Solving recruitment

New recruits (clinical or non-clinical) (newbies or experienced) are going to join your business for one of two reasons:

• Compensation - "how much do I get paid?"

• Culture - "will this be a great place to work and will it allow me to realise my potential?"

I wonder if there is a new 80/20 rule here - 80% are just about the compensation and 20% about the culture?

It would seem so from the conversations I have with clients about team members, managers, hygienists, therapists and dentists who are "mostly about the money."

Having said that - it's impossible to argue for culture if your business doesn't have one.

So what do we mean by culture?

The first four letters are C.U.L.T.

1. a system of religious veneration and devotion directed towards a particular figure or object

2. a person or thing that is popular or fashionable among a particular group or section of society.

As to the first - if the cult are worshipping the Principal (and I've seen a few of those) it probably isn't healthy and certainly not a sustainable (or sellable) business model.

If, however, the cult are devoted to a way of doing things - to excellence, to a brand, to core values - then that works for me.

As to the second - I want my clients not only to have queues of new patients waiting to join, but also a waiting list of job candidates, because people see you as a desired place to work.

There are VERY FEW examples of that in dentistry - but they do exist and have no problem with recruitment.

I spent two days with one of them this week - Chris Barrowman and the team at Infinityblu have created a business that has waiting lists for patients, employees and clinicians.

I'm proud to have him as a friend and his business as a member of The Extreme Business 100.

You could learn a lot by looking at how they use social media to tell stories, not just about the positive difference that they make to their patients but also how much their team enjoy being there.

Quite often, cults have a bad rep - but not this one, because they are about excellence.

I'm weary of hearing "recruitment is impossible" - it isn't - you just have to create jobs worth turning up for in a place worth arriving at - and market those jobs to people who want fair compensation but, more importantly, a culture they want to be a part of.