THE NEW WAY FORWARD FOR HUMAN RESOURCES

Artificial intelligence promises faster, more accurate hiring, but it doesn’t work without human oversight—and remains out of reach for some practices. Here’s how AI platforms are powering the shift, and how practices put them to work.

By Jerry Markon

IN YEARS PAST, when Dr. Rini Bavishi had an opening at her dental practice, she would personally read through each of the 200 or so applications, print them, reach out to candidates and await responses.

No more. Faced with a shortage of hygienists and managing an expanding practice with three locations in Texas, Dr. Bavishi turned to artificial intelligence. She began using OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write job postings, find the right keywords and help her screen candidates, while Indeed’s AI tools took over scheduling interviews.

A year later, Dr. Bavishi has reduced what was once a three-month process to hire one person to a week or two. “AI streamlines my schedule and makes things so much easier,” she says.

Dr. Bavishi, 40, is at the forefront of a developing dental hiring trend. More practices are using AI for recruitment and hiring, according to practice owners and online hiring platforms. Precise numbers aren’t available, and industry officials say that while AI in hiring is becoming more common for large practices, it remains less so for smaller ones that may not be able to afford paid AI services.

But industry officials tell Incisal Edge that the technology offers clear benefits, ranging from writing ads and screening candidates even to suggesting questions during interviews. They caution, however, that practices should be careful to retain human oversight.

Platforms Race to Meet Demand

“In the last year, AI has become kind of commonplace to use for hiring, writing job posts and digesting large pools of candi­dates,” says Frank Sandoval, 36, chief technology officer and cofounder of DirectDental, a San Diego–based AI-powered online staffing platform that connects dental professionals to practices. “For screening a large pool of candidates, it’s very effective.”

With adoption of AI-assisted hiring by practices widely expected to pick up, there should be no shortage of companies to serve them. “The number of vendors that offer AI tools seems to have skyrocketed in the past year,” says Dr. Maulik Kotdawala, a dentist with 19 years of clinical experience who now works for Advantage Dental, a medium-sized dental service organization based in Nashville, Tennessee.

The development is related to two broader trends: the growing use of AI in dentistry overall, and the profession’s serious staffing challenges. As Incisal Edge has previously reported, AI adoption in dental offices is growing rapidly for clinical purposes such as radiograph readings and crown restorations, along with automating some back-office tasks.

At the same time, practices have been wrestling with a nation­wide shortage of hygienists and assistants—fueled in part by the pandemic and its lingering effects—that experts say is expected to worsen. So perhaps it was only natural that doctors would employ these advancing AI technologies to help alleviate staffing shortages.

New Tools, New Speed

Indeed helped speed the adoption of AI for hiring in practices last April when it introduced Smart Sourcing, an AI-powered suite of products designed to match candidates to companies and make filling open positions more efficient.

Among the online hiring platforms specific to dentistry that have emerged in recent years is Jobley, which in 2023 began connecting dental professionals with employers. In November, it introduced AI-powered résumé parsing, which automates résumé analysis and generates detailed candidate profiles.

Dental offices can pick candidates or post jobs, with AI’s precision improving speed and accuracy and making for better matches, says Sunny Tsang, head of product for Jobley, which is based near Seattle. In one instance, the company’s AI caught a human error: a candidate who had a required certificate but had left it off their résumé. That enabled the interviewer to ask about the certificate during an interview. “I wouldn’t say AI is perfect, but it’s more accurate than a human,” Tsang says.

Another recent entrant into the growing AI dental staffing market is Toothio, a Tempe, Arizona–based AI-powered online platform that launched in 2022. Since its debut, it has more than tripled revenue each year and added hundreds of thousands of dental professionals—some 30,000 in 2025 alone, says CEO and founder Ian Prendergast. “AI is infinitely scalable,” he says. “You can have a team of 50 recruiters making 100 calls a day, or you can have one AI agent doing the same thing.”

Inside the New Workflows

On the dental office side, one major AI adherent is Tim Otto, cofounder of Alcan Dental Cooperative, which operates practices in Michigan, Texas and Arizona. Partly in response to ongoing hiring challenges, Otto’s company uses ChatGPT’s paid service throughout the hiring process—to write job descriptions, determine average pay in specific geographic areas, suggest initial candidate screening questions and, through a feature called “calendar integration,” help schedule candidate interviews.

AI streamlines my schedule and makes things so much easier.”

“If you’re in a full hiring blitz, it can take two hours per applicant to set and coordinate interviews,” says Otto, 42. “With AI, it takes 15 minutes. AI knows before you do if you are available next Tuesday at 5 p.m.”

Alcan also uses a paid AI tool that listens to job interviews and prompts the interviewer on which question to ask next. “It’s incredibly efficient and accurate,” Otto says. “It keeps the humans on track. Most people are not good interviewers.”

Dr. Kotdawala’s DSO employs still another paid AI tool to recruit candidates earlier in the process, enabling the company to reach out to them before they even apply. “The talent market for hygienists can be challenging, so this makes sourcing them a lot easier,” he says. “I can put in a city, a 10-mile radius, and it will tell me who the active candidates are and where they work right now.”

As a result, “candidate flow has improved pretty substantially,” Dr. Kotdawala says. “AI cuts down on the research time, with better results. We could have a recruiter do it, but this is much easier.”

AI Helps—but Only Humans Can Hire

Even with all these advantages, however, dental professionals advise their colleagues to make sure that they retain the human element of hiring at each step. Don’t surrender everything to the machines. “We’re in the people business, and you can’t have an AI tool pro­actively source candidates, screen them and call them. That would be extreme,” Dr. Kotdawala says. “You definitely need human involvement every step of the way.”

Holli Perez, cofounder and chief marketing officer of DirectDental, adds that practices should account for biases that AI systems might hold—and remember that hiring is, ultimately, a personal experience. “It’s about building relationships, not just what’s on a paper,” Perez says. “Especially in today’s marketplace, you have to sell people, pick up the phone and have a conversation.”