Working Interviews in a Dental Office: Do You Have to Pay?

A working interview is a trial shift: the candidate comes in and does the job they applied for — chairside assisting, a hygiene visit, answering phones, working in your practice software — while you and your team watch how they work.

The reason to run one is simple: hands-on skill is hard to judge from a resume or a seated conversation.

Instrument transfer, chairside pace, how someone greets a nervous patient, how the front desk handles an insurance call — these are the things a resume and a seated interview can only hint at.

The label varies — trial day, working day, skills day, paid shadow — but what defines a working interview for legal purposes is not the name.

It is what the candidate actually does.

A visit where the person performs productive work for the practice is a working interview whatever the schedule calls it.

Purely observational shadowing — where the candidate only watches and performs no productive work — is a different setup, and the sources this page draws on do not address it directly.

Treat the pay rules below as your default and do not rely on the word “shadow” to settle anything: the pay question is whether the person was permitted to work.

Our research found no federal statute that prohibits a paid trial shift; for a dental office the issues are pay and, for clinical duties, licensure.

On pay, the Fair Labor Standards Act’s definition is blunt: to “employ” includes “to suffer or permit to work.”

If you let a candidate work, they are employed for that time — whether or not you asked for the task.

Federal wage-hour rules say the same thing from the other direction: work not requested but suffered or permitted is work time.

The Department of Labor has applied exactly this to a dental practice.

In 2018, DOL found that a Nashville dental practice violated federal minimum wage requirements by requiring job candidates to complete a “working interview” without paying them for the hours worked.

A federal court ordered the practice, Smiley Dental Associates, to pay $50,000 in back wages and liquidated damages to 10 employees for minimum wage, overtime and recordkeeping violations.

That total also covered the overtime and recordkeeping violations, so not all of it is a working-interview bill — but the unpaid trial hours were themselves a minimum-wage violation.

The trainee exception is unlikely to rescue a trial day.

In Walling v. Portland Terminal Co. (1947), the Supreme Court held that railroad trainees were not FLSA employees because the railroad received no “immediate advantage” from their work.

A candidate who treats patients, assists chairside or runs your front desk gives you exactly that advantage, so this exception is unlikely to fit a dental working interview.

Dental and hygiene students read differently, but not much.

DOL’s internship guidance says an intern or student who is actually an employee is owed both minimum wage and overtime under the FLSA.

The test DOL applies there is built for interns and students — not for licensed candidates interviewing for a job.

And do not try to shorten or rename your way out.

An hour instead of a day, an “observation” or “trial” label, or the candidate’s advance agreement does not change the test: the question is whether the person was suffered or permitted to work — and DOL has treated unpaid dental working interviews as minimum-wage violations.

The floor is the highest of the federal, state or local minimum wage that applies where you practice — the federal minimum is $7.25 an hour.

Paying the role’s normal hourly rate is a practice choice, not a legal requirement.

Pay is the first trap; licensure is the second.

A trial day does not suspend your state’s dental practice act.

What a candidate may do to a patient is set by the state you practice in — not by the fact that they are “interviewing.”

Do not assume your state tolerates trial work by unlicensed or not-yet-licensed staff: each state’s practice act sets who may do what, so check yours before the candidate is in the schedule.

California shows how narrow the rules can be.

Under Business and Professions Code section 1915, only a registered dental hygienist — an RDH, RDHAP or RDHEF — or a licensed dentist may practice dental hygiene or perform dental hygiene procedures on patients, such as scaling, and the exceptions are narrow.

A hiring trial day is not one of them.

The law’s out-of-state exception covers a hygienist licensed in another jurisdiction performing a clinical demonstration for educational purposes — not an out-of-state hygienist scaling your patients during a working interview.

Boards also expect you to know who is treating in your office.

The Nevada State Board of Dental Examiners has told licensees that before hiring any dentist or dental hygienist to render treatment, they must verify that person’s license with the Board.

Nevada-specific as that notice is, the habit travels: confirm license, registration and permit status for every clinical task you plan to observe — before the day, not after.

If the candidate is not yet licensed or permitted in your state, build the trial around work that involves no patient care: charting exercises, setup and breakdown, a software walkthrough on a demo account.

And check with your state dental board before anything involving radiography equipment or any other permitted duty — that permission attaches to credentials you may not have seen yet.

Once the hours are payable, run them through payroll.

Add the candidate as an employee for the day, have them record hours the way your staff does, and pay at least the applicable minimum wage on your normal payroll run.

That gives you what a cash envelope does not: a wage record showing the hours and the rate if the pay is ever questioned — and recordkeeping was one of the violations in the DOL case above.

Paying the person as a contractor instead does not settle the pay question either way.

A trial day is time you permitted, on your schedule, under your direction and supervision, in your office — the fact pattern the wage rules in this page turn on, regardless of what the payment is labeled.

How contractor treatment is tested in full, for hygienists, assistants and front-office roles, is its own subject: our guide to 1099 vs W-2 for dental staff walks the IRS, DOL and state tests.

Keep the rate honest and the expectations written.

If the trial rate differs from the rate you are offering for the job, say so in the confirmation so the number is not a surprise in the first paycheck.

If you hire the candidate, the trial hours are simply their first recorded hours — there is no awkward reconciliation at the end.

If a candidate is injured during the trial — a needlestick, a slip in the operatory — whether your workers’ compensation coverage responds depends on state law, and the sources this page draws on do not address a candidate who is not yet on payroll directly.

Ask your carrier or broker how your policy treats a trial-day candidate before the day, not after the injury.

This is the practical case for the payroll route in the last section.

A candidate run through payroll for the day is a documented employee for that day, with hours and wages on record, instead of a visitor whose status you have to reconstruct after the fact.

The other exposure in a trial is clinical: a candidate performing duties they are not licensed or permitted to perform in your state.

Keeping the task list inside the candidate’s credentials is what protects your patients first — and the practice a close second.

A working interview is worth running only if it is deliberate.

Decide in advance which tasks you want to see — three or four is enough — and which of them the candidate is licensed to perform.

Give every candidate for the same role the same structure: the comparison is only fair if the test is the same.

Put the terms in writing when you schedule: that the time is paid, the hourly rate, the length, the dress code, and the task list.

Have them record hours through your timekeeping and pay them on the next payroll run.

Brief your team on who is coming, what the candidate may and may not do, and who supervises.

Pair the trial with a structured conversation rather than an improvised chat.

Our dental hygienist interview questions and dental assistant interview questions give you role-specific question sets to score the trial against, so the hands-on part of the trial and the conversation point at the same job.

Close the loop either way, quickly.

Tell the candidate the decision and the reason within a day or two of the trial — the person worked for you and earned a real answer.

And keep the trial in perspective: it is one step in a structured search.

The dental hiring hub collects the rest of the employer guides, from planning the team to contracts and pay.