Compared · Staffing Agencies

Stop paying placement fees for your own hires.

Dental staffing agencies are effective. They're also priced like executive search, even for routine roles. If a meaningful share of your hires are hygienists, assistants, and office staff your team could source directly, the math stops working fast. Here's the honest comparison.

What it means for you
Staffing agencies
DSO Hire
Cost per hire15–25% of first-year salary, per placement. A $200K associate dentist costs $30,000–$50,000 in fees. Ten hires a year can clear $200K in fees alone.Flat monthly subscription, unlimited hires. The platform costs the same whether you hire two people this year or forty.
Who owns the pipelineThe agency. The candidate relationships, the pipeline, the market knowledge: it all lives in their CRM, and you re-rent it for the next search.You. Every applicant, every scorecard, every silver-medalist lands in YOUR talent pool and compounds with every search you run.
VisibilityYou see the three to five candidates the recruiter chooses to share, on their schedule.You see every applicant, scored by PracticeFit, the moment they apply, and your whole team works the same live pipeline.
Routine rolesHygienists, assistants, and front-desk roles move slowly through agency pipelines; the economics push recruiters toward the big-fee searches.Routine roles are the platform's bread and butter: post across locations, screen with knockout questions, message and book interviews same-day.
Volume economicsHiring more means paying more. There's no version of agency pricing where ten hires don't cost roughly ten fees.Hiring more means each hire costs less. The subscription is the whole bill.

Where an agency is still the right call

A genuinely hard executive search with a tight deadline, a market you don't know, or temp coverage for tomorrow morning: agencies and shift marketplaces earn their fees there, and we'd tell you to use one. DSO Hire exists so those are the ONLY hires you pay a premium for, instead of all of them. (Run your own numbers with the calculator on our pricing page.)

Keep agencies for the searches that need them.

Move the other 90% of your hiring to a flat fee: applicants ranked by fit, your pipeline, your candidate relationships, compounding.