How to overcome the talent shortage in the dental industry

If you’re currently struggling with too few job applicants… You’re not alone. 

The process of finding job applicants, hiring, driving performance, and retaining employees will either amplify your growth or cause your decline. 

It's no different for a company like mine.

Here at ApplicantPro, we had a crazy leap year last year and my team went full-tilt into recruitment. We came out stronger now than we have ever been. 

Looking back to 18 months ago, we were struggling with our managers feeling like they weren't getting enough job applicants. They weren’t getting as many job applicants so they weren’t able to hire the skilled people we needed them to hire. I figured I'd pull the curtain back on what we have done over the last 18 months. 

Let's start with the backstory… 

If we look at Q3 2020 through Q4 2021... That's 18 months or six quarters that our team grew from 129 employees to 234. Our headcount nearly doubled in size! But don’t get me wrong, we had to hire 180 people to get there because of turnover.  

We were also growing like crazy, not just from a headcount but from a revenue standpoint. 

We had a ton of new initiatives creating new types of jobs. We now needed different people with different creative backgrounds and different business skills. As an organization, we hire across the entire spectrum of jobs. From data entry to telephone-based customer service, up to product managers, programmers, and testers. We hire lead gen jobs in marketing and the content writing space, lots of salespeople, appointment setters, account executives, etc. We also hire accountants and HR people and everybody else a business our size would hire! 

Our challenge was back in the last half of 2020 as the economy opened back up, and things were roaring back to life. A lot of our initiatives over the summer were starting to pay off but our team was struggling to fill some customer service positions that we normally wouldn't struggle to fill. This struggle is what started the entire conversation. 

We got all fired up! Hiring is our thing... 

How can we expect our clients and prospects to believe that we can solve their sourcing and hiring problems if we were struggling, too?  

The first thing we needed was short-term emergency management… putting out some fires which normally involves taking our inbound strategy and retargeting. 

 

Who are we trying to engage? 

Are we getting in front of them? 

Do our ads speak to their pain?

How can we adjust the type of job structure? 

How can we improve our job benefits compared to everybody else? 

 

In the midterm (the second two quarters) we reset our entire employee referral program. It was already more successful than any of our clients but we took it upon ourselves to figure out… 

Could we make massive improvements in the number of referrals we were getting?

Long term we wanted to be driving massive referral marketing with employees and ex-employees, customers, people in our community, influencers, etc. 

We then came up with some different ways to measure success. It comes down to finding not just the number of quality job applicants received but some measures to compare it against. Generally, this either has to do with the number of hires, number of openings, or (my favorite now) the number of headcounts. 

We look at job applicants, hires, and headcount and then compare those numbers to come up with a metric. As time went on, it became easier to compare those metrics to our starting point to see how we improved each quarter. 

We also drilled down those same metrics into each of our segments:

 

Inbound… Job board marketing.

Outbound… Social media marketing.

Referrals… Employee referrals, ex-employees, customers, and influencers out in the community. 

 

This was our three-step, short-term, mid-term, long-term strategy that had a drastic impact on our applicant flow, which allowed our teams to nearly double in size.  

If you’re currently feeling the effects of the talent shortage, know that you’re not alone! 

I know that you as a business owner, have a million other things to do and hiring is stressful. I’d love to chat 1:1 to dive deeper into what we did, what our action plan looked like, and how we can help implement strong inbounds, outbounds, and referral strategies. Whether you have 3 employees, 30 or 300, we can make it work for you.