Periodontist Interview Questions: What to Ask and What Good Answers Sound Like
The employer's question set for a periodontal specialist hire — and what a strong answer actually sounds like.
A license and a periodontics residency tell you a candidate is trained; they do not tell you how they practice.
The interview is where you learn how much implant and grafting work this person actually does, whether they hold any sedation permit your state's rules require, how they treat the dentists who refer to them, and whether they will co-manage periodontal patients with your hygienists.
The questions below target those four answers, plus the checks that settle what a conversation cannot.
Before the interview
Verify before the hour, not after it: the license on your state board's lookup — name, number, status, any discipline — and the specialty residency with the program.
Posting, screening and pay are covered in how to hire a periodontist; this page is about the hour itself.
Keep every question lawful.
An employer with 15 to 19 employees is covered by the federal laws banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation and transgender status), national origin, disability and genetic information — none of it belongs in an interview at any headcount.
Skip age, family plans, health, religion and immigration status; case volume, permits, referrals and teamwork are all fair game.
Clinical/technical questions
How many implants did you place personally last year, and how did they split — single-unit, multiple-unit, full-arch?
What to listen for: A number offered without hedging, and a split the candidate can explain case by case.
Volume is not the point; whether they track their own work is.
Treat whatever you hear as self-reported and test it against references.
Walk me through your workup for a patient who wants implants but has a history of periodontal disease.
What to listen for: Disease control before restoration.
A strong answer sequences it — stabilize the periodontal condition, assess risk, then plan the implant work — and can say what would make them delay a case.
A candidate who goes straight to the implant has described how they will treat your referred patients.
Which grafting procedures do you perform routinely, and which do you hand off or decline?
What to listen for: A specific list, owned confidently, and a boundary they actually respect.
A periodontist who claims every graft type is telling you they do not triage.
How do you decide between saving a tooth periodontally and recommending extraction with implant replacement?
What to listen for: A reasoned boundary, not a reflex in either direction — someone who can argue for the tooth and say when the implant is genuinely the better plan.
Implant-first thinking narrows your treatment mix and strains the dentists who restore what you save.
Tell me about a case that went badly — a failed implant or graft. What happened, and what did you change?
What to listen for: Ownership.
They describe the failure plainly, what they did for the patient, and what changed afterward in their screening or technique.
A candidate with no example either has not done the volume or is not being straight with you.
Scope, license and compliance questions
Which state issued the license you would practice under here, is it active and unrestricted, and are there restrictions, board orders or pending matters?
What to listen for: The state, the status and a direct answer on anything pending, offered without prompting.
Fuzziness about their own license predicts fuzziness about every other rule — and verify with the board yourself regardless of the answer.
Does the kind of sedation you use — intravenous, oral, or none — require a separate permit under this state's rules, and do you hold it?
What to listen for: A precise answer naming the permit and the cases it covers.
Sedation permits are state-specific: the New Jersey State Board of Dentistry, for example, issues enteral sedation, parenteral conscious sedation, general anesthesia, local anesthesia and ADA-recognized specialty permits alongside dental licenses.
Whatever your state requires, confirm the permit with your state dental board rather than taking the CV's word for it.
Are you board certified, board eligible, or educationally qualified — and through which board?
What to listen for: Each term means something different.
Board certified: dental school and the advanced residency completed, the certification examination passed, continuing education required to stay certified.
Board eligible: the same training, examination not yet passed.
Educationally qualified: the training and a state license, without certification.
Certification is voluntary — a commitment to lifelong learning and continued professional development, not a statement about your case mix.
The American Board of Periodontology, the specialty's recognized certifying board, certifies in periodontics and dental implant surgery based on education, licensure, a written qualifying examination and an oral examination; a claimed certificate deserves verification with the board.
Do you handle controlled substances as part of your cases, and how is your DEA registration set up?
What to listen for: Whether they have thought about it at all.
DEA registration follows the location: a separate registration is required for each principal place of business where controlled substances are dispensed, and a practitioner practicing in more than one state needs a separate registration in each state, after obtaining that state's authority first.
If they would handle controlled substances at your office, the answer is about the location.
Team and patient questions
This chair lives on referrals from general practices. How have you built and kept those relationships — and what goes back to the referring dentist after a surgical episode?
What to listen for: Named, repeatable habits — fast access for a referred emergency, visiting the practices that send, making the referrer look good for sending — and a same-day or next-day letter with the diagnosis, what was done, imaging and the handoff point.
The return letter is the referral relationship.
A referring dentist sends a case you would have treatment-planned differently. What do you do?
What to listen for: They work the disagreement without undermining the referrer in front of the patient — a phone call, a documented plan, a resolution.
Handled badly, it is an easy way to lose a referral line for good.
How do you work with hygienists on periodontal and implant maintenance — what do you delegate within your state's scope, and what gets escalated to you?
What to listen for: A real division of labor, not a slogan: what the hygiene team executes under their protocol — implant recalls included — and what turns a hygiene patient into a surgical consult.
A surgeon who places and disappears leaves your team managing complications they were never equipped for.
How do you present a surgical plan to a patient who hesitates, and where is your line between educating and overpromising?
What to listen for: Plain language, honest uncertainty, and a willingness to let a patient go home and think.
A candidate who guarantees outcomes, or who softens the maintenance commitment to close a case, is exporting a complaint to your front desk.
Red flags
None of these is automatically a no — each earns a follow-up question before you move the candidate forward.
- Cannot put a number on their own implant or grafting volume — or the number changes when asked twice.
- Is vague about the state that issued their license, its status, or whether they hold a sedation permit.
- Says 'board certified' but cannot name the certifying board or say where they are in its process.
- Treats referrals as the marketing coordinator's job rather than the specialist's.
- Frames every problem as something an implant can solve, with no boundary on when a tooth is worth saving.
- Talks about hygienists as surgical assistants rather than as the practice's maintenance engine.
- Asks nothing about your referral base, case mix, hygiene program or schedule.
After the interview
The interview ends; the assessment does not.
Four steps come before any offer, and the first is the one easiest to skip.
Give the candidate a practical task — and pay for it.
For a specialist the best task is rarely a production day; it is a case-review exercise.
Hand over two or three de-identified records from your own practice and have the candidate present a diagnosis, a treatment plan and a sequence — an hour of that tells you more than a second conversational round.
A chairside working interview must be paid: in 2018 the U.S. Department of Labor found that a Nashville dental practice violated federal minimum wage requirements by requiring job candidates to complete a "working interview" without paying them for those hours.
Do not assume a short trial, an "observation" label or an advance agreement makes an unpaid one legal, and a candidate not yet licensed in your state should not be treating patients just because the visit is called an interview — confirm with your state board what a candidate may do chairside.
Our research found no federal statute banning working interviews or paid trial shifts; the exposures are pay and, for clinical work, licensure.
Running a working interview and skills assessments own the logistics.
Check the references yourself.
Run reference checks before the offer, not after it: a prior practice owner or employer, and where you can find one, a dentist who referred to this candidate.
The question that matters is the referral one — would they send their patients again?
Ask every finalist for an NPDB self-query.
Any health care practitioner, including a dentist, may query the National Practitioner Data Bank about themselves at any time.
The NPDB does not send self-query responses to third parties, and the practitioner may share their own response with whomever they choose — so the self-query in the candidate's hands is the practical route.
Direct entity queries are limited to hospitals and health care entities with a formal peer review process — written procedures, notice, an opportunity for a hearing — so a practice without one asks rather than queries.
Make it a condition of moving to offer.
Score it the same day, while the answers are fresh — a candidate brilliant in the chair and careless with credentials is two different hires.
Clinical volume and case mix: specific, internally consistent numbers that map onto your schedule — candidate-reported, confirmed at reference.
Scope and compliance: exact license status, a sedation-permit answer matched to your state, DEA answered, board terms used correctly.
Referral behavior: named habits for earning and returning referrals, not intentions.
Hygiene co-management: a concrete delegation line within your state's hygienist scope, and escalation triggers.
Verification: license confirmed with the board, references completed, NPDB self-query in hand — nothing else matters if this line is empty.
When the strongest clinical profile and the strongest compliance story are different candidates, weight the compliance story — the license, permit and documentation failures are the ones you cannot undo after the hire.
The Periodontist Hiring Market Right Now
The periodontist openings you are competing with, from the 47 active listings on DentistryHires as of October 30, 2026.
Employers with the most openings
- Pacific Dental Services22
- Westphalia Holdings12
- Smile Brands3
- Specialty1 Partners3
- Leading Edge Specialized Dentistry2
- Premier Care Dental Management2
Where the openings are
Pay employers post
- 36% of periodontist listings state any pay at all, so posting a range helps yours stand out.
Benefits listings name
- 401(k) plannamed in 40%
- Health insurancenamed in 40%
- Malpractice insurancenamed in 36%
- Dental or vision coveragenamed in 21%
- Paid or provided CEnamed in 21%
- Advancement opportunitiesnamed in 15%
- Flexible schedulingnamed in 13%
Source: active periodontist listings on DentistryHires, updated daily. Pay figures use only listings that state pay (midpoint of each posted range) and are hidden when one employer posted most of them. Benefits count listings that name the benefit; a listing that doesn’t mention one may still offer it.
See the listings →Hiring a periodontist?
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