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Bad Dental Hygiene Job Application E-mails

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Lots of job seekers ask about things to include or avoid in sending dental hygiene job application e-mails.

For example, using your e-mail as your cover letter? Can it be done? Absolutely! Should it be done? Probably not.

I would stick with a formal cover letter from the standpoint that sometimes it will go to a front office person first and they will print it for the doctor doing the hiring. A printed e-mail just doesn’t look as good as a formal cover letter.

However, you still have this space in your e-mail to do some cool things that will help you stand out. So here are some simple guidelines on how to create an effective e-mail for a dental hygiene job application.

Evaluate Your Address

I wrote last week about the importance of a strong e-mail address. Make sure you have an address that represents you well.

Keep Your E-mail Short

This needs to be shorter than your cover letter – something in the neighborhood of 1-2 paragraphs consisting of 1-2 sentences. Here are a couple examples:

Example A

All Smiles Dental,

I wish to formally apply for your open dental hygiene position I saw posted on DentalJobs.net. Please confirm you have received my attached cover letter and resume. I look forward to sharing with you how I can be a great addition to your office.

Example B

All Smiles Dental,

Please confirm you have received my attached cover letter, resume, and testimonial sheet as application for the dental hygiene opening you have posted on DentalJobs.net.

I look forward to sharing with you all the great experiences I have had helping patients re-discover their beautiful smiles.

Add Power to Your Signature Line

Surprisingly, most people don’t really use signature lines. They put their name at the bottom and call it good. I recommend four things on a signature line:

  1. Your name with RDH behind it (e.g. Emily Walker, RDH)
  2. Your phone number (preferably cell number)
  3. A link to one online profile (LinkedIn profile, your website, about.me profile)
  4. A very short (3-10 words) by someone that inspires you, or that says something about you.

People love to click on links, especially if it will give them more information about you. Your own personal website, in particular, is extremely compelling and is almost guaranteed to get clicked (let us know if we can help you create one of those).

And everyone loves a good quick dose of inspiration but it really needs to be short or they won’t bother reading it (extra points for you if you can find one that exemplifies your personality).

Attachments

Attach your resume, cover letter, testimonial sheet, and CAR sheet (latter two are optional but very effective) in PDF format only. Don’t mess with sending Word or other types of documents that may not open for someone or if they do open will look different than you intend. PDF files are easy to create, will preserve your fonts and design, and are universally acceptable.

Age-Proofing Your Dental Hygiene Resume

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Doug Perry
Doug Perry, RDH Resume Coach

Lots of people are worried about age discrimination and so I get lots of questions about age-proofing your dental hygiene resume.

The interesting thing is it comes from two completely different age brackets – younger hygienists just out of school and older hygienists who have been out a couple decades.

Both feel they will not get a job simply because of their age/experience.

While you can’t hide your age or appearance forever, there are few things you can do to make it less obvious at the resume stage.

Here are four simple tweaks you can make to age-proof your dental hygiene resume:

Age-Proofing Your Dental Hygiene ResumeEvaluate Your E-mail Address

I’ll be the first to admit, I have an e-mail address I use that could be a giveaway of my age (dougperry88@gmail.com). No, I am not 88 years old (ha!)! But I couldn’t get dougperry@gmail.com the time so I added the year I graduated from high school.

Lots of people do this but if I am worried about age discrimination I would choose something else. Why even put something out there that may even cause speculation?

Last week I gave several tips on choosing the right e-mail address for job hunting purposes. Click here to read those tips.

Only Most Recent Jobs

There’s no rule or etiquette in resume writing that says you have to have to include your entire work history. In fact, it would be less-favorable to include jobs that are irrelevant to dental hygiene. So leave off the last some of your earliest jobs – no harm in doing this at all.

It would be bad and huge red flag if you simply left the years you worked at each job listed. That’s one of the most important things employers look at on resumes. They want to know how many years of experience you have and since it’s one of the most basic features of resumes not including it may mean automatic rejection.

Leave High School in the Past

There are some who will include their high school and graduation year as part of their education section. Totally unnecessary and a waste of space, no offense to those awesome years of your youth! Once a person enters college, I say ditch the references to high school on your resume. Especially for a dental hygiene professional, it really does nothing for you except tell an employer how old you are.

The College Years

Unlike the years you list in your work experience, I believe (and I share this opinion with lots of resume writers) it’s okay to not list the years you went to college. The more important piece of information is that you graduated (and are licensed).

Photos

Pictures can do a lot to hide your age if they are professionally done. If you choose to include a picture on your resume, my best advice is to hire it out. Dress in interview-ready attire and if you are older select a pose that conveys energy and vitality, with a subtle hint of wisdom. If you are younger, select a pose the shows confidence and maturity. A good photographer can help you with this.

Dental Hygiene Resumes – One Page or Two?

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One of the most common questions dental hygienists have about their resume is whether it should be one page or two.

For most professions, not just dental hygiene, the advice is the same: keep it to one page, with one exception. I’ll share that below.image

Why only one page? Three reasons:

  1. More likely to get read – It’s really simple. One-page resumes are much more likely to get read because they are not as long. In a saturated job environment, offices will get dozens of great applicants and so there simply isn’t time to get through two pages of that many resumes.
  2. Not necessary – I’ve written hundreds of dental hygiene resumes and very very few of them needed that second page. No one ever got an interview because of what was on page two of their resume.
  3. The type of resume – The most effective style of resume for dental hygienists is in a functional format, which is easier to keep shorter.

So, how do you keep it to just one page:

  1. Use a Functional style of resume – That’s where you post your accomplishments, skills, and expertise in a section near the top just under the About Me section. That way you can avoid some redundancies of posting some of the same things under each job. Then for your work experience you only need to list each job and how long you worked there.
  2. Only need to include the basics – You really only need to include four sections: About Me; Skills & Accomplishments; Work Experience; and Education.
  3. Bullets and not paragraphs – The only place you should have a paragraph is in that opening About Me section. The rest of the resume is basically in list format (bullets and such).

So when are two pages justified?

Most dental hygienists spend their career working in a clinical setting, but some will get very involved on the component leadership level or to the point of contributing thought papers, articles, or research to the profession. For those, a second page can be justified to include all the “additional” contributions they make on top of their clinical experience.

Others might include experiences on the education or corporate side of dental hygiene, serving as instructors or sales reps. These types of experiences require some additional explanation and thus the second page may also be necessary. However, even hygienists in these situations should consider creating a second resume that focuses on this different part of their career.

Most Compelling Dental Hygiene Resume Content

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I’ve said before the most important piece of content on your dental hygiene resume is your name, and then contact information a close second. But neither of them mean anything if you don’t include your most compelling content further down.

What is compelling to a dentist about dental hygiene – one might ask?

Great question. Generally it’s going to vary from employer to employer but I can give it to you in one word: Different.

What’s different?  Well, every employer is going to assume that because you are licensed you know how to do hand scaling, sealants, x-rays, blah, blah, blah – right? But that’s not different!

Different is found in what I call your EARS – no, not the things on your head that help support your loupes. EARS in this case are: Experiences, Accomplishments, Results and Solutions.

You should stay alert to these throughout your career because some times they just show up unexpected on a routine day. Record and save them because they so important to helping you land a job.

Let’s review them and give some examples.

Experiences

Every day at work (even dental hygiene school clinics) you are having experiences. Often we just discount them as simple little interactions that come and go, but don’t mean much. And, yes, some are pretty routine so you don’t need to track all of them. But target the situations you face with patients that are unique. Maybe it’s an overly-anxious patient, or an angry patient, or a mother who insists on holding her baby during an exam. What was your approach? How did you handle the situation?

This information will help you define your personal brand and give you some great content to share on your resume about the type of hygienist you are. For example, you could include a line about how you are “Uniquely skilled at educating patients about perio treatment planning.” Then in your interview with an employer you can share with them one or two specific instances have recalled or recorded that speak to the skill.

Accomplishments

This can sometimes be easier for dental hygiene students. In the resumes I write, I see all the time specific accomplishments about this or that award the person received in school. That’s awesome and you need to toot your horn about it on your resume. But what about other accomplishments? Maybe you are really accomplished at taking accurate x-rays or perhaps you are accomplished at a gaining patient compliance.

Again, word your resume with the generalities of it, then share the specifics in your interview.

Results and Solutions

Results and Solutions can be a little bit different in that you can sometimes get more specific on your resume. For example, some hygienists and practices value your ability to gain patient compliance to the point of an actual production goal. The specifics of that and other goals or results you achieve can be very valuable on your resume. But it can also be more anecdotal in nature – focusing more on story than numbers. For example, “Detected cancerous growth during screening that resulted in patient seeking further tests and treatment for cancer.”

In summary, yes, it’s okay to include the ho-hum stuff you do as a dental hygienist, but hopefully you can spice it up with some great EARS content that will say way more about you and thus make you stand out and appear different than other candidates.

 

Three Common Dental Hygiene Resume Errors

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Nobody’s perfect, right? But your dental hygiene resume should be and and there are three common errors you should watch for when writing or editing your resume. Remember, employers look for any little difference in a tight job market and if you say in your cover letter you are “detail-oriented” and they see you made some basic errors on your resume, you could be toast!

So here’s the top three most common resume errors we see at GetHiredRDH, plus a really good tip for editing resumes.

1. Misspelled words

Spell check is a great invention, so pay attention to words and phrases that get flagged. But that’s not all – sometimes spell check won’t catch words that are misspelled for what you intend them for. These are called homonyms and homophones (example: sea and see; or meat and meet; or too and to).

2. Inconsistencies

Your resume should be consistent to look professional. Are your bullets all matching? Do you use the same typeface (font) and size throughout? How about at the end of bullet statements – do you use a bullet on some and others not? What about spacing between lines? How it all looks will say volumes about you – make sure what you say is completely consistent throughout your dental hygiene resume and other materials.

3. Properly Placed Tenses

We tend to keep our resumes for many years and as such when we come back to it after a period of time, sometimes tenses can be an issue if you are using a chronological resume. Chronological are the kind where you list your accomplishments and tasks below each job instead of in one section at the the top. Sometimes hygienists will get a new job, but their previous job makes it sound as though they still work there.

For example, you might still have a line that says something like “Oversee hygiene department of four dental hygienists” for a job you no longer work at. Change it to past tense, “Oversaw” to make it correct.

[Note: At GetHiredRDH we strongly recommend a Functional style of resume instead of Chronological as it saves space and is better suited for dental hygiene.]

Quick Editing Tip

A great editing tip for resumes (and writing in general) is the read your resume backward. Our brains tend to trick us into thinking words look okay (which is often why we make mistakes). When you read a resume backward you aren’t focused on the wording and flow and can more easily spot errors.

Creating a Transitional Resume for a Dental Hygienist

Several dental hygienists wanting to leave clinical practice have been asking me about a transitional resume and how it differs from a regular resume. Much of the categories of content remain the same, such as work history, education history, and summary section to name only a few. The difference is in the language you use […]

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