Reference Checks for Dental Hires: Questions to Ask

Call the person who directly supervised the candidate's work.

For a dentist, hygienist or assistant that is the owning dentist or the lead hygienist; for front-office roles it is the office manager or practice owner who ran the schedule.

A friendly former coworker can tell you what it felt like to sit next to them, but only a supervisor can answer what matters: what they were responsible for, how they performed, and whether the practice would take them back.

Before you dial, collect for each reference a name, title, practice, phone number or email, and how they know the candidate.

Two or three references are plenty as long as at least one supervised the work directly; for a new graduate, that supervising voice may be an instructor or program director instead.

A reference call belongs late in the hiring process, after the interviews and any working interview have narrowed the field and before you make the offer.

If the candidate is still employed, agree on when — or whether — you may call their current employer: they may not have told their employer they are looking, so ask rather than assume.

Ask about the work in front of the chair.

The point is to compare what the reference describes against what your opening needs, so read these next to your job ad rather than in the abstract:

• “What were their core duties, and what did they handle on their own?” For an assistant: chairside assisting, charting, sterilization, expanded duties. For a hygienist: the usual recall mix, periodontal therapy, sealants, radiographs. For an associate: the procedures they ran without help. What your state permits an assistant or hygienist to do is a separate question — weigh the answer against your own state's rules and the role's needs.
• “How did they work with the rest of the team?” Dentistry runs four-handed and front-to-back, and a clinically strong hire who frays the whole schedule is not a good hire.
• “How did they handle the schedule running behind, or a nervous patient?”
• “Did they follow the practice's protocols — sterilization, charting, documentation — without being chased?”
• “How was their attendance and punctuality?” Reliability decides whether a hygiene column stays full.
• “Would you rehire them?” The single most useful question on the list. Ask it the same way every time and record the answer — including the pause before it.

Two housekeeping checks: confirm the dates and title the reference describes match the application, and listen for duties the candidate claimed in the interview that the supervisor never mentioned.

A gap earns a follow-up question, not an automatic no.

One thing a reference cannot tell you is whether the license itself is current and clean: that answer comes from the state board's records, not from a supervisor — our license verification guide walks through each state's lookup.

Run both.

Front-office references answer a different question: can this person run a front desk, treatment presentations or your insurance pipeline without supervision?

Ask about the actual tasks.

• “What did they own day to day?” Scheduling, insurance verification and claims, collections calls, treatment presentations, recall systems, ordering.
• “How did patients respond to them?”
• “How did they handle an upset patient or a billing dispute?”
• “What practice-management software did they use, and how quickly did they pick it up?” Compare the answer with your own system.
• “Were you comfortable leaving them alone with patient records and payments?”
• “Would you rehire them?” Same question, same treatment as the clinical list.

For an office manager candidate, add scope: “What decisions did they make without you — hiring, schedules, fee conversations?”

Keep front-office questions task-specific: a vague “how was she?” collects a pleasantry, a question about the day's actual work collects something you can compare against the next candidate.

Some references talk freely; others will give you dates and a job title and stop.

A dates-only answer is not a red flag by itself — the person may be following their company's policy, may barely have supervised the candidate, or may be wary of saying anything at all.

Read what you get against that reality.

Weight concrete confirmations over tone.

Dates, title, duties, and an answer to “would you rehire?” are facts.

Hesitation, a flat tone, or a long pause before the rehire question is information — but it is not proof, and it should not sink a candidate on its own.

Follow it with one open question — “was there anything that got in the way of the working relationship?” — and write down what comes back.

References come from the candidate's own list, so expect a favorable tilt — which is exactly why the specific questions matter: a reference describing actual duties and performance gives you something to check.

For a second angle, ask for a contact from an earlier job, not just the most recent one.

If a reference volunteers something serious — mistreatment of a patient, theft, a hostile departure — do not decide on one phone call.

Give the candidate a chance to respond, note both versions, and weigh what you hear against everything else in the file.

Start with authorization.

Have every applicant sign a line on the application authorizing you to contact references, including prior employers.

The signature tells you who you may call and when, and flags anyone who does not want their current employer contacted yet.

Whether any state requires a candidate's written consent before you call their references was not established in our research, so treat the signature as good practice rather than a legal requirement — and collect it either way.

Then keep the call consistent and job-only: the same core questions for every candidate for the role, every question about duties, performance and conduct at work.

The lines you do not cross, and the state rules that protect the person on the other end:

Health and disability.

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, an employer may not conduct a medical examination of a job applicant or ask whether the applicant has a disability, or about its nature or severity, before an offer.

The EEOC's principle that pre-employment information gathering should be limited to what is essential to decide whether a person is qualified is reasonably read to cover the questions you put to references too — so do not ask a former employer about the candidate's health, injuries, or whether a condition might affect the work.

Religion and other protected traits.

The EEOC says most employers other than religious organizations should avoid questions about an applicant's religious affiliation — place of worship, days of worship, religious holidays — and should not ask for references from religious leaders.

More broadly, the EEOC says inquiries that touch race, color, sex, national origin, religion or age are not clearly forbidden by federal law, but may be used as evidence of an employer's intent to discriminate unless justified by a business purpose — and job performance is the business purpose.

Pay history.

Do not ask a reference what the candidate was paid.

New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Colorado, Illinois and Washington, DC bar employers from seeking an applicant's wage or salary history from current or former employers — which is exactly what a reference call is — and California bars employers from seeking an applicant's salary history information, including compensation and benefits, personally or through an agent.

Ask about duties and scope instead, and set pay from the role and your own budget.

Reference-giving protections.

The silence you sometimes hit on the other end of the line may be the reference's own legal caution — and in the states listed below, the legislature has addressed the worry directly.

The statutes verified for this guide:

Read the table from both sides of the phone.

If you are hiring in one of these states, the reference on the line has less reason to go silent; if you are answering a call about your own former employee, the same statutes are what let you give an honest answer.

In every one of them the protection is conditional — the exception column gives each state's own standard — and if your state is not listed, do not assume either way: this table is the set of statutes verified for this guide, not a count of every state with such a law, so confirm your state's rule with employment counsel.

When a screening company makes the calls.

Everything above is about calls your practice makes itself.

If you outsource reference interviews to a screening company and its interviews reach the candidate's character, general reputation, personal characteristics or lifestyle, the resulting report is an "investigative consumer report" under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, with additional obligations for you as the employer — the full sequence is in the background checks guide.

A reference call your own team makes is not a consumer report.

Write it down as you hear it, not from memory.

For every call, capture the date and time, the candidate and the role they applied for, the name, title and practice of the person you spoke to, and their answers in as close to their own words as you can manage.

Attribute statements — “the office manager said she ran the schedule alone” — rather than recording your conclusions: “unreliable” is your opinion, “late twice a week, per the supervisor” is evidence.

Use the same note template for every candidate for the role.

That consistency is not just efficient: it keeps the questions job-related, makes answers comparable, and — because inquiries with no business purpose can become evidence of discriminatory intent — it documents that what you asked and weighed was the job.

Keep the notes with that candidate's other screening materials, next to the license verification result and any background report, so the eventual decision is documented end to end.

Then use them: a final comparison against the application, the interviews and the other screening results.

Where a reference contradicts something the candidate told you, ask the candidate before you decide; where two references disagree, note both versions — the disagreement is a finding too.

The guides that sit around this one — job ads, working interviews, screening, offers — all start from the dental hiring hub.