If you search the web for tips for the job interview, you will be overwhelmed by the amount of information from various application portals and Internet forums.
For the young dentist, however, the information offered is usually of very little value, since the dos & don’ts described mostly relate to job interviews in larger companies and, therefore, cannot be transferred to small owner-managed dental practices. We urge you to take interview help from professional and experienced dentistry interview tutors to be confident and perform your best during your interview.
Dress code for a dentist interview
This starts, for example, with the dress code – while for most other positions for academics in the job interview a suit is usually mandatory for men, an applicant for a training assistant position would appear quite overdressed in a suit. This doesn’t mean that you should march to your future employer in shorts and flip-flops – a decent shirt (no tie), decent jeans or trousers and leather shoes seem appropriate in most cases.
In the end, the same applies to young dentists – dress smartly, but not too elegantly – you go to a dental practice and not to the exam ball.
In general, most dental job interviews are more like a collegial interview. In this conversation, in addition to the technical content, it should be clarified above all whether the interpersonal level of the possible future treatment partners is right. After all, you work very closely together, especially at the beginning.
Interview questions
In addition to points such as salary, training grants, vacation and working hours, the following points and questions in my interview helped me to decide for or against a practice afterwards:
Did the dentist already have an assistant?
Dentists who already have experience with training assistants know that you, as exam graduates, are qualified doctors, but do not have too high expectations in terms of working speed, etc. to young professionals. It is optimal if you can seamlessly take the place of a predecessor and thus take over a grown patient base. Otherwise, it can be quite tough at the beginning in terms of patient numbers, since most visitors to the practice prefer to be treated by the head dentist.
As an assistant dentist, do you have your own column in the order book?
This ensures that you also get your own patients and are not only allowed to work through the things that the boss just cobbles about for you in the ongoing operation of the practice
Can the assistant dentist continue to treat his patients?
It was important to me to be able to treat my patients completely and not have to play the foreman. In other words: You do the Endo+ build-up filling and the chief dentist then happily grinds the tooth. Sounds obvious – but unfortunately it isn’t.
Which dental assistants will you primarily treat with?
Especially at the beginning it is important to work together with an experienced helper. She can help you in many situations, be it that she hands you the right instrument that the boss would ask for in “this” situation, gives a tip along the lines of “the boss would now…” or simply radiates security towards the patient .
Internship / internship in the dental practice
If you like the theoretical circumstances of a practice, you should definitely sit in for one more day, because in an interview you will certainly be able to find out very little about the professional quality of a practice. Since in my opinion the assistantship is very formative for the attitude towards your work level, you should try to get an idea of the working methods in the practice for yourself. You can, for example, look at preparation models, take a look at an X-ray or simply look over the shoulder of your future chief dentist.
During my residency, it was very important to me to know that, with my boss behind me, I can always fall back on an experienced therapist who can help me with words and deeds in tricky situations and with uncertainties (which occur quite frequently at the beginning) stands. This gives security when treating and when appearing in front of patients.
Material management in the dental practice
At first glance there are really more exciting topics than warehouse management for dental practices.
At least I can’t say that as a young resident I was really happy about the task given by my boss at the time to take care of an inventory management system as part of QM.
The more I dealt with the topic of material management, the more I liked this topic, which admittedly initially seemed quite unspectacular.
Before I go directly to the numerous advantages of modern warehouse management (which I have gotten to know in the meantime), we should briefly deal with the term itself.
What is actually behind the term merchandise management?
The popular online encyclopedia “Wikipedia” would put it this way:
“Materials management or merchandise management deals with the administration as well as the temporal, quantitative, qualitative and possibly also spatial planning and control of material movements within a company and between the company and its environment.”
Related to the dental practice and translated into understandable language, one could define the basic function of a merchandise management system as follows:
“Merchandise management ensures that in practice all the required materials are always available in exactly the right amount”
In order to fulfill this task, a merchandise management system must cover the entire material cycle in a practice. This starts with ordering or purchasing the goods, goes through booking the goods into the warehouse when the order is delivered and after booking the goods out, when they have been used up, starts again with ordering the goods from the beginning.
In everyday practice, this leads to numerous advantages, just a few of which are mentioned here:
- Avoidance of material wastage due to reaching the expiry date of the goods
- Avoidance of treatment failures / delays due to non-existent material
- MPG-compliant batch documentation
- Reduction of the stock value and thus increase in liquidity of the practice
- Time saving when ordering
- Increased efficiency with the same deployment of personnel and thus further cost reduction
- Clarity of current stock levels
- Inventory optimization
- Extensive statistics
Job interview as a dentist in a dental clinic
While the dress code for job interviews at private dentists is more casual, you should dress more formally for interviews in clinics. Most of my fellow students took their exam outfit out of the closet again for job interviews in clinics.
Of course, the tips suggested above are also less relevant if you apply to a clinic.
