The Minds Behind DDS Collective: How Dentistry, Recruiting, and Technology Came Together to Rethink Dental Hiring

Dentistry has always been built around people.

A patient trusts a dentist. A dentist trusts their team. A practice succeeds because multiple individuals come together with a shared vision of delivering quality care.

Yet, behind every successful dental practice is a challenge that often receives less attention: finding and retaining the right people.

For years, dentistry has relied on relationships, referrals, and traditional recruiting methods to connect practices with talent. Yet one challenge remains: finding the right talent for the right practice.

The traditional approach is that a practice has an opening, a candidate applies, credentials are reviewed, interviews happen, and a decision is made. Many practices eventually discover that finding someone with the right qualifications does not always mean finding the right fit. Clinical skills, personality, commute duration, and other factors play a crucial role in hiring.

But the reality is more complicated.

A great dentist does not automatically become the right fit for every practice.

A successful placement is not just about clinical skills, experience, or availability.

According to the people behind DDS-Clinsights’ latest feature, DDS Collective, whose platforms address different challenges across the dental ecosystem. DDS Recruit tackles talent acquisition needs, while DDS Matchmaker focuses on creating meaningful connections across the dental industry.

The challenge is creating better connections between dentists and practices, because a successful associate relationship depends on far more than clinical skill. It depends on full alignment, taking into consideration a multitude of variables.

A dentist can have excellent credentials, strong clinical abilities, and impressive experience and still not be the right match for a specific practice.

Because all practices are not identical. The culture and vision of a practice are measured subjectively.

A high-volume practice with a fast-paced environment operates differently from a relationship-focused private practice built around long-term patient relationships. An endodontist who also offers restorative procedures and implants in FL is a foreign concept to a retiring endodontist moving from Atlanta, hoping to keep his fingertips wet.

The ideal associate for one environment may struggle in another.

This is where traditional recruiting often falls short.

The process usually focuses on visible factors:

A good dentist does not automatically mean a good fit. The right match requires understanding both sides of the relationship, the dentist and the practice.

DDS Collective was built at the intersection of three different perspectives: dentistry, recruiting, and technology. Each person involved saw the same problem from a different angle, and together those angles shaped a new approach to dental hiring.

Darius Somekhian's relationship with dentistry didn't start in a dental chair. It started at 18, selling latex gloves out of a garage, going door to door across Los Angeles with nothing but a pager number on a business card. That business grew into a $15 million dental supply company before it was acquired by Benco Dental, and what came after mattered more than the sale itself.

Darius spent years on the operational side of the industry, working directly with practices and specialists nationally. From that vantage point, he kept seeing the same pattern: specialists who couldn't find the right opportunities, and practices that couldn't integrate specialty care efficiently, even when they badly needed to, let alone sustain production and patient traffic ample enough to satisfy the specialists. That observation led him to co-found Pair Dental, originally known as Synergy Specialists, the “in-house” agency designed for a traveling specialist model that eventually took DDS on a journey to become a founding team member of Cloud Dentistry, a staffing platform for hygienists and DAs that dominates the space.

Today, that journey has evolved into DDS Collective, an ecosystem designed to connect the people, practices, and ideas shaping modern dentistry.

Within that ecosystem, DDS Recruit focuses on practice recruitment, while DDS Matchmaker creates opportunities for broader professional connections.

What Darius brings is nearly three decades of relationships and a network across specialists, practice owners, and founders in the early-stage technologies of oral health, ranging from Biotech, Therapeutics, AI/Software, and advanced diagnostics.

Brian Passell spent a decade consulting with private dental practices on growth strategy, systems, and team building before shifting fully into recruiting.

The shift came from a repeated pattern: practices would receive resumes from staffing agencies, but no one was evaluating fit beyond paper credentials.

What Brian does differently as a PhD in organizational psychology is treat a placement the way an executive search firm treats one, except applied to dentistry, which almost nobody else is doing.

Brian's answer comes down to two things. A team built right stays loyal long after the fact, something he saw firsthand watching former employees of his father's Perio practice years later.

And the business side of dentistry still struggles with staffing or association sourcing due to the constraint of supply and high demand from offices, which means the impact of getting hiring right is larger and more challenging to see than in almost any other industry he's consulted in.

He tells a story that gets at exactly why this matters. Brian recently spoke with a dentist living in New York.

A large DSO had dangled a production-based contract with tiered percentages that climbed the more she produced; on its face, a strong offer. But when Brian pressed her on the details that actually determine whether those tiers are reachable — the office's real new-patient flow, the procedures she'd actually be handling day to day, and whether new associates typically got stuck doing simple extractions that would never push her into the higher brackets — she had no answers.

Nobody had ever taught her to ask.

That's the layer Brian is building into DDS Collective: helping candidates understand what they're actually walking into, and helping practices be honest about what they're offering, before a contract gets signed instead of after someone's three months in and unhappy.

While dentistry and recruiting revealed the problem from the inside, technology made it possible to solve it at scale.

By then, Darius had spent nearly two decades building one of dentistry's most extensive professional networks. Thousands of relationships with dentists, specialists, practice owners, and DSOs had become the foundation of DDS Collective.

Something that could capture years of conversations, understand the nuances behind every introduction, and help match people with the same level of judgment that the founders had built manually over time.

The team spent years working with different engineers to build that platform. None of them quite understood the problem they were trying to solve.

That changed when Shivam Bhatia entered the picture about a year ago.

Shivam Bhatia has been building tech companies since 2020, starting with an AI-driven platform that placed high schoolers into startup internships during the pandemic, then a fintech app for Gen Z that he later sold to a larger unicorn.

After moving to San Francisco, his approach was simple: he walked into small businesses on Market Street and asked owners what process they'd automate if they could.

Across multiple dental offices, the answer kept coming back to the phones, the constant calling for scheduling, insurance, and patient intake. That insight led to his first dental product, a voice AI company called Lunabil that handled patient intake calls, integrated with Open Dental to pull patient records, and asked the standard pre-visit questions before someone even walked in the door.

The product worked, but it scaled toward a few large hospital clients instead of the small clinics Shivam had originally set out to help, and that pulled him toward a sharper question. The real problem in dental offices wasn't the phones. It was retention.

When a hygienist or a dentist leaves, the clinic doesn't just lose a person; it loses a day of revenue and continuity until the seat is filled again.

And the deeper issue underneath the turnover usually wasn't unhappiness with the work itself. It was that the person had been placed in the wrong clinic from the start.

Shivam had options across healthcare broadly, and what kept pulling him back to dentistry specifically comes down to two things: dental professionals were unusually open to trying new tools, and he saw too many good independent practitioners losing patients to corporate chains and eventually ending up working for the very chains that displaced them.

That second point is what convinced him that the right team behind a practice owner removes much of the pressure that pushes independents toward selling out.

Shivam built the technology backbone that acted as the connectivity tool.

Dentistry has always been a relationship-driven profession. The best opportunities rarely come from cold outreach or job boards; they come through introductions, referrals, and the trust built over years of working together.

Behind every placement is a network cultivated over decades, one built through conversations, partnerships, and long-standing relationships across private practices, specialists, and DSOs.

It's institutional knowledge that can't be recreated overnight.

Technology doesn't replace that network; it gives it greater reach.

AI helps organize relationships, identify meaningful connections, and surface opportunities that might otherwise remain hidden. But the foundation remains the same: people trust people.

Human LinkedIn of Dentistry’s rolodex, powering Darius's industry insight and the longest-standing dental recruiter in existence, alongside Brian's matching philosophy, into a scalable hiring ecosystem.

Ask any of the three about AI's role in dentistry, and the answer comes back the same way: useful, but only where it doesn't get between a practice and the trust patients place in it.

Adoption has moved fastest in diagnostic and administrative tools, the kind that work quietly in the background, things like AI-assisted imaging that reinforces a diagnosis, or a morning huddle briefing that saves a team ten minutes of chart review before the day starts.

Adoption slows considerably anywhere AI tries to step into the actual patient relationship, like phone-answering systems replacing a familiar voice a longtime patient expects to hear.

Practice owners think about AI as a way to free up staff time rather than to cut staff, then redeploy that time toward the things that still require a person: patient relationships, marketing that actually reflects the practice's culture, and the work that builds trust rather than just processes a claim.

That same logic carries over into how DDS Collective thinks about matching itself. A dentist who relies heavily on AI for note-taking and patient coordination is likely to struggle in a practice that's resistant to that workflow, regardless of how strong the clinical fit looks otherwise.

Technology preference becomes one more dimension of alignment, alongside culture, communication style, and compensation structure, rather than a separate conversation.

The strength of DDS Collective comes from the combination of three different areas of expertise.

Without dental experience, it is difficult to understand the realities of practice ownership. Without recruiting expertise, it is difficult to understand human fit. Without technology, it is difficult to build something that works beyond a handful of relationships. Just knowing all these people is half the battle; connecting them requires an AI built by the intuition of a dental staffing guru.

Darius brought the network and the firsthand understanding of where the industry's structural gaps actually are, and bridging them together through creative, unique approaches, built over nearly three decades of starting with the genesis of working from building a dental supply, to pioneering the traveling specialist in-house agency model, and eventually helping to build the world’s largest dental staffing platform for hygienists and other talent.

Brian adds sustainability to the match by bringing the assessment frameworks and the recruiting discipline to evaluate fit on both sides of a placement, not just the candidate's resume, drawing on a decade of practice management consulting that most recruiters never spend a day doing.

Shivam’s AI lab and team brought the systems to make that kind of matching scalable across hundreds of practices and specialists, rather than a handful at a time, along with another proven founder's instinct for finding the actual problem underneath the one everyone assumes is the problem.

Each piece solves a different part of the same puzzle, and none of the three works particularly well without the other two. A network without an assessment framework is just a list of names. And technology without dental or recruiting expertise behind it risks optimizing for the wrong thing entirely, treating hiring as a matching algorithm rather than a relationship that has to hold up six months after the contract is signed.

The future of dental hiring may not be about finding more candidates. It may be about finding better matches.

As dentistry continues to evolve, practices need more than professionals with the right qualifications. They need people who align with their vision, their pace, and the way their team communicates. And dentists need opportunities where they can actually thrive, not just opportunities that look good on paper.

DDS Collective represents a shift in thinking: growth in dentistry is not just about filling roles. It is about creating the right connections. It is about building relationships that support long-term success, for the practice and for the person walking into it.

When the right people come together, practices grow stronger, teams become more stable, and dentistry moves forward.