Mike is Co-founder of the London based Smilepod dental group and Co-founder of SmileWisdom Academy of Dentistry & Dental Nursing, focussing on dental nurse training and dental nurse recruitment. Mike is a Fellow of the Institute of Personal Development and held several senior HR Director positions in multi-national organisations. 

Where has the Recruitment idea come from?

As Co-founder of Smilepod in 2009, offering a far more accessible and live-style friendly approach to private dentistry recruiting and developing the team of dental professionals was vital. 10 year on, with a team approaching 100, a foundation of the Smilepod success is the extremely low turnover of staff and high team job satisfaction.

Today, when searching for a dental nurse position, the search parameters are minimal. This leads to poor and frustrating outcomes for those hunting for opportunities, and time consuming and expensive processes for practices on the lookout for new team members.

While personally recruiting dental nurses, it became strikingly clear that the typical approach to recruitment was broken, with a token attention to dental nurse specific job requirements, and the limited attention to the development of recommend candidates. A radical overhaul of recruitment processes is required. 

Dental nurses are in my view undervalued. Patient care, most dental treatments and compliant practices simply would not be possible without dental nurses and dental nurse trained and experienced practice managers. Yet, a dental nurse earns a small proportion of the dentist’s revenue that simply would not be achievable without the extra pair of hands!

These insights led to the creation of SmileWisdom; committed to the training, development and recruitment of dental nurses. SmileWisdom recruitment processes will offer a new focus on dental nurse skills, experience and development. This will result in a better match of candidates with job vacancies, including both permanent and (in-time) temporary job positions.

What is the need, its purpose, how will it work, who benefits? 

The need is a better and far more efficient way to match dental nurse skills and experience, with job requirement. There is also a need to have a best-in-class ‘go-to’ recruitment site dedicated to position for new and experienced dental nurses.        

The purpose is to support dental nurses thought-out their career. From helping new nurses seek their very first job while a student, apprentice or trainee, right through to specialist GDC qualified and experienced dental care professionals. We will also include dental nurses who work in support roles and practice managers. 

The SmileWisdom approach will be straightforward and work by a dental practice registering and uploading their job(s).  Dental nurses will register and apply for jobs. The big difference will be the inclusion of specific dental nurse skills and experience to better match candidates with jobs, and jobs with candidates. 

Dental groups with many vacancies will be upload jobs automatically with real time data.