Forensic Hiring - Finding Out What an Applicant Doesn't Want You to Know

Episode Transcript

Auto-generated transcript: Forensic Hiring - Finding Out What an Applicant Doesn't Want You to Know

You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests. So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber, and Amber Weber,

and listen to the first time you've seen the video. You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident. From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests. So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber,

Wendy Askins, and David Harris, talk about the issues that matter to you. I'd like to introduce my terrific co-host today. First of all, I'll introduce Amber Weber, who's one of our senior examiners. In fact, she's our newest, most newly promoted senior examiners. She's from Bluff, Bell, Texas.

Amber works with us in front investigation, and also in what's called office protection system, which is our protection package for dentists. And my other co-host today is the Splendifer, as Wendy Askins also from Texas. Wendy is our longest serving examiner, and she's one of three supervising examiners. So that's the most senior level of examiner that we have.

Wendy's particular concentration is front investigation in orthodonic practices, and she knows more about that than really anybody else on the planet. So you may see a little bit of a bad flavor coming through today. And I'd also like to send a shout out to my friend, Jan Keller, who's a consultant, and she was really the first person to use the title for anti-ciring in dentistry.

So I just want to acknowledge that, and thank Jan for generously allowing us to use that title. And the final thing I'll say is, we're not age-art advisors. And we're not here to tell you how to find the best person. You know, that ideal person who's the perfect fit for your practice who projects the personality of your practice exactly the way you want to do. What we are really ultimately as professional cynics,

and we get to see people who we call serial and buzzers. And these are the ones who get caught stealing in one practice. And two weeks later, they're working more or less across the street. And what we want to do is show you their tricks, and help you come up with a plan to not be victimized by those people. And there's a lot of investment that is preventable if the hiring is done properly. And I'm going to highlight one serial in Bezler now.

And she's got a lot of names, unique wells, Denise LaLam, or yet men, all kinds of variations. Unique has, and I'll cover unique for purposes of this discussion. She's worked a lot in the Las Vegas and Phoenix areas. And we've probably heard from 20 different practices about her. Most of you know that we have a place in our website called the Hall of Shame, where we profile on Bezler's. And of course, you can't say page there.

I described her as the chameleon, because the resumes have some common elements, but she will shift the brown light crazy to try to look like she's perfect for it. And she's a good job. This is one of the resumes that she's used. What came with this resume was a reference from somebody named Karis Stevenson. It did. What's that?

Oh, you guys. Yeah, it's too good to be true. Amanda said, email address to Ali, this is not the same as her name. I'm great. Carl said, I pray I can tell, what a better sentence structure, but I could change it in that letter.

Yeah, and and Carol is a consultant that I will say, and I'm fondly articulate. And so she gets, she has bonus points for that one for sure. Yeah, yeah, Gary Gillan's. Hi Gary he's a he's a guy from Nova Scotia. We're at, we're at LaVo move the way. He's at the same part of Grammar in both places. also said, oh, well done, Yari.

He said, Karis Stevenson doesn't seem to exist. You know, it's, she's not in Google. And, and, cumul seducers, the signature is not a wet signature what he means is not done by a pen. Yeah, no address. You guys are doing well here. And, oh, who just money? Well done, who just said, you need, you need John title

as insurance coordinator, but the reference letter talks about her like she's the office manager. Yeah. Yeah. Marlon Salomon said she can do everything. Justin Gita looks like it's copied and pasted. Yeah, let's, let's break my high-less. Another, another good Canadian guy,

I, I, Google, Karis Stevenson and she doesn't exist. Yeah, lots, lots of, lots of good answers here. Well done. So, I said, she'll go anywhere, really? Yeah, that was, that was, that was an analyst. I mean, this is somebody who's willing to relocate to anywhere in the US for an office manager position. Yeah, well done Rosary, that's definitely on our list.

And, well, there's, well, they caught just on your consultants in the pediatric world and the same thing, well, in your relocate. If you other people got that as well. Yeah, the miss, the miss spelling of recognize in the, in the, in the, in the resumes, something I didn't like. Yeah, here, here's one that's maybe a little bit more subtle. The first thing I see is that she, she,

she lists his her work experience to pretty big DSOs. And I think one of the things that she knows about and is collectively is that those, first of all, they don't love making phone calls to verify previous employment. And you just know that when you call on the SO, you're going to have to talk to probably three people and you're going to get a little bit of a run around before you actually find somebody who can confirm employment.

So if you're a little bit disinclined to make that call in the first place, then working for a DSO or another one that we're going to see later on, a big university, is a reason for people not to do it. So just to make it a little more interesting, I'm going to show you a different resume that unique used. Oh, sorry, one more thing before I leave the DSO theme. I mean, the reference from this Kara Stevenson person who I'm pretty convinced doesn't exist.

You'll see the company name at the bottom, sphere education and development. I'm wondering if, when you need to grow this letter, actually, it was trying to make people think it was sphere education and development, which is a company that most people have heard of. So I'm wondering if there's kind of a vague recognition concept. But Kara Stevenson talks about how unique can basically walk on water. Now she's worked for 2 DSOs. These DSOs are growing pretty fast.

I mean, Pacific Dental Service adds typically 80,000 offices per year. So they need people. And somebody with all the skills that unique is supposed to have would have been promoted about three times over the course of the nine years. This resume is from 2019, over the course of the nine years that she worked there. I mean, she'd be a regional manager by now. There's no way that she's going to be stuck in an insurance coordinator role for a company growing that quickly.

So now let me drop the other shoe. And this is another resume that the same person used. And of course, the reason I know it's the same person is it's the same phone number. And if we were still in any doubt, this wording is the same verbato. So now she's using a different name. She's using Marie Edmund, which is a little more consistent by the way with her email address. And she's clearly applying in an orthodonic practice because she has totally different work experience and it's all ortho based now.

I mean, it looks like she worked for two different companies. There is a frost orthodonic scenario. It's not in Gilbert. It's a few miles away from there. And this is what I say about the chameleon. Now she's applying for an ortho job and she pretends like she's spent her whole life in ardo. So lots of great comments here.

You guys are all doing well. I guess the question I have to ask you is if you would do that well, if you didn't have the advanced knowledge that this is from a scammers. And that's really our money question here. Amber, Wendy, anything you guys want to add on unique and her unique resumes? No. Well, we did have one thing to make note that it states that her confrontational skills are excellent and they said, what was she a boxer?

Yeah. I was wondering what that meant to. Yeah. Okay. Let's see if anybody got any that works on my list. Someone said she knows far practice management systems in only two jobs. That's a good act. Yeah.

And the DSOs buy practices all the time and they come in with different softwares. Yeah. So a lot of things wrong here when you start digging in just a little bit deeper. And clearly things here aren't exactly what they say. The problem is there are a lot of resumes that don't stick out quite as much as unique stew and still have lots of problems. But yeah, congratulations to everybody who gave good answers there. So now we are prosperity.

So we do have to talk about the dangers of investment because that is mainly what our purpose and industry is. And that is to warn you that 90% of dental practice owners will be in vessels sometimes during their career. And unfortunately, the latest data that we have, the latest study from the ADA shows that it would probably be several different times, maybe up to five, that a practice owner is a vessel from when it happens in the average amount of medicine battle in vessel is $109,000.

And 20% of investors are serial investors as they said, these are the people that thrive on in vesselments. So they go from one office to the next office to the next office, just cannibalizing revenue from that particular dental office. But that's not all that we need to worry about in forensic hiring. Something else we want to worry about is that 50% to 70% of resumes that we receive in our offices for each job position, 50% of those resumes are falsified in some form or another. Now it may be trying to hide a job by stretching the dates.

It may simply be saying that their registered dental assistant when they're actually not possibly they've inflated their salary or their representing skills that they're saying they have, but that they really don't. Now the unfortunate thing about all of this is that it's no secret that in dentistry we're behind on the systems and the processes that we use to find out if information is actually true or not. Another really sad thing is that it's very easy to find out if someone is aligned to you and it doesn't take that much time if you have the right systems in place.

When I travel around the United States I often hear people say to me, I would know if my staff member was stealing from me or I just have this third or sixth sense that tells me when someone's not being truthful with me. Somebody's going to show up and fill out an application and come to an interview and they have a scarlet Eve or a better written on their ad. The problem is that we see these through our own filter of what we perceive them to look. I thought would be easy to spot. In actuality, investors look like you.

And they look like me. That's what makes them so hard to spot when they're standing in front of you. When do I think that's so true that people can hide the truth so easily? This comment came from a convicted felon chat room. And so as you said, and those words books can be deceiving, they said,

the dental game is great. No background checks unless you work with kids. Great money, easy hours, and it's the same thing over and over. So that statement really justifies the fact that dentistry is behind. And that's the important that we want to talk today about forensic hiring and having that system in place.

So that you can avoid hiring somebody that you don't know what they're trying to hide from you. So what we'll start off with now is starting your job search. Just sorry, can I interrupt for one second? I just want to reinforce one thing that Amber said. There are two problems here. The first problem is that dentistry

doesn't follow the same kind of scrutiny when it hires that most other businesses do. The second problem, and that to me is really what this slide says is there's a community out there of really bad people who know that. And they are specifically turning you. And that's really what this challenge says. Sorry, Amber.

I just wanted to make sure that we type all parts of that together. Yeah, that's a thank you for coming, Dave. So the important part is starting your job search. This is before you ever meet a possible applicant. And so what we're going to talk about here is why you need to have all the details figured out before you start. The first thing is you need to have an application form.

This we would recommend professional assistance with the design in this form. So that every person that applies for your position that you're advertising and gets to the stage of you wanting to possibly interview them or hire them still is not the same form. This form will facilitate comparisons. It will help you make sure everybody is able to fill up

this form accurately. And it prevents discriminatory activities. But let's give an example of this. If you ask for every person's data birth and then you didn't hire that person, they could come back on you saying that you discriminated against them because of their age. So it allows you to be protected from any discriminatory activities.

That's why we recommend you get a professional to help you get a great job of the patients that you'll have people to allow. The other thing is it also allows you to obtain consent for background checking. And this is one of the most important parts in front of the hiring is knowing who you are going to possibly bring on to the part of your team.

Before you start using make sure you define what you want, what you're looking for and a possible routine member. And make sure you're looking for something who's bring strength to your office is not your weaknesses. So a lot of doctors will hire off of, they emotionally like this person. They felt like they were the same.

They had the same viewpoint, the same type of ethics and different ways of approaching things. But we recommend that doctors try to make sure they have a well rounded staff that will sometimes counter balance. The doctor or other team members strengths and weaknesses. The other great thing of why you need a system that we want you guys to know

when we're doing this today is when the staff member leaves, we'll see a lot of doctors go into panic mode, what we call panic hiring. So they don't have the system in place and they just hire the first thing that comes along. And so the other thing that we recommend is having good systems. So that if you do have a team member leaves, you know still how to operate that office

and you have other staff members who have separation and responsibility. So you're not in a panic mode of hiring. And we want you also to preserve your knowledge what you need to have and make sure you have a slow, systemic route of screening use applicants. You know, one thing that I see is every doctor on the planet understands the concept of a short notice with the four patients.

What sometimes is a little puzzling to me is why they don't apply the same concept to staff. In other words, if you want to practice with three doctors and 35 staff, turn over's going down. It's absolutely going down. The question for you is, why you choose to start at zero when somebody says Friday is my last day. Especially if you have a big practice,

but even in a smaller practice, my advice is to become collector of people. So once COVID-19, you can need to restaurants again. You're out on a Friday night. You have supper. There's a food server there who's great when anticipates your needs who makes you feel good about the dining age experience.

Why not hand that person to card and say, you're great at what you do. And if you never want to leave, I understand. But if you ever were interested in daytime hours, I'd love to chat and just start the conversation. We don't have to wait until the moment when we need somebody to start looking. And when we do it, it's exactly what it embers is.

That's when people get in trouble because they are forced to skip over some of the steps that they really shouldn't skip. So one of the key things we start this search and you're going to advertise a position because you've had a staff member leave. We recommend having a single purpose email or Gmail account so that you know exactly

that these people are applying for that position when you're ready. I love what you said Dave about, you know, screening for people when you're out of the restaurant and keep those in your memory bank. But you also want to have something that's devoted specifically for your hiring process. The other thing we recommend is when you advertise

for this position, that you have a reference number, so that you can ask any applicants to quote this reference number and our cover letters. So you can make sure that they are paying attention. And it's one more way to screen and make sure applicants are qualified and want to do what's needed to apply for this position. Yeah, the other thing about the first point of embers is that it makes very sure that somebody who's applying

at least knows how to use a computer as far as emails. You really can't function in a dental practice anymore with those in computer skills. And somebody who can't manage to send you a resume by email probably isn't going to be able to master practice management software or the other things you need to do.

So the next topic we're going to talk about is, you know, literally this is where you'll check for grammar, any typo on the resume, resumes, and that's another way to filter out and to screen possible applicants. The key thing for this is, it doesn't mean that person cannot qualify for the job. It just means that you're trying to set the stage for what your practice needs to have. So we recommend anything with typos or non-personalized cover letters or anything that looks like it's not dramatically correct to this card that resume. And like I said, being relaxing here sends a message to possible people that you hire with a resume like this, that you're pretty laid back and they can kind of get away with not having to set up the place. However, after you hired somebody, would you expect there are standard written communication to be higher or lower than it is on the resume? Exactly, we always wanted to be higher. I'm going to share a personal story. When I was an office manager, I actually hired somebody because I felt like they had a good personality and it would be trainable to teach them better skills. However, after they communicated with a couple specialists that we referred patients to, it obviously did not send out a professional message of the practice.

And unfortunately, it wasn't a good long-term fit. However, had I had this system where I had a standard of what I would hire for and what I wanted them to meet, it would have prevented me from going through that situation. Yeah, after you've gone through all of the resumes and you're at the point where you found someone who looks interesting to you and you'd like to meet them in person, we're going to move to the interview process. So when you have this person in your office, if you're sitting down with them to meet them and learn more about them, the first thing you want to do is make sure that you're not using leading questions. And I want to find that practitioners will do this because they're used to talking to patients that way and it's like, and we're going to wear our rubber bands every day, aren't we? So we're used to talking to patients that way and sometimes it comes across when we're talking to other people or candidates that way. So here's an example. So let's say, what is one of your weaknesses like maybe perfection that you have? And of course, what's the one going to come back to you and say they're going to come back and say oh yes yes one of my weaknesses is that. I'm in a perfectionist and sometimes it takes me a little bit longer to get things done because I want to manage every single detail to make sure that it's correct.

I mean, help who wouldn't love it and pull away like that right, but you're giving them the answer. Another thing you want to do is make sure you roll play with someone and I tell you I was a managing director of a multi-million dollar large group practice. And man, I wish I had done this every single one of us has hired an employee and about two weeks into it, we say to ourselves, oh my god, how did I ever hire that person? Well, here's a good way that you can get around that. So if I'm hiring an orthodonic office and I'm hiring an insurance coordinator, I might ask that person. If we have a new patient that comes in and they're a transfer patient from another state and we know that they've gone through phase one and now we're going to continue on with phase two or even you know with intercepted care. How would you file that insurance? How would you tell that parent or that responsible party? What their insurance would cover to you? How would you do that? Now that's a pretty detailed question and even after being an orthodonic firm was 30 years. That's a very difficult question to navigate because there are a lot of variables that are involved in that. And can you give us an example that you would use for general ministry?

Okay, so in general, Benus, we wanted to think that I like to use is I would ask them to complete a written form written questions. Because I wanted to see what their basic skills were, how they would write out the answers to the questions. Because in general, Benus, we do a lot of referrals to specialists or the donuts and the donuts. So I want to know how they would write out an email. I also want to know if they had basic understanding of insurance or math skills. And then I could go over those questions with Ben, like your fear saying, Roca, how did you figure out that answer or how would you explain that to that patient? Okay, great. Thank you. Another thing I want to ask everyone to think about is how many times do you ask to look at Identification before they make a job offer to someone. I mean, I know you have to have like a copy of the driver's license or whatever for I know and you have to have a prepos citizenship. But we're talking about adding a family number to your business practice. I mean, there's a long, archaice process that goes on before that and where we're trying to do our due diligence.

Let's catch it early. So during that first interview with that particular applicant asked us in our driver's license. Now, you may need to ask them to place their finger over the birthday so that there are any issues of discrimination because of age that might come into play later on. But we want to check that the name is the same on their driver's license. Of course, the picture matches the person that you're standing there looking at the name matches the same name on the resume and the address matches the same address that it's on the resume. And another thing that we want to be careful about is looking for gaps. We're going to talk about that a little bit later. Gaps and employment and lateral job moves. For example, if I have an ortho assistant or a dental assistant who's working for Dr Smith, the General Street and they want to come to my office and work as a dental assistant in my office. What's the reason why they're leaving? Is it because they don't make enough money? They want more money. If you're offering more money, that's going to give you a clue of what's important to this person and there's nothing wrong with that. But you need to know that before you hire this person or how about if they don't get along with Dr Smith and they have a problem. personality conflict with Dr. Smith.

That's certainly something that you would want to know prior to higher in this person. Now, we've gone over a background checking. I believe in the past two webinars that we've done with you. So, John, I want to belabor the point here. However, I do think it's important to recap the processes or the steps that you need to take before you, it formally invites someone to join your practice. Absolutely, 100% if you don't do anything else we're talking about, please talk to former employers.

A social networking scan, drug testing, a credit check, especially if it's someone who's going to be handling money, and doing day-and-closes in your practice, license verification for your clinical assistance, and a criminal records check. This is the one that skipped in it. It is the richest source of information about what kind of employee somebody's going to make. I was talking to a group on a webinar at the other night about hiring, and it was a small group, and we were kind of doing it interactively. And one of the dentists was saying, yeah, I asked somebody for references.

And my response was, no, I do not care at the slightest what somebody's come scouted leader thinks about them, or their eighth grade science teacher, their parish priest. They're only people I'm interested in hearing from, are former employers. And my rule is really simple. I want to hear from everybody who they've worked for through at least the past five years. Now, there are some tricks of the trade, and let me give you a few. The first one is this, don't phone any phone number that an applicant gives you. If we go back to unique and her letter from the consultant, if you call that number, you need answers. Call the consultant's phone number. So, if somebody says that they work for Dr. Merchett and

pure actual annoying, Google has really achieved use. Go online, find the phone number and call that number. If you call a number that an applicant gives you, it can easily be what's called a burner cell phone to dispose of a cell phone that they're all part of their office answering, gives them a great reference. Okay, we need to find the phone numbers of everybody we call in the panel. When I get that person on the phone, the first thing I'm going to ask them to do is to confirm the job title that the person had and provide their exact dates of employment. And I'll go back to something that when he said a minute ago, we're used in in in industry to giving people an answer and asking for confirmation. That's a really bad idea here.

If you say Susie said she worked for you from July of 2017 to September of 2019. Any human being you asked that question to is going to say yeah, that sounds about it. We want exact dates of employment and it's to deal with something when he said a minute ago, called they didn't job. We also want to ask somebody what this person's job title was when they left. We know this a lot of people will give themselves that upgrade first class, where in their last job, their title, the treatment coordinator and now they're applying for a position with you and on their resume, it says that they were the office manager. So it's a great chance to catch somebody a little bit of deception and your three presenters all agree that a little bit of

deception when being hired can lead to a lot of deception later. So two questions asked the other one that I want you to ask is really simple would you rehire this person? And the beautiful thing about that question is that any answer other than yes, of course, in a minute means no. So if you ask somebody that question, if you get three seconds of silence and you can sense that they're kind of squirming a little bit, you have your answer. The other nice thing about this question from the perspective of somebody being asked is that it's safe to answer. So we've all heard that when you fire somebody, you have to be pretty careful about what you say about the next.

And the danger is something called slander. And the problem with with facts is that sometimes they're a little bit subject to interpretation. So to give you a scenario, let's say that you fire somebody today and it's either it's either the person that's linked from you or the hygienist who uses the same profile a couple of days. And I know what you're all thinking now, which is y'all. You fire somebody like that. You get a call from somebody and you say, yeah, I fire it or for stealing. And two weeks later, two years later, she gets the court and she gets a quit it on some technology. Do you know what that person's going to do next? They're going to sue you for slander. Because with the benefit of hindsight, you made a statement that was

false into famatory momentum and those are the two ingredients for slander. What I'd rather to you say about that person is under no circumstance that I could remotely possibly imagine whatever behind it. That's not slander. That's not talking about what you plan to do in the future. It's not subject to a true or false death. So that's how you give a negative reference, but it's also when you're on the other side and you're looking at hiring, this is an incredibly important question asking. So let's make very sure we ask it. The other thing that you were running into a lot is somebody who says to you, please don't contact my friend boss because she doesn't know I'm leaving. And there are two possible scenarios from this. The first one is that it's true. The second one is

you're talking to somebody who got fired three weeks ago. And this is their way of preventing you from calling somebody who they know is going to give them a bad reference. When somebody says that to my response to them, the response I suggest you give them is this. I understand completely and I would certainly not want to get you in trouble with your current employer. But I'm also going to tell you that we don't hire anybody without having that conversation now. In a combination of your situation, I'm prepared to push that to the very end of our process. But I do have to have that conversation before we can hire you. And what you just did was a great exercise and differential diagnosis. If somebody's playing games with you and they were fired

three weeks ago, what you just told them is at the end of your road is a red wall. And they will abandon the process you will never hear from them again. And part of the objective of hiring is to separate unsuitable candidates at the earliest possible chance. The further you go with somebody, the more you've invested in them and the more you waste when they turn it up to be suitable. So that's a, that's a great way of separating the the liars from the people who are really in a bit of a jam. And when they say that. So keep that in mind in your toolbox. On the subject of references, There are companies out there and this is one who are believe are not in the business of providing favorable references to people and never work it. So you're looking for a job, you can hire a flat and deception service.

It's love the name and pay them a fee and they'll give you phone numbers, normally local phone numbers in your area. And when somebody calls, they will answer and give you a good reference to that employee. So I'm back to seeing again, we need to let Google do the walk in here and find out where somebody find out the actual phone number or where somebody claim they've worked and call that. Otherwise you end up talking to the lad and getting a great reference for somebody they've never had. So yeah exactly 20 30 years ago, it was much more difficult to provide a fake reference letter or provide fake phone numbers. Now with technology and the new world that we're in, it's much more easy. This is another example we have from a chat form of people who are talking and sharing advice on how to get your fake resume and get people to believe what you're putting on there. So as it says, oh good, good God.

Okay, every job I've ever left, I've made sure I took a step of a stack of company letter heads so I could write up my own letters of recommendation never had one Iota problem from it. So also when you get a reference letter as a term a doctor or a previous office that they may have worked in, it's still good like you were saying earlier they've to contact them make sure that that letter head is truly a reference letter that came from that office and it wasn't falsely. Made up with the staff member that took it. Just throw these away and talk to people. Right. That's exactly. Yeah, I mean we should not place paper is not worth the paper is not in the story. Right.

And so as we talked about this, it is a big bad world 65% or 65 million Americans. We know have some type of criminal record and 50 to 70% of the resumes that come through. Your office or other people who are looking to hire any type of positions are misleading. So those are good numbers to have written down or in your memory bank because you need to know before you go need to know what you're dealing with before you go ahead and offer that. A patient of position in your office. The next thing is learn from social networking, you know, used to be well my brother or my best friend said this person is a really great person. Now, if social networking really recommend that you take the time to screen and look at how these people live their life in social media. Number one, we want you to look at their communication style.

How does it look like they're post looks like we talked about the grammatically correct. Did they have quotes or different things post about against their employer? I don't like the guy I work for. The people I work with are making my life really difficult. So you want to see how they're going to portray you and your team. Time feeds. This is a really key one that I used to deal with as an office manager. I would research people if they had other jobs. If they were constantly doing post during working hours or active on social media.

You want to know that because are they going to spend their time helping you build your practice or are they going to be spending their time checking their social media accounts. And do they live a high risk lifestyle? Their pictures, their weekend events, do they constantly have different posts out with their friends having parties, different things like that. What is their high risk lifestyle look like? Or are they pretty, you know, your white collar, easy, laid back family person? Yeah, the woman in the back is one of our more notorious cases. That's a Christy Correll from Udondo Beach. Just outside Los Angeles.

As a member of a relatively exclusive fraternity, a prosperity called $1 million club. So those are people who stole over $1 million from their, from the practice. Yeah. And here's one that that my friend Carol Page had mentioned. This in Beveler's name, Lisa Durgen. I've met her a couple of times personally and she's a, she's local to my own area and she kind of moves from practice to practice and steals. And one of the things that she's been doing is putting on her resume as her last employer, some dentist who has died. So, you know, she'll go to the Obits and look for a dentist passing away and then we'll include that dentist as part of the resume.

And of course, the reality here is it's very tough to get a job reference from somebody who's current address is a cemetery. So that's one of Lisa's tricks. Well, let's think about how we would overcome that if because, let's face it, there are many, actually, there are people who actually work for them. So the fact that somebody listens to see his dentist as a resume as a, as a, as a form employer on a resume doesn't automatically mean they're scanning, but it means that we now need to. Get a little more invasive. If she did actually work for this dentist, there's somebody somewhere who can confirm that. There are co-workers. There's probably a supply rapper too who used to call in that office who would have remembered seeing her there. She would have income tax paperwork from that practice.

So there are lots of other places we can go and and when we hit a dead end here, we can't give up and that's what that's what these are counting on that's why they list these people that's why they list big institutions like like the SOs. We just can't give up quite that easily and the problem is they know you want to. Oh, speaking of any of you who have ever heard me speak live, know that I talk a lot about one of my favorite is actually eating that we chased all over Tennessee. One of the clients that Ashley stole from Senas this resume because we were trying, you know, we we have some questions about. About how, how is it that she just continues to to go from office to office without getting caught. So one of our clients is sent this resume in from Ashley. Now if you'll notice. Ashley worked at Vanderbilt University from September 2005 until July 2010. And then she worked at another nail practice from December.

I was in intent until when this resume was handed to the second client that we knew that Ashley had in Bezel from. Well, here's the problem with Ashley's resume that we know to be true. Ashley worked for my first client, which is a very dear friend of mine. She worked for my first client from 2011 to 2010. So right off about we were able to see to Ashley was doing what we like to call stretch. Which is that she actually took the dates, the yearly dates of when she worked at one location and she made that longer and she completely made my friend's practice that she and that's all from completely made it disappear. Now, you know, as a former managing director of practice administrator, I would look at this and I wouldn't know that. The only way that I would be able to catch it is if I called Vanderbilt University either the orthodonic department, the or surgery department or the pediatric, that's the department. Which gives back to the exact same thing that Dave was saying when we have these barter practices or DSSs sometimes or universities or research labs or whatever, it's almost impossible to get to the right person that you need to speak with, to get an accurate reference or to get an honest reference from someone. So we're going to talk about that in just a second, but here's how if you're just a regular person trying to hire a good person to work for you.

We don't hire anyone unless we get a reference from their former employer. That needs to be a standard line that's in your hiring protocol. Now, sometimes we'll have people that come into our office applying for a position and they have gaps in their employment and these are legitimate gaps. You know, for an example of, you know, someone who. Someone who stay home with their children for a second years. Someone who took off a year to care for an alien character. You know, with this COVID mess that's going on, we're going to have people that are out of work for a while because of that as well. We need to remember that not only are there legitimate people that have reasons for gaps.

But gaps in employment is a big thing that a lot of investors or people that are trying to hide something from you. That's exactly what they'll do. They'll just say I wasn't working out as at home, like Dave was saying earlier. Even if someone has been at home or they haven't been in the workforce for an extended period of time, we still need to verify that. And as Dave said before, you know, it's easy to say, you know, can you know, can I see your tax returns from that particular view? Well, their tax returns should reflect that they weren't working. Or if they were traveling in your or an extended period of time, hey, good for them, good for you. But I need to see your passport so that I can verify that you're actually out of the country.

So once you, once you've picked that person, once you once you found the chosen one and you've verified, you've done your due diligence and you've verified all of their references. You've checked their social media. This is how we proceed. Number one, you need to send them an invitation to join your family. That includes a written offer to join your family. Now, the written offer needs to be conditional if you are in one of the band, the box of states. In which requires, I think, but there's California. What are the other them, Dave?

I stop keeping track. It's a growing field. I think from memory Massachusetts is one of them. There are their lawyers. Yeah, they're like 15 states. Something like that that actually require that after you do your due diligence and use a talented candidate that you want to offer a job to, you have to get them a written offer before you can check their criminal record. So keep that in mind. And again, let's say you have got the perfect person sitting in front of you and there an excellent match for your family for your business family.

But they say to you, well, I'm still working with Dr. Jones. And I would rather you not call Dr. Jones for a reference because doesn't want Dr. Jones to know I'm leaving obviously. You can extend that individual or written offer on the condition that you be able to speak with Dr. Jones at a later date, right? Because you're actually, you're actually taking care of two issues there. Number one, if someone is lying to you and they just don't want you to talk to Dr. Jones and they're telling you that, you've said right there. Here's a conditional job offer for you. I'm not hiring you unless I talk to Dr. Jones. Right?

How on the other hand, if that is a legitimate request, you've automated offer to someone that you want to join your family. But if she's going to lead Dr. Jones office anyway, right? She'll get noticed there, accept your office and accept your offer and then you can go back and call Dr. Jones. So after we've done a written offer and they accept that, we need to write down the conditions or the employment contracts that we have with that particular employee. Really the issues that come about in a written contract with an employee should all be laid out in your employee manual or your employee policy or protocol manual. Things that addressed what you expect of that employee and what that employee can expect from you such as, are we going to do annual and you will reviews when do I get a raise? How do I go about getting a raise? What's your self-unpolicy? What's your drug testing policy? That way you can get authorization to do drug testing, random drug testing every year. If that's what you choose to do in your office, as long as the employee is clear that those the guidelines that are set out in your practice. Also, I cannot stress enough that it's important for you to have an anti-prime policy as well in your employee policy.

So, by, oh, sorry Dave. One thing I was going to just add, one of our more difficult cases to work on. You're called to do this quite a lot, is a situation where somebody has committed payroll fraud. So let's say it's the office manager of who's the person who's the problem and they have given themselves a raise that the doctor didn't know about or they're paying extra hours, like over time or something like that. The first question we're going to ask you is we need to confer what her pay in title

and what's. And there's a way we need to know what she was supposed to be paid. And the people who are then in trouble are the ones who say, well, I don't have a red degree with that person or I do, but, you know, I spend years old and, you know, we've given her three raises sense. Nobody's going to go to jail on he said versus he said kind of construct. If somebody is stealing from you for payroll and you want to hold their feet to the fire, it only realistic way to do it is to be able to produce a written document that says, this

is what their title and to pay is. So if you neglect this, you're really painting yourself into a corner when it comes to that. Sorry, Wendy, I just didn't want to let that go. Oh, no, thank you. Thank you. It's been a shake case exactly like that and that is something that we really struggled. But is, you know, she over paid herself by $100,000 over a three-year time period.

You know, she'll be the documentation that you didn't have a verbal agreement with her. That's going to be really hard to prove, but we did good for you. I had a very, very dear friend, you had a settlement happen in her practice. And just as an exercise after we had confirmed a settlement from the individual, we went back and we got the resume and went through and called, looked up all of the places that she said she had worked and called all the numbers that the employee had listed as references and every bit of it was fake. And so my friend said to me, which broke my heart and sticks in my mind constantly,

is she said, if I only would have done this before, she stole $200,000 from me, if I only would have done it before. So if we do our due diligence and we do some of the things that we're talking about today, we can find out the character of people before we hired him instead of after it's too late. It is really difficult for you to change the terms of employment of an existing employee kind of somewhere in the middle of the process. In other words, in the eyes of the law, you have a contract with every employee whether it's a written one or something understanding. There's an agreement between you and every employee and what's difficult to do is come in

our material and the middle of that process and say, we're going to implement a drug testing policy starting next week. If you want to change terms of existing employees, what I encourage you to do is go to your HR advisor, I mean there are some good companies out there that specialize in HR for dental practices and I'll give you a couple of ideas and this is not an exclusive list there, I'll give you as well. Two who we refer to sometimes is a company called Cedar, which is CEDR. They're in Tucson, Arizona and there's also a company in Oregon. I believe they're in Eugene but I may be often my geography a little bit called bent airics in any of those. It's another, those are both companies that specialize in dental HR. If you want to change existing

terms, you need to work through them. However, for the next employee you hire, there is right now no contract. So you can set up something that's a little bit different than the basis on what your current employees are there and a couple of things to think about. One is we mentioned drug testing on the way in but it shouldn't end there. You should have the ability to drug test employees going forward. The other one I'll spend a second on, you can require that if an employee brings what's called a personal electronic device, so we're talking about like a smartphone or an iPad or something like that. If any device that they bring onto your premises is subject to search. That needs to be an employment condition. Again, that's not something we should be imposing retroactively. But if

that's the rule and an employee chooses to take a job with you knowing that that's going to be rule, that's part of your contract. So I'd encourage you to look at those two things. Certainly if there's an investment, for example, that gives you the ability to say, I have the right to look at your smartphone and I'm choosing to exercise that right. This also discourages why I call the social media bunnies. The ones who will take the how-how are bathroom-break twice a day and chat with their friends. If they know that their fullness subject to search was a little bit of a dissent center. The one above that are the things that you may want to contract with somebody that they can't do. Non-compete, which would normally only apply to like an associate

dance, non- solicitation, which can apply to everybody, which says if they leave your practice, they don't take the patient list and they don't start calling you patients trying to get them to their new practice, non-disclosure, and non-discords need non-discords means that when somebody leaves them for that matter while they're employed by you, they're not allowed to make negative statements about you. Normally, these are reciprocal, so you also have to agree not to disparity in play. But those are some of the things that could be in contracts. How do you do it? Do I need background checks for different positions? How do I do a how do I do drug testing? And how do I do drug testing in Canada? And then we have some about needing consent from the

applicant to look at their social media. I think I answered that one correctly. Facebook is it it's publicly posted, but someone had a brilliant question about what if they have a high privacy setting on their Facebook account? Look at it and sorry my last one. What if you have an applicant that has no social media or have digital footprint? Yeah, I'll take that one first. There are some people who really are not on Facebook. I wouldn't accept their word for it, but look at it around a little bit. In terms of Facebook privacy settings, what I would say to an applicant, let's understand that due diligence is normally something we do on. The chosen one, you know, that final person who were prepared to hire.

In other words, we don't play applicant survivor where, you know, okay, we have five people who we think could do the job. Let's run them all through a criminal records check. Let's drug test them all and the last one standing will hire. That's a really bad idea for a whole bunch of reasons, including costs. So, let's assume for purposes of the rest of this discussion that you're down to one person. And now what you're trying to do is see if there's anything in their life that's kind of a showstopper for you. So, yeah, some people really don't have social media fair enough.

Certainly, you know, for a lot of jobs in a dental practice, social media is almost becoming part of the job. In other words, you know, you typically are looking for your friend desk people who write Instagram for you and maintaining your Facebook page and stuff. So, I'd have a little bit of a question about this person's ability to do that if they're not actually in their participant in social media.

Just a personal thing, but beyond that, there's the possibility that they haven't, they just don't want you to see it. So, take a look before you simply accept their word. In terms of privacy settings, what I encourage people to do is say to that final applicant, as part of our screening process, we look at your social media. So, what I need you to do, I'm going to send you a friend request and I need you to accept it. After 24 hours, if you'd like to, you can unfriendly, that's totally up to you. But accepting that friend request will give you the ability to get beyond the privacy settings and see what you should see what their social media.

And if somebody doesn't want to do that, then it's their right to refuse that. It's also your right not to hire you. This goes back to something that I've ever said early on when she was talking about having a written application form. One of the things that you can do in that application form is you can communicate what your scrutiny process will be. And you recall, I said a few minutes ago, one of the objectives here is to separate unsuitable people from the process as early on as you can. So, when people see the application form, they see that you'll be checking their social media.

And they think you're not going to like what you see, they'll just bail from the process. And that's exactly what we want them to do. So, let's let's be upfront. I mean, let's tell applicants at the very beginning. Here's what we're going to check on you. And those who know that they're not going to pass you tests or just going to vanish and that was a victory. Somebody asked about drug testing. In any city of 50,000 people are more, there's usually a lab that will do it.

And normally what happens is you make an appointment for the employee at the lab. Yeah, I should be unfairly short notice. I wouldn't say to the employee 30 days from that we wanted drug testing because that's not find a flush, darn you're needing out of their system. Usually, it should be within the next 72 hours. And typically what happens is you make the appointment for the mission route at a time that's convenient for them. The lab will do the tests, whether it's blood or urine, and will report back to normally both parties.

Some labs will only report to the person who's standing in front of them. So they'll you know, they'll give this, they'll email this person a lab report or whatever. And they'll need to forward it to you. But that's how you do it. But as somebody asked, would you mention all of the application on the application form that you require a criminal records check and a credit check? And then one I forgot before was our smokers a protected class. I love that question.

Yeah, I think you should be as transparent as you can be about what you're planning to check on applicants. And like I say, if somebody looks at your job and decides not to apply because they know that the scrutiny is going to be going to find something negative on it. That's the best possible outcome. I mean, it's a heck of a lot easier if people are just saying, now I'm not interested in it. They go halfway down the process. And then find out, oh, you really are going to be doing a drug test while I'm probably won't pass that.

So here's how discrimination works and nothing a lot of people get this wrong. In every jurisdiction, there are bases on which you cannot discriminate. So, you know, they vary a little bit from place to place. But typically it's race and ethnic origin. It might be citizenship. It might be gender preference. It almost invariably includes gender. So you can't refuse to hire male hygienists. For example, that would be discriminatory. Each within a certain range, which is typically like a age 18 to 65. So you can't refuse to hire somebody because they're 60 years old and you don't think you'll have enough time with them before they retire to make it worthwhile.

So every place has its protected grounds. I live there about 13 of them. And sexual preferences is one of the things that is protected here that isn't in all jurisdictions.

There's a blanket exception if someone is if if the discrimination is generated. So for example, you're hiring an attendant for a female locker room that a gym, you are totally within your race to say only females. Okay? Because in that case, it's job related. But here's the part that people miss. If it's not on that list, you are totally free to discriminate on that basis. And when we were planning this session, I actually use this exact example. For our office here where I work, I will hire smokers. Because I don't like smelling them and I don't like the productivity loss that I have four times a day while they go out for some fresh air. Is that discrimination? It absolutely is. I am taking an identifiable characteristic and I'm making the decision on that

without even asking whether somebody can do the job. So let's be totally clear that that is discriminatory. However, it's not protected discrimination. Okay? So in my jurisdiction, and again, the rules may be different elsewhere, but in my jurisdiction, I am totally able to refuse to hire smokers. So you need to check out what the rules are where you are. But that's the state of the union where I have. I have a great question, Dave. Theresa asked, what about all these employees who are on layoff right now? Can we not create a new contract upon re-higher?

That's a great question. I don't have a good answer and it's going to very state by state. And it's going to depend on their legal status. I mean, are they furloughed, which implies that they still have a job, but they're simply not working at it right now. They kind of have a job with zero hours right now. Or are they, have they actually been terminated by the practice and given their separation paperwork in which case it would probably be a new hire?

The answer is going to vary across and where the merit guide. I don't really have a good answer for you. It depends on where you live and how it was done. I think. Okay. I also question, I just don't have the answer. Here's a great question. Can you do a background check yourself or do you recommend a company so that it can be completed more thoroughly?

Yeah. And let's be clear when we talk about background checks. I think sometimes people misapply that term really what they mean is criminal records check. To me, background checking is the entire process of getting to know this person and deciding if you're good with them or not. If the question is really about criminal records check, you can't do it yourself effectively. There are websites that report to give you a complete background work up on somebody. I can tell you because we use these sites internally for some of the things we do.

They are wildly incomplete. And it's always a case of, they have less information than they should. Not that, you know, they have more stuff than it's wrong. We will see criminal records, for example, missed all the time. So there's one of these sites. And I'll name it because we use it for certain things. Just call true finders. You can do it on a subscription basis or you can pay it on an individual basis.

They have a lot of information that's right about applicants. One thing that they're always missing is some of the criminal records history. So to do this higher at company that's in the business of doing background investigation, there's one company at least that specialize in dentistry. Actually, there's a friend who's on the call today. Her name's Anne Loser, Hands-On, I gen. She lives in Maryland. She recently completed her private investigator training and she's been exactly this and trust me.

She's really well set up to do that kind of work. So I'll give a shout out to Ann and who's on the call. There's another company called Dead Rups that do that kind of work as well. But you need somebody who's in that business. There is no one like online site that you can go to that will give you a real eye. I will complete answer on somebody's background. You really need somebody with a train hand. One of the problems is when you look at the United States, there are about 57 different jurisdictions

in which a criminal record could reside. So you've got 50 states plus district of Columbia plus the federal registry plus Guam plus the Mary Island. There are a lot of places where a criminal record could be. In some places and the two ladies with Mayor both from Texas, in Texas records are maintaining county by county. Somebody told me how many counties there are in Texas and I forget I don't know if either you have a better idea. I know it's over 100 but I just don't know how many.

There are a lot of counties and the criminal records are county by county. So there's no central registry in Texas that has all that information. So you need a specialist with that and you know trying to look at one of these online sciences is a real recipe for disaster. Wendy, one for you, Martin and I said can you be more clear about what an anti-frod policy is? I know that's one of your pets. That's actually one of my passions. It's an anti-frod policy and your policy manual which specifically lays out exactly what

you consider for our longevity to be. For example, if you have a sales rep from Patterson that comes into your practice and brings in season tickets to the Jackson's when we start playing football at Downer Sports after COVID and this person gives those season tickets to the person sitting at the front desk. Well, she's in possession of those tickets but they're intended for you. So technically who owns that? Who owns those tickets? Same thing with get baskets, any types of gifts, rebates, you'd be surprised to have any clients I work with where like in in Disneyland and Disneyland rebate will come back to the practice

and they'll open the mail and they'll you know, consider that check to be theirs. So you want to lay out things like that. What you consider to be fraudulent activity and here's where I think is most important laying out what happens if another employee in your office suspects that there is employee dishonesty going on from one of their coworkers. How do they handle that? Are they responsible for reporting to the practice owner that they've seen a dishonest act being committed? You want to lay that out? You also want to lay out what's going to happen if you find someone being dishonest. Number one, I of course would say we hire outside help.

We hire outside advisors outside resources to do an investigation and if you're found guilty, you will be punished to the fullest extent of the law. Now technically, it may not stop someone from sealing from you but it opens those guidelines of making someone think twice about I'm not going to come in this practice and have four year in a hand to take whatever I want or steal whatever I want because if I get caught, I'm going down for it and the perception of being caught is one of the greatest deterrence to an bezel. That's probably a much longer answer than you wanted. No, you're my place, my passion. So yeah, I know I'm going to put this glad to see that question come nice and yeah that's a that's a windy question for sure. I want to answer a great

question here. It comes from a good friend of mine in Indiana named Amanda Colis and Amanda says Indiana's an at-wheel employment state. That means that we can terminate an employee ideally with documented cause it will. Would an employment contract be contraindicated in other words, would it undermine this concept of an employment at-wheel? My answer to that Amanda is an personal fantastic question and I think I know it's an Indiana question but at 49 states are employment will states so it's very broadly applicable. Thank you. What your employment contract should do is essentially reinforce the concept that it's an employment at-wheel range. You have the ability and an employment contract if you want to contract out of employment at-wheel or you can simply say

that the state law of employment will apply to this continent.

And what that does, of course, it blocks somebody from arguing with you and saying, well, I know that it's an employment I will state, but when they hired me, they told me that if they had to have been going to give me three months notes, when it's in the contract, there's none of that. I think if anything, your position is stronger. So fantastic question, thanks Amanda.

Dave, I'm sorry, I have lots of passions. And that's what I'm going to find. One thing that I find a lot of people misunderstand is it is true that in at-wheel states an employee can quit or you can separate from that employee or fire that employee without cost, that does not protect you from having to pay an unemployment claim. And it also doesn't protect you from having a discrimination lawsuit filed against you.

So each state has its guidelines of paying unemployment claims. Is some business owners done? I mean, I'm care at all. They're like, I'm rid of an employee. I know, I don't care if my tax rate changes. But there are some others who would rather chew off one of their toes than have to pay an unemployment or allow an employee to get unemployment claim because of effects in the long run.

So make sure that you're keeping those in mind when you separate. I totally agree with that Wendy because I've had experience with that from Amanda's perspective and the other piece of advice I would give is always make sure you document any issues you have with staff prior to the day you're going to let them go. So the first time you start seeing issues, make sure you document that because that just protects you even more because if you are at it, we'll say it gives you more opportunity to protect yourself from that.

Yeah, anybody can go on with that a little bit further. Amber, I don't need to belabor the point, but I do know I get a lot of questions about this in general. You know, I know in Texas, what you have to do is you have to have a private conversation with that employee and it is documented. You have to list specifically behavior that is disagreeable to you. You have to give them training to change that behavior and you have to give them a warning that this could cause them their job and you have to give them a deadline of when you're going to

meet with them to document any improvement in that behavior and you have to do that two times. Now, on third time, you can bring the employee in, go over the first two documents and go over the behavior and say, I'd want you twice that this was going to cause a separation, a mandatory separation with your employment with us and that's come to pass. So we need to separate right now. And if you have all of that documentation and you've presented to an unemployment commission board, I've got pretty good results with that system. Let's display.

Be out, though. So I'm glad we both shared it in that experience.

I'm going to answer one of Mark Lando's questions. Mark, by the way, always ask great questions. And his question is, can you write in your employment manual that any acts of broader investment will be prosecuted to the full extent of all? You absolutely can. I think it's more important, Mark, to define what constitutes fraud, because that's the part that isn't always self-evident. And when you mention a couple of good examples around sort of the little goodies that they'll supply companies hand out some acts. But there can be, we all like to think that investment is black and white. Most times it is.

It's other types of fraud that get a little bit more gray. So sure, if you want to, you can say that we have a policy of prosecuting thieves. To me, it's better demonstrate that than say it. But it's more important that we address the gray areas.

And make sure that when something is over the line, then everybody knows where the line was.

You can construct a lot of scenarios that are gray areas. Somebody named KW says, whether the companies that can help in creating a job application, I'm based in CA, which I'm going to assume is California, although in the baby Canada. I'll mention again the two down HR companies that I talked about earlier, Cedar is one, which is spelled CEDR from Tucson or vent Ericsson from Oregon. Two great good companies and you know, one could help you with the application form and the rest of your HR needs as well. Heather Harris, I had her, mentions ADP offers a free background check. I didn't know that. That's good and I'll say ADP is a payroll company. I'm assuming you mean criminal records check.

And then her follow-up question is, is it better than truth-finders? If ADP offers it, I'm very sure it is. I mean truth-finders is, and there are other truth-finders as one we use internally, but there are other online verification sites as well. They all suck. Okay, let's just say they're not good for this. And the other thing is, by the way, in truth-finders, they actually have a, you know, they have an agreement and the agreement says, what you can use them for, what you can't, employment screening you can offer. That's part of your terms. You also can't use them if you're a landlord in your screening tenants. It all comes down to a law that's called the Fairfax reporting act. There are a lot of different pieces

to that law, but you know, the business of pre-employment screening is pretty carefully regulated. So again, my answer is very simple. Go to somebody who doesn't have as a business. There's nothing online that will give you what you need to know to make employment decisions. Okay, real quick, Laura has some excellent verbiage on when you're meeting with an employee to discuss the improvement of behavior. She writes when documenting issues always use the phrase immediate and sustained improvement is required. And number two, further disciplinary action up to and including termination of employment will result. That's nice. Oh, well, so. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, there's no, no, I'm the duty left after you.

that this is. Thank you and have a great day. Thank you.

We will be back soon with another episode. Thanks for listening to the dental practice owners podcast. Brought to you by Prosperidant. You can contact Prosperidant through its website www.prosperidant.com or by calling 888-398-2327. If you have questions about this podcast, if you would like to discuss your practice, or there is a topic you would like to see in a future podcast, we would love to hear from you. Remember, Wendy and David will be back soon with another episode.