Dental Specialist Recruiting: What Multi-Site Dental Groups Can Learn From Medicine

A dental group with fourteen locations makes a business case to stop sending its oral surgery cases to someone else and bring oral surgery in-house. The equipment is easy to buy, but now the group is running into the hardest part of dental specialist recruiting: someone has to find the surgeon.

In a recent Becker’s interview, a DSO recruiting leader said pediatric dentists, oral surgeons and endodontists remain particularly difficult to recruit. Anyone who has run physician recruitment for a multi-site medical group will recognize the problem right away. It’s the same search in a different building.

Dentists are doctors. Dental specialists are specialists. The playbook medical groups have built for recruiting specialists across multiple sites applies to dental almost line for line, and many dental groups haven’t picked it up yet.

Why the pool is so small

Let’s start with the math. According to ADA data, oral and maxillofacial surgeons grew 16.9 percent from 2001 to 2021, an increase of 1,079 surgeons, while endodontists grew by 1,672. General dentists added 28,471 over the same period. That’s about a thousand new oral surgeons in twenty years, for the entire country. Pediatric dentistry is the exception, having more than doubled, but it still shows up on the hard-to-fill list.

Then look at who else wants them. Specialists are moving into group settings quickly. The share of oral and maxillofacial surgeons affiliated with a DSO rose from 13.4% in 2022 to 15.7% in 2023, and endodontists went from 11.6% to 13.8%. Specialty-focused groups are acquiring oral surgery and orthodontic practices state by state. So a general dental group trying to add a surgeon is competing with organizations built entirely around surgeons.

The candidate also has a third option. One dental executive told Becker’s that it can be easier for a specialist to succeed on their own.

Medicine has been living with this for years

Physician recruiters know this terrain. AAPPR’s latest benchmarking found that the median physician search took 119 days, and endocrinology had the longest median timeline at 312 days. Urology searches were filled only 28.3% of the time by the end of 2025. Meanwhile the median internal recruitment budget dropped 7.4% to $512,500.

Medical groups learned their lessons slowly and at real expense. Dental groups don’t have to.

Plan the role before you post it

Strong medical groups decide where a new cardiologist will practice, how many referrals will feed that schedule and what year one looks like before the search ever opens. Dental groups often do it in the opposite order. They buy the CBCT, build out the surgical suite and then post the job.

The specialist you want will ask about referral volume in the first conversation. “We’re building it” doesn’t hold up against a specialty group that can show its numbers. Know how many cases your general dentists currently send out and which offices they come from. That data is your best recruiting tool.

Be honest about the multi-site schedule

Physicians who cover three clinics know exactly what that means. Time in the car, staff who change from site to site, a different room setup every day of the week. Medical groups that keep traveling specialists usually anchor them to a home site and standardize the rooms they rotate through.

A specialist splitting time across four dental offices will ask the same questions. Have the answers ready, and make sure they’re true.

Start before you’re ready

Hospitals routinely sign residents and fellows a year or more before training ends. Dental specialty residents finish on a predictable calendar too, and the strongest ones tend to commit early. A group that starts looking after the build-out is competing for whoever is left.

Keep the line running while you search

Medical groups figured out long ago that a specialty service can’t go dark for six months while recruiting catches up, so locum tenens coverage is built into the plan. In AAPPR’s data, in-house recruiters used locums in 15% of primary care searches, 10.7% of surgical specialty searches and 21.6% of nonsurgical specialty searches.
Dental has been slower to adopt the model, but it’s well established now. The ADA even publishes its own guidance on locum tenens dentistry. For a multi-site group, coverage keeps patients from drifting to the practice down the street when a dentist leaves. It also lets a new specialty line open on schedule instead of waiting on the permanent hire.

That second benefit matters more than most groups realize. Remember the referral volume question every specialist asks? A few months of locum coverage gives you a real answer. You’ll know how many cases the line actually generates and which offices send them, and that beats any projection you could put in front of a candidate.

Treat the locum as a possible hire

Some of the best permanent placements in medicine start as locum assignments. The physician sees the staff and the real schedule before committing. The group sees their clinical judgment and how they handle a Tuesday that goes sideways. Everyone decides with better information.

Groups that convert well raise the permanent conversation early in the assignment. They read the conversion terms before signing the coverage contract, because those terms vary and can complicate a hire later. And they build an offer that holds up against what the clinician earns as a locum, which is where a lot of conversions fall apart.

Dental groups can borrow every bit of that. Locum specialists are harder to find than general dentists, but when one turns out to be a good fit, ask.

Sell autonomy, because that’s the real competition

For many specialists, the alternative to your offer is their own practice. Becker’s has reported that younger clinicians increasingly prioritize mentorship, autonomy, work-life balance and organizational culture alongside compensation. Medical groups found out the hard way that a signing bonus won’t overcome a physician’s fear of losing control over clinical decisions.

Spell it out. Who sets the schedule? Who picks the equipment? What happens when the specialist disagrees with a treatment plan from a general dentist in the group Vague answers lose candidates.

Know which searches to hand off

Most medical groups fill family medicine roles with their own recruiters. The searches they bring to a retained partner are the rare ones: the subspecialist in a small market or the surgeon expected to cover several hospitals.
The dental version is the oral surgeon or endodontist who will anchor a new specialty line across several offices. Those candidates are rarely on job boards. Someone has to identify them, reach them while they’re happily employed elsewhere and keep the conversation going for months. That’s a different kind of work than posting a hygienist opening.

A note for medical groups

The lesson runs both ways. Dental groups are going through specialty consolidation quickly and in public, which makes some patterns easy to spot. Buildings get finished faster than people get hired. A new specialty line rises or falls on its first recruit.
If your system is opening a satellite cardiology clinic or spreading a GI group across new sites, ask yourself the same question dental groups are facing. Did you define the role before you started looking for the person?

Optigy has spent years helping multi-site organizations recruit physicians, with locum tenens coverage, permanent placement and retained search working together. Dental specialists deserve the same approach.