Landing a Job as a Dental Hygienist
After graduating from your dental hygiene program and becoming certified to practice, it's time to find a job!
Hopefully, whether you attended a two-year college, four-year university, or a master's program, your school has a career center where you can drop in and ask advice. The network of alums who graduated from your program and are now working in the dental field would be a great thing to tap into. Your instructors may also have professional contacts in the industry that they can get you interviews with.
General Job Boards
After tapping these resources, you should hit the Web and look for advertised job openings. The major job sites all have plenty of listings for dental hygienists. Indeed.com has recent positions open in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Denver. Simply Hired has positions as varied as a dental hygienist for inmates in a California correctional facility and a part-time dental hygienist at a nursing home in Madison, Wisconsin.
Dentistry-Specific Job Boards
Next, turn to the job boards specificially targeted at the dental hygiene profession, such as DentalJobsBoard.net. Job seekers can post resumes here, as well as responding to job listings. However, be forewarned that some of these listings are only tangentially related to dental hygienist jobs, such as one posting that advertises a need for a Web developer to create the website for a dentist's office. However, if you are multitalented, this might be just the thing for you.
Interviews
When you do get a response on your resume and cover letter, and are invited in for an interview, keep in mind that you will most likely be interviewing with the dentist, not some HR manager. Dental hygienists work closely with dentists, and the dentist will want to know that you are trustworthy and professional before taking you on. This interview is not the time for all your childhood fears of visiting the dentist to come back!
The article "Inside a dental hygiene job interview" on dentistryIQ.com helps provide a good overview of what you should prepare for. The author was grilled for two hours by the dentist, and asked her own questions in turn, inquiring about his number of active patients and how quickly she would be expected to treat each patient. She got the job, and even more importantly, she knew what kind of work environment and professional relationship she would be getting into. Hopefully, you will soon find yourself with a similar outcome.