Ep. 109: The Biggest Barriers to Finding Good Staff
If you survey dentists (which we do), staffing issues will always come up as one of the biggest sources of problems and stress—and it’s only gotten worse in recent years. So this week, special guest Jeff Santone comes on to discuss the biggest barriers to building a good team and what adjustments you should make to be successful in today’s environment.
Topics:
:11 I can’t find (or keep) any good staff
14:12 – I’m understaffed but can’t afford to hire more people
Links:
The MGE New Patient Workshop - https://www.newpatients.net
DDS Success (coupon code RX269) - https://ddssuccess.com
Fees & Plans Analysis - https://www.mgeonline.com/fees-and-plans
Wasserman Guide – https://wasserman-medical.com/product-category/dental
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Questions From This Episode
What does Jeff Santone say is the top staffing complaint from new clients, and how is it different from what practice owners dealt with in the past?
The number one complaint now is simply that nobody is applying at all, a shift from pre-pandemic years when finding qualified staff was the harder challenge but applicants themselves weren't scarce. He attributes this partly to a genuine labor supply shift, with projections showing the overall labor pool dipping below current levels by around 2032.
Why does Jeff Santone say staying within the recommended payroll percentage can actually mean a practice is dangerously understaffed?
Total payroll (excluding the owner doctor and associates) generally shouldn't exceed about 22.5 percent of collections. But a practice heavily in-network with PPOs that's collecting $100,000 a month might actually be performing closer to $180,000 worth of real dentistry, so capping payroll against the discounted collected amount means staffing is calibrated to a much smaller workload than what's actually being delivered.
What did Jeff Blumberg find when comparing a client's hygienist job posting to local corporate listings?
The client was offering $55 an hour, phenomenal money by pre-pandemic standards, and getting zero responses, while five corporate practices in the same zip code were advertising $60 to $65 an hour plus $4,000 signing bonuses. Both were facing the same inflationary pressure, but only one had actually checked what the real local market required.
Why does Jeff Santone recommend over-hiring rather than hiring exactly one person per opening?
He describes a New Patient Workshop exercise where attendees interview three strong-seeming candidates, two who perform well on a working-interview test and one who quits by lunchtime, and most people instinctively pick just one of the two good candidates. His point: you can't fully predict who will actually work out long-term, so hiring both when you find multiple strong candidates keeps a practice from being caught flat-footed when someone unexpectedly leaves.
What do Jeff Blumberg and Jeff Santone say is often the real fix when a practice insists its core problem is "not enough staff"?
They point to inefficiencies elsewhere in the practice, like only converting a fraction of diagnosed treatment into completed treatment, or a weak new patient call conversion rate, as the actual source of the problem, since fixing those often generates enough additional revenue to afford the staff the practice already needs. They also point to heavy PPO participation as directly suppressing the revenue available to pay competitive wages in the first place.
Episode Transcript
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Jeff Blumberg: If you had to pick one issue that gives you the most trouble or causes you the most stress in your practice, what would that be? I know that's a bit of a loaded question, since it assumes there's a specific challenge weighing on you in the first place, and if there is, it might rate anywhere from a one or two out of ten on the stress scale, or it might be something bordering on catastrophic for your practice. Your answer might even change depending on when you're asked.
In an effort to serve our audience as well as we possibly can, it's critical that we stay aware of the biggest problems and stressors facing dentists in private practice. Beyond surveys and statistical data, one of my favorite sources for this kind of information is actually our own sales department, specifically new client sales. That makes sense when you think about it, those folks are getting real information about current pain points straight from the source. During a recent meeting with our Expansion Executive, Jeff Santone, who many of you will recognize if you've been listening for a while, he pointed out that statistically, the biggest challenge or stressor for the average owner dentist right now, in 2023, is still staff. That might mean finding staff, hiring staff, or keeping adequately productive staff.
With that in mind, I wanted to build this week's episode around exactly that. I'm joined by Jeff, and we're going to dig into this in depth, why this may be happening to you, which might not be for the reason you think, and most importantly, what to actually do about it.
So let's jump right in. I wasn't expecting staff to be the big recurring issue you're running into with newer clients or people reaching out for help. When you say staff, what would you say are the top three issues specifically?
Jeff Santone: The number one thing we've been hearing for a while now is simply that people can't find anybody. Nobody's applying, there aren't even candidates to interview.
Jeff Blumberg: When you talk to these folks, are they actually advertising adequately?
Jeff Santone: At least they feel they are. I don't always dig into it too deeply when I ask, but that's consistently the top complaint. The second thing we tend to hear, and this was always true even back when I was a practice owner myself, is the qualified level of staff, people applying and coming in just aren't cutting it. And the third thing, not nearly as loud as the first two, is staff leaving, either for more money elsewhere, or to be home with their kids.
Jeff Blumberg: So breaking that down: not enough people applying, the people who do apply aren't qualified, and people are leaving. And it becomes this cyclical thing, you get someone in, they leave, you can't find a replacement, and when you do find someone, they're not great, and then they leave for more money anyway, and it just goes in circles.
Jeff Santone: Exactly, and there's a lot we dig into when we talk through their staff problems, but for the most part, there are a number of other underlying issues that actually led to them not being able to find staff in the first place.
Jeff Blumberg: For anyone who hasn't heard Jeff on the show before, Jeff is our Expansion Executive, but he's also personally owned two dental practices, a specialty practice and a general dental office, so he's got real firsthand experience here. You were a trained MGE client yourself at the time, you'd been through the Power Program. How do the problems you're hearing from these newer folks compare to what you personally ran into as a practice owner?
Jeff Santone: The qualified staff issue was always a thing for us too, you'd get someone who said they had dental assistant experience but couldn't name basic instruments, or someone who claimed they knew the software but really didn't know how to use a computer. So that part's always been there. But we never ran into simply not being able to find people in the first place, there was always somebody applying.
Jeff Blumberg: Interesting.
Jeff Santone: I think that's because we were trained to always be looking. What I find most doctors don't do enough of is exactly that, you should always be hiring, whether you currently need somebody or not. By the time you actually need someone, it's too late, and you end up compromising on who you're willing to take, or negotiating into a range you're not happy with.
Jeff Blumberg: So when you were a practice owner, you had the qualified-staff problem, but you didn't hire unqualified people on purpose.
Jeff Santone: Absolutely not. But this connects to something we've talked about before, there's no such thing as a naturally great staff member just waiting to be found out there. You have to develop them, train them, turn them into a great staff member. They need the basic raw material to start with, and there are plenty of good people out there, but it's what we teach here at MGE that actually turns them into great staff members. So we always had the training challenge, but we were never at a loss for actual applicants.
Jeff Blumberg: And you're hearing "not enough applicants" as the number one problem from new clients now, which you didn't hear as much from colleagues back when you personally owned practices?
Jeff Santone: Right, back then colleagues would say things like "we don't know where to find people," but it wasn't nearly as pronounced. Now, coming out of three or four years of COVID and the mass exodus of people out of practices, this is what we consistently hear. Before that it was more about insurance, or not enough new patients, other problems entirely. We still hear those too, but staffing has become the dominant one.
Jeff Blumberg: Let's say you've run into the last several people who told you they can't find staff. Pick one example in your mind, keep it anonymous. What was this person actually doing to try to solve the problem? Were they just sitting with it, or actively trying something?
Jeff Santone: That's a good question. What I find is most people do try something, and then they just give up. They'll place ads, get responses, people say they'll show up for an interview, and then they don't. That happens constantly. And then they just cope with it, most doctors end up finding ways to make their existing staff absorb the extra work instead.
Jeff Blumberg: So say I've got three people at the front, we're humming along fine, busy office. I lose one, can't replace them, so the other two just do more. Am I paying them more for it? Usually not.
Jeff Santone: Right, and that's exactly what leads into the third issue, one of those remaining two sees a dollar more an hour somewhere else, and if they're going to work that hard regardless, they'll go take it. I think the biggest underlying thing I run into is doctors not understanding what a healthy ratio of administrative and support staff to the production team actually looks like. A lot of the people I talk to are so understaffed it's almost funny, heavily weighted toward providers, with nowhere near enough administrative staff to actually keep those providers busy.
Jeff Blumberg: Interesting.
Jeff Santone: Exactly, and something inevitably slips through the cracks. Reactivation becomes a huge issue, patient retention becomes a huge issue, missed phone calls become a huge issue.
Jeff Blumberg: What's interesting about that is some staffing problems are obvious, nobody's answering the phone, it's going to voicemail, or you're forwarding it to your assistant's Bluetooth headset while they're working chairside with you because you're that short-staffed. Those are visible. But the reactivation and retention piece is almost like periodontal disease in that sense, the person doesn't even realize they have it until it's already bad.
Jeff Santone: Right, you'll have a doctor who's thrilled, "I'm getting 50 new patients a month," and I'll point out, sure, but you haven't added any hygiene, so you've actually lost 50 patients somewhere along the way. Where did they go? "But we're busy, hygiene's busy." To answer your earlier question though, about what people actually try: there isn't much you can farm out when it comes to actual production. If you need a dental assistant, you need a dental assistant, there's real credentialing involved there. But that's not actually where most of the complaints come from. Of course people struggle to find hygienists and assistants, that's expected. It's the front office area where I hear the most "I don't have the team to do this and I need to hire them."
I was talking to two separate doctors recently who'd both tried farming out their front desk to an answering service when they were short-staffed, calls would route there during business hours when they couldn't get to the phone. Both of their reviews: don't do it.
Jeff Blumberg: Someone just to answer the phone during business hours, not after-hours coverage?
Jeff Santone: Right, during business hours while they were working. And honestly, I find this kind of thing genuinely painful to hear about.
Jeff Blumberg: I do too, and you came from the business world before healthcare, so I'd imagine it's especially painful for you.
Jeff Santone: It really is. I expected them to say it worked great, and instead both said it was awful, messages taken incorrectly, delayed too long to be useful, or the service had access to the schedule but refused to actually book anything, since they couldn't think through which procedure needed what kind of appointment, including new patient calls. One doctor told me flatly, I'd have been better off letting the call go to voicemail entirely and hoping they left a message, rather than handing it to that service. And with a new patient especially, in a lot of cases they'll just call the next office instead. It wasn't even that it was cheap, he just didn't think it worked well during business hours. It might be a different story after-hours, but it's something that's been tried, and at the end of the day, it's a decent bandaid if you genuinely need one, but you still need to replace that human capital at the front desk eventually. You need real staff.
Jeff Blumberg: So say I'm one of these people, I can't find anybody, I've placed ads, people say they'll show up and don't. Do people get into the mindset of "I guess I'm just stuck this way"?
Jeff Santone: Yes, and then they cope, and that becomes how it is. Honestly, I think we see the result of that mindset more often than we actually talk to people mid-complaint about not finding staff, they've already stopped complaining and just adjusted. You'll find out they've got two front desk staff, a doctor, and two hygienists, and I'll tell them, you're severely understaffed, you need at least one more person, ideally closer to two or even three depending on your volume.
Jeff Blumberg: And how do they react when you tell them that?
Jeff Santone: A lot of them go, "I knew it, but everyone's been telling me to keep my costs down." And that's where you start running into all these other issues in the practice that are actually forcing staffing levels low in the first place, and it's costing them in ways they don't fully see.
Jeff Blumberg: You've actually hit on two points there worth unpacking. One of them is something I'm covering in the overhead course we're currently filming for DDS Success, our online platform, I'll put a link on the episode webpage. One of the issues with cutting overhead is that people often cut things that are actually making them money, instead of looking at what genuinely has no return. They've got an underperforming employee they should replace, fine, cut that. But instead they'll cut something like marketing, because it's a lot of money to spend, even though it's actually generating revenue, and then they wonder why they're making even less money. It snowballs from there.
The second point we were discussing earlier is that all of this is happening in a genuinely inflationary environment over the last three and a half years. I'll probably do a separate update episode on this, but I just pulled the number, overall consumer price index inflation since March of 2020 is sitting at about 18.8, call it 19 percent. So if something cost you a dollar in March 2020, it costs about a dollar nineteen now. Applied to a staff member, if you were paying someone $20 an hour, you'd need to be paying them close to $24 now just for them to keep pace.
So they're trying to hire in this inflationary environment, and I'm curious, when you're talking to these newer clients about their advertising, are you finding they're just not meeting the market financially?
Jeff Santone: Most of them don't realize who they're actually competing with. They're not checking their real competition, they look at job boards for "dental assistant," see everyone in the dental space posting around $22 an hour, and don't realize Whole Foods down the street is paying $30. They're stuck thinking only within the dental industry.
Jeff Blumberg: You covered this in depth at our Owners Conference too, the overall labor supply picture in the US. Based on current demographics, a large share of the baby boomer generation is leaving the workforce, creating a real vacuum. Projections suggest the labor supply ticks up slightly over the next few years and then actually dips below where it is now by around 2032, which is fairly striking. So dental practices are competing with large employers offering better benefits, paid vacation, 401ks, a perceived sense of career stability, standard nine-to-five hours, signing bonuses, and most dental practices simply haven't thought about any of that.
Jeff Santone: Right, they're not thinking outside the dental box. But then there's the other side of this too, a lot of these doctors do look closely at their bottom line, and you'll find they're well within the recommended payroll percentage threshold, which, when you're also heavily in network with insurance, almost guarantees you're understaffed without even realizing it.
Jeff Blumberg: Let me unpack that, since I know exactly what you mean. We've covered this in the overhead episode before, but total payroll, including employer-paid taxes, shouldn't exceed about 22.5 percent of gross collections. So if you're collecting $100,000 a month, payroll shouldn't exceed $22,500. That figure excludes the owner doctor and associates, but includes everyone else, office manager, hygienists, assistants, front desk.
Jeff Santone: Right, and here's the thing, if you're heavily in managed care and staying within that 22.5 percent threshold, you're almost certainly underpaying your team, because if an office is collecting $100,000 a month while heavily in-network, they're likely actually producing closer to $180,000 worth of real dentistry. If they're capping payroll at $22,500 against that real production level, they're drastically understaffed relative to the actual workload.
Jeff Blumberg: So it becomes the same snowball effect, can't afford more staff, so you keep the team lean and cross-train everyone across multiple roles, and if you lose even one person, you're in real trouble, all while not actually paying people what the full scope of their work is worth. They're stressed, frustrated, underpaid, and the office down the street offering two dollars more an hour wins immediately.
Jeff Santone: Exactly, and doctors forget that their staff is dealing with the same inflationary pressure they are. A lot of times the doctor hasn't paid themselves in three months either, and they'll say, "I'd love more people, Jeff, but I can't find them, and certainly not at the rate I'd need to offer, and I couldn't afford it even if I could." Everyone feels staffing is the core problem, but they rarely dig into what's actually causing it, what kind of job are you really offering?
Jeff Blumberg: That reminds me of something from last year. We had a client struggling to find a hygienist, not exactly a news flash. I looked up what was being offered in his zip code on Indeed. He was offering $55 an hour, which pre-pandemic would have been phenomenal, that area was paying in the forties before 2020. He was getting zero responses. So I searched the same area and found five corporate office listings for hygienists offering $60 to $65 an hour plus a $4,000 signing bonus.
Jeff Santone: And those corporate offices are dealing with the exact same inflationary pressure, so what else would you expect them to do?
Jeff Blumberg: Right, it's a combination of rising costs and lowered reimbursement, and if the reason you're not attracting candidates is simply that you're not offering enough, it's only going to get worse if nothing changes.
Jeff Santone: It's absolutely true. And that's really where we come in. You're always going to have some staff problems, no matter what, everyone does, it never fully goes away. But there are things you can do to prevent your last remaining person at the front desk from quitting and leaving you with nobody. You should always be in a position where you're actively hiring, no matter what.
We actually run a scenario at the New Patient Workshop around this. I'll describe a situation: you interview 50 people, you really like three, and you bring each in for a single-day working interview. Candidate one makes a hundred phone calls and gets ten people rescheduled for reactivation. Candidate two makes 150 calls and gets the same ten people scheduled. Candidate three, the one you were only interviewing because you felt obligated to, breaks the phone by 10am and disappears on their lunch break, never to return. So I ask the room, who do you hire? Candidate three's obviously out, they already quit. Everyone raises a hand for either one or two.
Jeff Blumberg: And you tell them they're all fired as executives.
Jeff Santone: Every time, because you should have hired both. These are two genuinely strong candidates, and you don't actually know who's going to work out long term, why are you sorting that out right now by only picking one? Someone might not make it past a week for reasons that have nothing to do with their ability, maybe they find out their partner's cheating on them and move back home to their parents the next week. You never know. So we were always overstaffed, in a sense, we always had people in training waiting in the wings who could step into a role if needed.
Jeff Blumberg: I remember that, you always had someone sort of off to the side being trained, ready to plug in.
Jeff Santone: Right, because as you're growing, you're going to want more people anyway, so we were never in a position of being caught flat-footed. I've still lost long-term people I thought I'd never lose, someone has to move to be closer to family, whatever the reason, and you think you'll never recover. But if you're doing it right, you do.
Jeff Blumberg: Nobody likes hearing "you just need to keep hiring." They'll say, Jeff, I have no money, I can't find the right people, nobody's applying, I don't have time to interview.
Jeff Santone: That's a big one too, "I'm running the whole practice and answering the phone myself, I don't have time." I get it, but then you need to block out dedicated time for it, even an hour at the end of the day on a specific day each week, or bring in a friend to help for a week or two while you catch up. I understand you may not feel like you have the time or resources, but if the alternative is being bankrupt in three months, what's really the alternative? We have to make this work. And the honest answer always comes back to the same thing: I don't have the money.
Jeff Blumberg: How can they compete going from $50 an hour to $65? That's an extra thirty-some thousand dollars a year on a full-time role.
Jeff Santone: Right, and that's when I tell them, you're actually sitting on a gold mine, you're just looking in the wrong place for the money.
Jeff Blumberg: Let's put together a concrete list for anyone listening in exactly this situation, having trouble finding staff, feeling like they either can't match the going rate or would bankrupt themselves trying. For me, step one is making sure you actually have an adequate number of staff to serve your current patient base and support ongoing growth, if you don't have enough front desk capacity to both keep the schedule booked and actively chase down reactivation opportunities, that's already a problem. But before that, I'd want strong new patient marketing in place, which, shameless plug, is exactly what the New Patient Workshop covers, Jeff's one of the main speakers there, I'll put a link on the episode webpage.
Assuming new patient flow is healthy, the next thing I'd focus on is reactivating existing patients by whatever means available, while also working to drop any insurance plans you're still in. If you forced our own company to deliver the same work on half the income, we'd have to let people go or close our doors entirely, so we simply wouldn't accept that. The idea of an outside company dictating what I'm allowed to charge is something I genuinely can't get behind, it's close to a controlled-pricing model, and the market, not an insurance company, should determine what you're able to charge. If I wanted to charge $5,000 for a crown, plenty of people would say no thanks, but someone, somewhere, would pay it. The market sets the real price.
Jeff Santone: That's exactly right.
Jeff Blumberg: And there's a real reason that matters: if you don't raise your fees, you'll eventually price yourself out of being able to support expansion or pay your staff properly. People genuinely need to get out of plans and make sure their fees are actually adequate for their area, something we've talked about at length before. If you want help getting your fees right, I'd recommend checking out the Wasserman Guide, we have no business relationship with them, but it's the most accurate tool I've seen for showing what you should be charging by zip code. And if you want help actually getting out of plans, we offer a free Fees and Plans Analysis, where Jeff and his team go through exactly what's happening in your office and help map out a path out of network, so you're finally getting paid what you're actually worth, and can genuinely afford your team.
Jeff Santone: I don't see this situation improving for anyone who doesn't actually do something about it.
Jeff Blumberg: Agreed, it's definitely not getting better on its own.
Jeff Santone: And beyond that, people really need to start looking at where they could be more efficient. We get a lot of calls from people wanting help, and when I ask what the single thing is they'd most like to improve, it's almost always "staff, I need more staff." But when you actually dig into their numbers, you find they're leaving a lot of opportunity on the table, and they could likely afford more staff if they simply got more patients to accept the treatment they actually need rather than only what insurance happens to allow, and weren't getting shortchanged by insurance in the first place.
Jeff Blumberg: I'll be careful not to get you started on Delta Dental specifically, or we'll be here another thirty minutes.
Jeff Santone: Fair, let's leave that alone. But yes, and then you also need to get better at training your staff into genuinely productive team members. A lot of inefficiency in a practice directly contributes to the staffing problem itself, that's really the core of what we do. Even in a reasonably good office, if you presented $100,000 worth of treatment and only completed $50,000 of it, which would already be unusually high acceptance, that remaining $50,000 is sitting right there. Recovering even 10, 20, or 25 percent more of that easily covers another staff member, more than covers one, honestly.
Jeff Blumberg: And the same goes for your new patient call conversion rate. If you're only converting around 23 percent of new patient calls, better than that average means more opportunities to present treatment in the first place. That lost income from inefficiency is adding directly to the staffing problem, on top of not being paid what you're worth to begin with.
Jeff Santone: Right. And then there's the arbitrary qualification requirement issue too, people insisting on years of specific software experience before they'll even consider a candidate.
Jeff Blumberg: We actually did a whole episode on this, how you all hired people with zero dental experience early on, and were able to train every one of them up, since literally everyone had no dental background at some point.
Jeff Santone: Exactly, if a role genuinely requires a certification, an x-ray certification, say, fine, there's a defined course for that. But beyond that, I'll hear things like someone calling in wanting help "getting better reimbursement from insurance," and when I dig in, what they actually mean is they don't know how to properly bill or collect from the insurance companies they're participating with in the first place. And of course they don't know how, when the only person answering the phone is also doubling as a dental assistant, what else would you expect them to be able to handle?
Jeff Blumberg: That makes sense. And we haven't even touched on what happens when there's a problem staff member on the team actively driving away your good people.
Jeff Santone: Let's leave that one alone too.
Jeff Blumberg: Fair. So if this is you, listening right now, feeling like you can't find your way out of this, here's what I'd say. First, if you've become genuinely apathetic about it, decided this is just how it is, I'm not sure anything I say here is going to help, and I really hope that's not where you are. But if you'd genuinely like help and just don't believe it's actually possible for you, here's the thing: it is completely possible to get out of plans, to get paid what you're worth, and to build a genuinely good team. I treat that as a given, because we see people do it constantly, and these aren't extraordinary people, they're just good, hardworking, everyday private dentists, same as you.
So help is genuinely available. What actually solves your specific problem, since it might be fees, it might be a problem staff member, it might be any number of things, comes down to talking to someone like Jeff and working through exactly what's happening in your practice. And I'll say, this is part of where we differ from a lot of other companies, we're not going to sign up someone who insists they already have all the answers and there's nothing we could possibly help with. That's fine, we part ways amicably. But if you genuinely want help, we can help you. I just want people to understand, you don't have to keep living this way.
Jeff Santone: You really don't. People build genuinely great teams here all the time, I see it constantly, staff who started wherever they started and became phenomenal team members. But it's not just the staff, the owner and the office manager get trained as executives too, because you can't build a great team under poor executive leadership. The doctor essentially becomes a great staff member themselves in that sense, they know their role and how to actually execute it.
Jeff Blumberg: You see it clearly when clients come share their success story at one of our free seminars or the New Patient Workshop, after sitting through that training, they'll tell you what actually made their practice successful wasn't their clinical skill, which we're already assuming is strong, it was the executive skill they developed, knowing how to attract and bring in the right people.
Jeff Santone: Exactly. You have to get out of your own way sometimes, accept that maybe you don't have all the answers yet, and go find them. Honestly, most of what we do with new clients, running the production numbers, the fee analysis, is really just showing them there's nothing to be genuinely afraid of. Say Delta's only 500 of your 1,500 total patients, and they're only responsible for 20 or 30 percent of your overall production, so what happens if you actually lost that plan? You're probably not going to, but even if you did, it wouldn't be the disaster it feels like.
Jeff Blumberg: Or we'll show them their own dollar value presented versus accepted, "you presented $220,000 last month and only produced $80,000 of it." Once you have that clarity, and that safety net, since it's all sitting in their own data already, we're not inventing any of it, it gives you an actual direction to move in. "Okay, let's tackle one or two of these specific things first, so I can at least start paying myself again," which is honestly a huge relief on its own. It also shows them it's not just some far-off pipe dream, it's genuinely achievable, backed by real data. We're not telling them about some mythical client doing $400,000 a month that nobody can relate to, that client started exactly where you're starting now, at $80,000, through the same process.
Could I look at your ad and help improve it? Absolutely, there are often specific things in the wording itself that aren't attracting the right candidates. But just as often, it's not that the ad is poorly written, it's that it's not being placed often enough, you're not consistently hiring, or the pay simply isn't competitive. If you're not getting responses, I'd just keep raising the offered rate, since that's a form of marketing too, keep adjusting until you actually get a response.
Jeff Santone: Right, and what we do internally before placing any ad is look at what else is actually out there. It's basic marketing, you have to be aware of what your competition is doing, even if it doesn't change your own approach.
Jeff Blumberg: Right, if I'm competing for the same pool of candidates, I should know what other employers in my area are actually offering, or I risk sounding completely out of touch. Go back to that corporate hygienist example, they clearly researched local rates and intentionally priced themselves high enough that candidates would be foolish to turn them down.
Jeff Santone: And I understand the instinct on the other side of this too, nobody wants to hire someone who only cares about the paycheck, I get that completely. If the first five questions in an interview are entirely about what they'll get out of it, I'll usually wrap that conversation up pretty quickly myself, I'm not interested either. But people genuinely need to get paid, prices have gone up roughly 20 percent across the board, gas is up around 30 percent, and in a lot of cases, candidates simply don't have the financial cushion an owner doctor has. You have to be realistic. If everyone else in your area is offering $20 an hour and you're advertising $10, you're not tone deaf out of malice, you're just not going to hire anybody either way.
Jeff Blumberg: I think that covers it well. Folks, I hope this helps, we went a bit all over the place today, but hopefully gave you several concrete things to actually act on. I'll make sure all the links we mentioned, the Fees and Plans Analysis, the New Patient Workshop, DDS Success, and the Wasserman Guide, are all on the episode webpage. And if you'd like to talk to Jeff Santone directly, his email is jeffs@mgeonline.com, I'll put that on the episode webpage too.
Otherwise, I hope this helped, and we'll see you at next week's episode. If you want to know more about MGE, you can find us online at mgeonline.com or call us at (800) 640-1140. Thanks a lot, and have a great week.