Guides for hiring your next practice manager.

Start with a job description that tells the truth about the role. In most dental practices the office manager owns the schedule, insurance claims, patient balances and the front-desk team. If your job post reads like a receptionist ad, you'll get receptionist applicants. Our Essentials Kit includes a dental-specific job description you can edit in minutes.

Screen for three things: scheduling discipline, dental billing knowledge and people leadership. Ask every candidate the same structured questions and score the answers the same way — gut feel is how practices end up rehiring in six months.

Before the offer, check references with questions that get past “she was great”: How did they handle an aging report? What happened to recall rates on their watch? Would you rehire them?

Finally, set the hire up to succeed. A 30/60/90-day plan with a handful of clear KPIs — schedule fill, claims turnaround, collections — turns a good hire into a great first quarter.

Most practice manager interviews fail the same way: the owner chats, likes the candidate, and hires a personality instead of an operator. Structured interviews fix that. Ask every candidate the same questions, in the same order, and score each answer on a simple 1–5 scale.

Cover four areas. Operations: “Walk me through how you'd handle a morning where two staff call in sick and the schedule is full.” Billing and insurance: “Tell me about a time you found and fixed a collections problem.” Conflict: “Describe a disagreement between front and clinical staff you had to resolve.” Leadership: “How do you hold a well-liked but underperforming employee accountable?”

The scoring guide matters as much as the questions. Decide in advance what a 5 looks like for each answer — specific, numbers-aware, owns the outcome — and what a 1 looks like. That way the panel compares candidates against the standard, not against each other's moods.

Our Complete Kit includes all 12 questions with the full scoring guide, plus a skills test covering scheduling, billing and insurance basics, and a conflict scenario.

There is no single right number. Practice manager pay varies widely by market — a small-town dental office and an urban multi-specialty group are different worlds — and by scope: a front-office lead supervising two people is a different job from a manager running billing, HR and compliance for fifteen.

Instead of chasing an average, triangulate. Look at current postings for office managers in your specialty within your metro area. Ask your peers and your study club what they're paying. And be honest about scope: if the role includes billing and collections, price it like it does.

Remember what the right manager is worth. A strong practice manager typically pays for themselves through better collections, a fuller schedule and lower turnover. Underpaying by a few thousand to save money often costs far more in a weak hire.

Put the range in the job post. It filters out mismatched candidates early and signals that you run a professional operation — which is exactly what good managers are looking for.