Dental hygiene job searching is a little like dating, right? You have to put yourself out there so employers know you are available. But before you do that – you need to do some things behind the scenes.
Finding a good match begins with honing in on your pool of potentials. Doing so will save you time and money, and will help you find a job faster.
One of the keys to success (and probably most over-looked) my wife Tracie had with finding a dental hygiene job so quickly was that we narrowed the focus.
In her case, she didn’t want to work more than 10 miles from our house – and the closer to home the better, for many reasons. There were also one or two offices she knew would not be worth marketing to for various reasons.
So here are the four things we did – and at the end I want to give you a FREE copy of the spreadsheet we used.
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Step 1: Define Your Pool
The first and most obvious thing to do is figure out geographically how far you are willing to travel for a great dental hygiene job. Put a number on it – is it 5 miles? 10? 20?
Now, think about anything that might possibly eliminate an office. Maybe it’s the type of office or things you know about that office that make you shutter. Make a list of those offices – a no-way-in-heck list!
Step 2: Gather the Data
This can be the painful part because it took me and Tracie hours and hours to type all this in. And we had even narrowed the list down to about 110 offices! Some clients I have worked with had a pool of nearly 500 offices!
But here’s a tip: If you don’t have the time and are willing to shell out say $20-40, you can actually hire someone online to do this for you. I usually recommend Elance.com or Fiverr.com, but I noticed a new site called PeopleBytheHour.com that just opened recently. The point is, it’s not hard to find someone willing to do all the research for you. Just tell them what you want, and you can get it back within just a couple days.
Of course you can do as we did and Google your way to this information. It’s out there, and lots of online directories like yellowpages.com or yelp.com. In fact, it doesn’t hurt to look at multiple directories as one might be more current than another.
Gather as much as you can. We gathered (and you will see in the download) not just addresses, but also e-mail addresses, website addresses and social media (specifically Facebook) addresses. Those latter three are useful when it comes time to market yourself.
Step 3: Launch Your Marketing Effort
Next week, I am going to talk more in-depth about how to create an organized plan or campaign. So you’ll have to hold on a bit longer for more detail on this, but it will include both reactive and proactive strategies you can do once you know who are targeting… so stay tuned!
Step 4: Observe and Keep it Alive
This is the most important and useful part of creating this spreadsheet. You need to keep adding to it as you gather more information. I included a section for notes so we could add observations.
Just a few observations we would add are details about whether the office seemed to employ a hygienist or not; or if the office always seemed to be hiring people (could be a bit of a red flag).
We also used it to keep track of offices she would temp at and whether the experience was good or bad. This can also prove useful in tracking your earnings at various offices for tax purposes.
There’s lots of small pieces of information that can come in very handy and be to your advantage to keep a record or note of and doing so in a spreadsheet will save you lots of time and money in the end as you are seeking a new dental hygiene job.
Free Download
This spreadsheet is what we used and we hope it helps get you started in tracking your potential pool of employers. Next week, we’ll show you how you can put this information to work for you.
Dental Hygiene Job Seeker Database (Excel File Version)
Dental Hygiene Job Seeker Database (CSV File Version)
