Growing a successful dental practice requires more than attracting new patients and increasing production. At some point, your ability to scale depends heavily on your ability to find, hire, develop, and retain the right people.
In this episode of The Dental Wealth Podcast, host Matthew sits down with Jeff Rzinski to discuss the challenges of dental practice recruitment and why a structured hiring process becomes increasingly important as a practice grows.
Jeff shares his perspective on finding qualified candidates, evaluating resumes, recognizing potential hiring red flags, and choosing candidates who are likely to become long-term members of the organization. He also explains why outsourcing recruitment can make sense for dentists who don't have the time or expertise to manage a comprehensive search themselves.
For practice owners pursuing dental practice growth, recruitment isn't simply an HR function. Building the right team is part of creating the leadership capacity and organizational structure required to scale successfully.
Why Dental Practice Recruitment Becomes Harder as You Grow
Hiring can consume a surprising amount of a practice owner's time. Posting a position is only the beginning. Someone must review applications, evaluate resumes, conduct interviews, follow up with candidates, assess qualifications, and determine who actually fits the organization.
For dentists already balancing patient care with the responsibilities of running a business, recruitment can quickly become another competing priority. The result is often a reactive approach to hiring.
A position opens, the practice needs someone quickly, and speed becomes the primary goal. But filling a position quickly doesn't necessarily mean filling it correctly. Jeff emphasizes the importance of finding the right long-term fit, even when that means being more deliberate about the hiring process.
Tower Leadership has previously explored this distinction between proactive and reactive hiring in its guide to building a proactive dental recruitment process. Creating a candidate pool before the need becomes urgent gives practice owners more time to evaluate both the quantitative and qualitative factors behind a hiring decision.
Why the Right Dental Team Member Is More Important Than a Fast Hire
An open position can create immediate pressure on a dental practice. Existing employees may take on additional responsibilities. Scheduling may become more difficult. Productivity can suffer.
That pressure can make the first qualified candidate look like the right candidate. But hiring based primarily on urgency can create much larger problems later. A poor fit may lead to performance issues, culture problems, additional training expenses, or another recruiting process several months later. Jeff's approach prioritizes compatibility and long-term potential over simply filling the position as quickly as possible.
That doesn't mean recruitment needs to take months. With the right strategy and appropriate recruiting platforms, many dental positions can still be filled within approximately a month. The goal is to combine efficiency with selectivity.
Building a Structured Dental Hiring Process
Successful dental recruitment should follow a repeatable process rather than relying on intuition alone. A structured hiring process helps practice owners compare candidates consistently and reduces the temptation to make decisions based solely on personality or first impressions.
A strong process may include:
- Clearly defining the responsibilities of the position
- Identifying required skills and experience
- Establishing cultural expectations
- Selecting appropriate recruiting platforms
- Screening applications consistently
- Reviewing employment history
- Conducting structured interviews
- Checking references when appropriate
- Evaluating long-term potential
- Creating a consistent onboarding process
The same principle applies when scaling a dental practice. As an organization adds providers, employees, leadership layers, and locations, hiring and onboarding standards need to become repeatable systems rather than processes that change with every new employee.
How to Identify Red Flags on a Dental Resume
A resume provides more information than a list of previous employers. Jeff recommends looking for patterns. One potential warning sign is a history of repeatedly moving between positions after short periods of employment. One short-term position doesn't necessarily indicate a problem. There may be a reasonable explanation. A consistent pattern deserves additional questions.
If someone has worked at several practices for only a few months at a time, the interviewer should understand why. The goal isn't to automatically reject the candidate. It's to identify areas that deserve further discussion during the interview.
Green Flags to Look for When Hiring Dental Employees
Just as employment history can reveal potential concerns, it can also demonstrate stability and professional development. Longer tenure with previous employers can indicate that a candidate values consistency and is capable of maintaining professional relationships.
Career progression is another positive signal. A resume showing increasing responsibilities over time may demonstrate ambition, reliability, and a willingness to learn. Practice owners should look beyond individual job titles and consider the overall story a candidate's career tells.
Useful questions include:
- Has the candidate demonstrated stability?
- Have their responsibilities increased?
- Is there evidence of professional growth?
- Do their career decisions make sense?
- Does their experience align with the position?
- Are they looking for a long-term opportunity?
These questions help move hiring decisions beyond simply determining whether someone meets the minimum qualifications.
Why Dental Practices May Benefit From Professional Recruitment
Dentists are trained to diagnose and treat patients, not necessarily to become professional recruiters.
As practices grow, owners must recognize which responsibilities require their direct involvement and which can be delegated to people with specialized expertise. Recruitment is a good example.
A professional recruiter can manage many of the time-consuming components of the process, including sourcing candidates, screening applicants, evaluating experience, and coordinating interviews. That allows the practice owner and leadership team to focus their attention on the strongest candidates. This transition from personally managing every function to building specialized support is also an important component of dental practice consulting. A scalable organization requires the right people and systems so the owner doesn't become the bottleneck for every business decision.
A Different Approach to Dental Recruitment Fees
Jeff also discusses the economics behind traditional recruitment. Many recruiters charge placement fees calculated as a percentage of the employee's salary. For higher-paying dental positions, those fees can become substantial.
His model takes a different approach. Rather than basing the price primarily on the candidate's compensation, Jeff describes a transparent, work-based fee structure designed around the recruiting effort required to fill the position.
The philosophy behind the model is straightforward. Recruitment pricing should reflect the work being performed rather than simply increasing because a candidate earns a higher salary. For practice owners, understanding the recruiter's fee structure upfront makes it easier to evaluate the cost and expected value of professional recruitment support.
Why Dental Office Culture Matters When Hiring
Recruitment isn't simply about finding someone capable of performing a job. Every new employee becomes part of the practice culture.
That means hiring decisions can either strengthen or weaken the organization. Practice owners should clearly understand their expectations, values, communication style, and performance standards before interviewing candidates.
Candidates should also understand what the organization expects from them. This mutual clarity helps both sides determine whether the relationship makes sense. Building a strong dental office culture becomes increasingly important as the organization grows because culture influences how standards are maintained, how teams communicate, and how consistently the practice performs.
Hiring for a Multi-Location Dental Practice
Recruitment becomes even more significant when expanding from one dental practice to several locations. A single-location owner may be able to compensate for staffing weaknesses through personal involvement. That becomes increasingly difficult across multiple offices.
Growing dental groups need repeatable standards for:
- Recruiting
- Interviewing
- Hiring
- Training
- Onboarding
- Performance management
- Leadership development
- Culture
Without those standards, each location can gradually develop its own hiring philosophy and workplace expectations. That inconsistency can make scaling significantly harder.
Recruitment Should Support Your Dental Practice Growth Strategy
Hiring shouldn't happen independently from the practice's larger business strategy. Before adding a position, leadership should understand why the role is needed and what business outcome it should support. That may include increasing clinical capacity, improving patient experience, strengthening management, reducing owner dependency, or preparing for another location.
As practices become larger, workforce planning becomes part of strategic planning. The question shifts from "Who do we need right now?"to:"What team do we need to build the organization we're trying to create?"
This also requires developing leaders who can take ownership of people, decisions, and performance. Tower Leadership's guide to dental practice leadership explores how growing practices can build leadership capacity beyond the founder rather than continuing to escalate every decision back to the owner.
Stop Hiring Reactively and Start Building Your Team Strategically
One of the biggest lessons from Jeff Rzinski's conversation is that dental recruitment shouldn't begin only when the practice is desperate to fill a position.
Reactive hiring creates pressure. Pressure encourages shortcuts. A structured recruitment strategy gives practice owners greater control over who enters the organization and allows them to evaluate candidates against long-term business goals.
The objective isn't simply to fill empty seats. It's to intentionally build a team capable of supporting the next stage of the practice.
Key Takeaways From Jeff Rzinski
Successful dental practice recruitment requires a combination of patience, structure, and clear expectations.
Jeff Rzinski emphasizes that finding the right long-term fit is more valuable than simply making the fastest hire. By creating a structured hiring process, carefully evaluating employment history, identifying signs of professional progression, and using specialized recruitment support when appropriate, dental practices can make better hiring decisions. But recruitment is only one piece of the larger growth strategy. As dental practices scale, the strength of the team, leadership structure, systems, and culture increasingly determines how much growth the organization can successfully support.
Practice owners preparing for that next stage can explore Tower Leadership's Dental Practice Growth Consulting to learn how stronger leadership, team capability, financial strategy, and business infrastructure can create a more scalable dental enterprise.
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