Temp to hire lets a dental office bring someone on through temporary shifts before deciding whether to hire them permanently. Instead of judging a candidate off a resume and one interview, the practice sees how they actually work: their pace, chairside manner, how patients respond, and how the team adjusts around them. This guide covers why practices use it, how to run it well, and how to use GoTu’s temporary dental staffing services to find your next hire.
What is Temp to Hire?
Most hiring runs on a resume and one interview, then you find out three weeks in whether they can actually keep pace on a full schedule. Temp to hire flips that order. The dental office books a hygienist, assistant, or front desk hire through regular temp shifts, watches how they handle real patients and a real team, and then decides whether to make a job offer to them.
If it’s not working, the shift ends and you keep looking, no severance conversation, no bad hire sitting on your books for six months while you figure out how to move on. If it’s working, you hire them and skip the part where you find out too late that someone who interviewed great can’t handle a Friday afternoon schedule.
Why Practices Actually Use It
Interviews can lie. Not on purpose, but a candidate can say all the right things and still fall apart under real volume, or rub your hygiene team the wrong way in a way nobody could’ve predicted from an hour interview. That gamble is especially real right now. Most dentists actively recruiting a hygienist call it very or extremely challenging, which means you rarely get the luxury of a deep candidate pool to choose from in the first place.
It also saves you from the expensive version of a bad hire: the one where you’ve already onboarded them, trained them on your systems, introduced them to patients, and now you’re starting over anyway, except three months behind where you’d be if you’d just tested fit first.
For DSOs running multiple locations, this matters even more. One bad hire at one office doesn’t stay contained to that office. It shows up in coverage gaps and scheduling headaches across the group. Temp to hire catches that before it becomes a group problem.
How to Run a Temp to Hire Shift
Don’t book one slow Tuesday and call it an evaluation. Book enough shifts to see a real patient day, ideally a few of them. That’s when you find out if someone can keep pace, not during the lull before lunch.
Talk to your team while it’s happening. Ask your office manager or hygiene lead how the shifts are going. If something’s off, pace, communication, technique, say so during the trial, not after you’ve already converted them and it’s suddenly a performance conversation instead of a heads-up.
And decide on a timeline before the first shift starts, typically two to four shifts is usually enough to know. Drag it out longer than that and you risk losing someone good to a practice that moves faster. Convert too fast and you’ve skipped the entire point of doing this.
Using GoTu for Temp to Hire
None of this requires a separate process. The shifts you’d book on GoTu to cover a gap are the same shifts that let you evaluate someone for the long term. You see their history and ratings before you ever book them, which already tells you more than a resume would. Once they’re in for a few shifts, you and your team get a real read on them, and if it’s a fit, converting them to a direct hire doesn’t cost you anything beyond the shifts you already paid for. GoTu now has waived conversion fees, so a shift you were booking anyway can double as your interview process for free.
Temp to hire is just a smarter way to use the shifts you were already going to book to find your next great hire.
