard thing. How do we evaluate somebody before the onboarding? If they're coachable, right, how do we do that? I think the main thing is do they come off candid? Do they seem like they don't have an ego? Do they seem like they're receptive to new things? You know, steve, you have a lot more associates than I do. I mean, have you found a way to judge if they're coachable beforehand?

Henry Ernst:

The book the Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni Hungry, Humble, Smart has definitely influenced the type of questions and the character traits that I'm looking for in all team members, especially doctors. Humility is probably the hardest personality trait to create or change, especially in doctors who have been told their whole lives they're smart and pretty and that everything they do is right. And when I am interviewing doctors, I talk a lot about humility. I talk a lot about what it means to be humble, and then I try and uncover experiences where they've truly had adversity and how they've dealt with it, or where they've had failures in their dentistry or failures in relationships. And the more candid that they can be, typically, the more humble they'll be, and the greater they'll, the more coachable they'll be.

Paul Etchison:

See, I love that. And now this is making me think that when people say, how do you do your interviews, how do you find such great people? And my answer is always I just talk to them and say tell me about your life, tell me what you like to do, and I just see if this person is enjoyable to talk to. And I'm not one that does all those interview questions, but I bet this is the kind of stuff you're trying to uncover. Tell me about a time that you, you changed your mind about something. Or tell me about a time that, uh, you learned a hard lesson but you, you came back from it Like these corny ass interview questions. That's. That's what these are for.

Henry Ernst:

They're corny ass. If they're just like, I'm going to read off this sheet what is your humility? It's just having a conversation with someone and really understanding where they're at, learning about them and seeing if they'd be a good fit for how you want your organization to behave.

Paul Etchison:

Do you have interview questions? Do you guys have a certain guide of interview questions? I'm just curious. I don't, I do it off the cuff- I do have interview questions.

Henry Ernst:

I'm only curious. I don't I do it off the cuff. Uh, I do have interview questions. Um, I'm only responsible for the doctors as far as interviewing them. I know that my operations team they definitely have interview, like interview questions that they go through, but again, it's, it's not to like read the question, it's just to give you a guide to make sure you have enough information to make the right decision if this person is going to be a good fit.

Steve Markowitz:

Yeah, the Neanderthal in me says it's the beer test, right? Is this person interesting, first of all? Right? If they're not interesting, it's a red flag, right? Are they interesting? Do I feel like I mean, hey, would I have a beer with them and the conversation would be interesting, right? And are they humble? Because that's a great question. You said, well, like, what are your failures? What have you messed up on? Right? It's just like somebody who's a real estate person. You're going to ask them what's the worst deal you ever had. If they have nothing to say, they either haven't done it long enough or they're not humble to admit their failures. Right? All three of us could sit here for hours and talk about the stuff that we've messed up, right. When somebody's candid and this is an environment where maybe they're nervous to say this because this is the hiring doctor oh man, he doesn't want to hear about. When I broke that file on number three and it kept me up for three weeks, you know, but that's humble. I've done that before, right? How did you react to that? What did you learn from that? That is somebody who's humble and I've learned that right from the get-go.

Steve Markowitz:

In my younger times of hiring associates, I might not have hired associates that they would not have passed the beer test right. I had an associate that was kind of a foreign dentist, really nice, great practitioner and everything. But the assistants were getting upset with her because she was so rude and she would just say you know, like forcep, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I had to have a conversation with her to tell her you should say thank you, so my hands are an instrument. Say thank you. Her answer to me was well, her question to me was I'm going to be saying thank you all day long? And I said yes, you are. She thought it was weird to say thank you all the time.

Henry Ernst:

Is there a tequila test, as I'm not a beer drinker?

Paul Etchison:

We could do tequila. I had a Malort test A what you guys know what Malort is Malort? You ever heard that M-A-L-O-R-T, that's a Chicago thing. Yeah, my old neighbor.

Henry Ernst:

I have a thing of Malort in my liquor cabinet that he gave me as a gift. It's supposed to be the most disgusting crap ever.

Paul Etchison:

You know what it grows on you, so I'll describe it to everyone. So it's a wormwood liquor. It's not like anything else you ever had. It kind of tastes like aspirin, grapefruit and rubber bands. So it's a weird— Don't miss this. But I took a shot, this one, associate. We were at a wedding. One of the hygienists got married and she just started, like two weeks ago, and I'm like you want to take a shot of Morton? She's like what's that? So we took it and she goes you're expecting people to make a face. And she took it. She goes it's weird, but that ain't shit. And I was like I miss her. She was good.

Henry Ernst:

To get back to what Henry was saying, which was awesome. When, having those conversations, I will lead with mistakes that I've made and then I'll ask them, so I'll tell them about. Like you know, the reason why I put alcohol underneath all of my bonding, all my composites now, is because at one point in my career, every buildup that I did was popping out, or at least I felt like it was. So I had to do something different and then hopefully that will open up them to be vulnerable to say, you know, yeah, this is where I failed. Or if I get something like, oh man, my temporaries don't come off, I'm like either you're the best dentist that's ever existed or you don't do crowds. That's the only way. That's true.

Paul Etchison:

You're full of shit. I really thought you were going to say the reason I keep alcohol under every desk at this office. Like, did you think that too? Like I don't know why I thought you were going there with it Like what are we doing?

Henry Ernst:

Are we turning this podcast into like a fraternity party? Alcohol under composites? It's amazing.

Paul Etchison:

Yeah, guys, you know great lessons to be learned. I guess the moral of the story let's get a synopsis or moral from each of us. I think the moral is have the right people, find the right people, and sometimes they squeak by. I think the moral is just get rid of them sooner than later. Don't tolerate, You'll get what you tolerate.

Henry Ernst:

That's what I would say. Steve, let's go to you. I think the what I know to be true is, the clearer I become on who, who we are and how we behave, the more we've grown and the better people we surround ourselves with. So when people don't, when people are telling you or showing signs that they don't like what you're doing, thank them for their time and then wish them all the best.

Steve Markowitz:

Be yourself, stick to your principles. You know what's right. Sometimes, evaluate your existing staff. Say to yourself if I had to hire them again, would I? And if they told me I was leaving tomorrow, would I be upset? And that's a great way to judge anybody, because the worst thing is when you say, man, they left and I'm happy and I should have got rid of them sooner.

Paul Etchison:

Yeah, totally All right. Thanks guys. Well, hey, if you're listening to this and you're thinking you would benefit from having someone like this look at your practice in depth every month with you and guide you through growing it, please check out our coaching options at dentalpracticeheroescom. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.

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