How do you recruit top-tier dentists and hygienists for 1700+ practices—when demand far outweighs supply?
Tyler Micenheimer, SVP of Talent Acquisition & Workforce Planning at Heartland Dental, breaks down how his team tackles competitive hiring—matching top talent to the practices where they’ll thrive.
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[00:00:00] Tyler Micenheimer: Don't think of yourself as an HR person or a TA person or whatever it might be. Think of yourself as a business person first, and that's just the area you happen to have the most knowledge in.
[00:00:11] Dave Travers: So, what does it really take for your business to attract world-class talent today? I'm Dave Travers, President of ZipRecruiter and on Talent All-Stars, we shine a light on the people and the day-to-day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses.
[00:00:28] Dave Travers: Today's guest leads people strategy for a company that supports more than 1700 dental practices across 38 states, each with its own culture and hiring needs. Tyler Micenheimer is the Senior Vice President of Workforce Planning and Talent Acquisition at Heartland Dental. He has built systems at scale, but also keeping the local practices in mind as well.
So let's learn how he's doing it. Tyler Micenheimer, welcome to Talent All-Stars. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. So excited to have you, so much to talk about today, but I want to start at the beginning, or close to the beginning, and talk a little bit about your journey before you became a leader and a leader of leaders.
When did people and leading people teams start to feel like something that might not just be your current job, but might be a path and a long-term career journey?
[00:01:19] Tyler Micenheimer: I think a couple answers to that first would be, so I did a grad program at the University of Illinois. It's kind of an HR grad program. And that obviously instilled in me that this is important work, this is strategic work, but I don't think you really get it until you do it. And I was lucky enough, my actually, so talk about beginnings. This was my first internship, and it was with Gatorade, and so super cool job up in Chicago. But I got there on the first day, and the way they structured these was kind of, you go in and you diagnose the problems and you tell us what your project should be this summer over the course of the summer.
And so I'm super smart and cocky, and I know everything. I'm in grad school, right? So I know how to diagnose problems. So I set up meetings with all the senior leaders of that particular vertical, that function and, you know, asked them all, you know, all these diagnostic-type questions. Well, maybe what, what should I be working on?
And I got to one of the operational leaders, and really early in the conversation, he's like, well, why are you talking to me? If you wanna know what my workforce needs, like, I'm 17 steps away from being able to give you good answers. So it's like, okay. And so I set up what we called route rides because these were route sales reps.
So I spent a couple weeks literally on the truck going into the stores in the morning, stock and shelf, doing all the stuff these folks did for a living. And about the end of the first week, they became comfortable talking to me. You know, 'cause it's an HR guy in their truck. That was not the assignment anybody wanted.
And so finally one of the guys was like, Hey, the guy at Koch make a lot more than we do, and they have this different pay structure and the light bulb went off. I was like, I think I just found my project, so quickly turned into a really compensation-focused internship, designed this new incentive program.
It was more variable comp. It had, you know, we did market analysis and found out what these folks should be making, presented it to the leaders, and got the buy-in and the budget. We, by the end of the summer, so it was pretty quick. We ended up implementing that new structure right as I was walking out the door of my internship.
I ended up coming back one semester later to work full-time with Gatorade, and it was really cool to see that all of those same employees were there. They had previously had this big retention problem. Everyone's jumping ship, all the employees were there, and it was kind of two critical learnings.
Really early on was one, this stuff actually works. Like this is real business results that you can measure and see the impact to the business from HR related work, but two. Just that importance, and it's kind of a common thread through my whole career of you gotta know your workforce really well, and really the only way you can do that effectively is to immerse yourself in the workforce and the things they do on a daily basis and understand really at a granular level what that's like. And I think that was just, it was a great internship, and learned a ton from that. And again, those carried throughout my career.
[00:04:09] Dave Travers: That's awesome. So what I love about immersing yourself in the workforce like that is that when you come back, and I've found this several points in my career too, when you come back to your day-to-day job or what your boss thought your day-to-day job was gonna be, is that you're now speaking in the language of not.
How headquarters thinks it works, but how the frontline is actually experiencing it, which is a very powerful, just using the right words is a very powerful tool to unlock the perspective of what's really going on out there and provide some ground truth. But what's interesting, and I wanted to follow up on what you were saying there that I thought was so cool, is for a junior person or an intern.
Like saying, hey, I think we can change the compensation strategy or change something based on the insights of what I'm hearing. That can feel scary the first couple times you do that. Like, am I allowed to do that, or should I speak up about this opinion? Now you're managing people, trying to get them to think like owners, the way you're describing yourself, doing younger in your career.
How do you build up the confidence? How do you know to put yourself out there the first time, saying, I know this isn't exactly in the charter of the three page memo you told me to write, but. I have an idea or something I wanna push forward. How do you build up the confidence to do that?
[00:05:26] Tyler Micenheimer: So for me personally, and what I've also tried to kind of instill in my teams over the years is like, don't think of yourself as an HR person or a TA person, or whatever it might be.
Think of yourself as a business person first. That's just the area you happen to have the most knowledge in. So if you don't know how to read the p and l, you can't tell me what your unit's performance was like in a given quarter or year or whatever. You gotta get all that stuff figured out before you're gonna have the credibility or the gravitas to make big decisions.
And I think it also lends confidence once you understand the business a little bit better, that yes, my diagnosis. Has merit, and I know it does because I know what the business needs at a holistic level versus just. Focusing on my HR vertical, and I think a lot of folks benefit a lot from that advice.
[00:06:14] Dave Travers: So, coach me, I'm the young intern on your team. I come in and say, Hey, I have this idea, but I haven't thought it through in totality. So you know, like it's a well-meaning idea, but I haven't immersed myself in the P&L. So, how do you give feedback to someone? How do you coax them into becoming that, that sort of a person who's like now encompassing the totality and developing the gravitas to actually make that kind of business recommendation?
Yeah, I mean, and it's to beat a dead horse, but if you haven't spent enough time in the field doing the work, you definitely don't know. And two, I think it's gotten so much better even in my career, but I think HR people are kind of notorious for bringing an idea forward that. It sounds like a nice thing to do, but if you haven't done the math or the analysis to say it's a nice thing to do, but here's how it's going to benefit your business and done so in a credible way, and my pressure test for myself has always been go meet with the senior most finance person in that vertical and pitch your idea to them and pitch your ROI case to them.
[00:07:13] Tyler Micenheimer: They're gonna tell you really quick if that's fake math or HR math or whatever they wanna call it, or if that's something that might actually withstand the questions you're gonna get at a higher level. So that's always been my approach.
[00:07:24] Dave Travers: I think going to the senior finance person sounds like a nightmare to some people. And I say that lovingly as a recovering senior finance person myself, but I think. People would be shocked by how open somebody in finance is or somebody elsewhere throughout the company saying, Hey, I've never done an ROI case before. I would love to bounce this off you and see what you think. Just the idea that someone's coming forward and thinking with that mindset.
From outside of finance perspective, I think people be shocked by how, what a helpful and constructive response they're gonna get most of the time.
[00:07:56] Tyler Micenheimer: I think it's that, but I think it's also having the vulnerability to say, I don't know how to do this. Yes, I've never done this, and I got caught up in this probably more than the average person of I need to create a sales pitch. And that's what I'm, if it feels like a sales pitch, you're gonna have a visceral reaction for the folks you're trying to walk through your information. So just be vulnerable.
[00:08:15] Dave Travers: Yeah, I think that's so right. If you go in saying, I would love to learn from you, as opposed to, I would love to bull you into accepting my proposal. I think you'll get, you'll get a lot farther. Okay. So now here you are at Heartland Dental, one of the largest dental providers, maybe the largest dental provider in the us. And you have this huge recruiting operation, so many people, you're trying to hire different locations, et cetera, at a place that has really strong culture.
How do you think about managing a culture as the sort of senior people steward of the culture? What is that like, and what's the philosophical approach to that for you?
[00:08:51] Tyler Micenheimer: I think the way we, at least the way I think about it, and I think this is consistent, is so we have obviously a Heartland culture, but we also have 1700 plus practices, and each one of those has kind of its own little micro culture.
And so, if I think about my corner of the universe from a TA standpoint is you need to know the culture of that individual practice to be able to effectively bring in the right talent for it. You can't be 10,000 feet up and recruit against some generic culture. It's gotta be very specific. And the way our teams do that is really through workforce planning.
That's where the magic happens for us. We want to know what's the doctor like, what's the doctor looking for in this position? How busy is the practice? What's the patient base look like? It's the schedule, like you really need to immerse yourself in that particular book of business. And then you can kind of back into what's the right candidate profile for that culture is.
And we think part of the magic of Harland is those 1700 different cultures. It feels like I running your own business. And I think it instills that business owner, mindset owner mentality. And so that's a little bit of a secret sauce for us.
[00:09:55] Dave Travers: So how do you then apply that once you understand what the culture of a particular location is, how do you apply that then to figuring out who's gonna be the right next recruit for that team? How do you translate that into action?
[00:10:12] Tyler Micenheimer: One example would be, let's say we have a practice that's, it's huge. It's got eight doctors. It is a massive team, huge client base. It's probably not gonna work great for me to find somebody that's fresh outta school. Maybe not as efficient, doesn't work as fast. I might want an experienced candidate for something like that, or somebody that's just been around the block enough that they can play at that pace.
Or another example would be maybe it's a really, really small practice. And it's only gonna have one doctor in it. I'll probably struggle to find someone fresh outta campus that wants that role because they want the mentorship of having someone else in there to, you know, maybe peek over their shoulder and watch them work.
So those are just two really small examples of like the dynamic of a practice should really dictate the type of candidate you're hunting for.
[00:10:57] Dave Travers: I think what's so powerful about being adaptive to the different cultures of your different practices is that it gives room to your point about ownership. And so rather than imposing the cookie cutter, this is the exact 1000-page manual of every single thing must. Be done every single way. You're giving the person on the ground the sense of ownership rather than the fact they're just executing the detailed playbook. And that in the end translates through to how patients feel about it, I'm sure as well.
Okay, so talk about what has changed. Since the pandemic and we're now in the post pandemic era. Talk about what's changed with recruiting and recruiting for people with specialized skills and in a dental environment, et cetera. How has that evolution changed for you and for Heartland?
[00:11:46] Tyler Micenheimer: The biggest single thing, and I'm sure we're not unique in this regard, but there were already supply and demand constraints. Particularly as you think about doctors and hygienists, so licensed individuals that already existed pre-COVID, and then it just exacerbated post-COVID, so a lot of hygienists left the market never to come back. A significant number. And so what we figured out pretty quickly in a post-COVID world is we're not gonna get as many candidates per rec.
So we have to be really efficient with how we think about candidates. And when I say efficiency, what that looks like for us is speed through the funnel. When you have a low supply in a market, competition's gonna be high, right? So if it takes me. A hundred days to get somebody through the recruiting cycle.
Three other companies have already offered them a job by that point in time. So even a day is too long to wait when a candidate's ready. You gotta work on the candidate's timeline, not on your own timeline. And so that requires us, particularly with those types of talent, to require a little bit more white glove serves.
Like when they're ready, we gotta be ready too. We gotta have technology where they can interact with us on nights and weekends, and kind of have to have an always on approach and be really aggressive as it relates to compensation and financial offers too.
[00:12:59] Dave Travers: Makes total sense. And you're like so many high-skilled, high-demand roles. We see lots of people making that change. How do you maintain or convince a practice owner, manager, and dentist who's running a practice that moving that fast? They can still make a really good decision for somebody who's been used to maybe taking the a hundred days or at least 10 days. If you're now in a situation where you really need one day or a handful of days to move through the whole process, how do you coach speed that way with confidence?
[00:13:33] Tyler Micenheimer: Something's been really powerful for us is to be able to do really good market analysis. And these are really smart folks, really highly educated folks. If I can sit down with a doctor or the hiring manager and say, look, the labor supply in this given MSA is low and the competition is very high, so we're gonna need to move quick.
We're probably only gonna get this many candidates, so let's give every candidate a very hard look and move really quickly. For the most part. You know, we haven't had a lot of trouble with that. And I think the other side of that coin would be it really only takes one time of missing out on a great candidate for a hiring manager or a doctor to be like, I don't want that to happen again. Let's move fast.
[00:14:10] Dave Travers: So, Tyler, one of the areas obviously that's super competitive is the dental hygienist. So, give me an example of that supply and demand creativity in a low supply labor environment where you have to get creative to make sure you're getting enough candidates for a really competitive role. How do you go about doing that?
[00:14:27] Tyler Micenheimer: I think the first thing that we've done is the hygienist pool as a whole. One of the key value propositions they look for generally is flexibility. Flexibility on hours, on schedule, et cetera. And what we noticed, probably about 18 months ago, cropping up were these gig scheduling platforms where someone could post a shift and someone could find the shift, almost like Uber for hygienists.
And we thought, wouldn't that be a great part of the value proposition if we had our own platform for that internally? So if I'm working four days a week, normally on that fifth day, I could use the Heartland app, which we call HD Flex. I could find a posted shift in the Heartland family drive down the street and take that shift, and now I work five days a week.
So I've gotten two things outta that. I got the flexibility to dictate my schedule, but then I also got the flexibility to augment my income, and those are huge value propositions for us that really help us during the recruiting process. That's been one. And then the other, that's a little bit more outside the box, is we identified a while ago, Hey, there's this supply problem.
So we went at how do we increase the supply in the market? And so I. Actually, it'll open this fall, but we built our own hygiene school to graduate more and increase that supply in the market, which was now one of our core competencies two years ago, building a school. It's a bit of a new thing to try, but yeah, we feel really good about it because the students are gonna graduate.
They're gonna have a good experience with Heartland. They're gonna learn Heartland Systems in terms of how they operate. When they graduate, they're gonna be even more ready to step into a heartland practice in the local market. So yeah, I would say those are the two big levers we've pulled, but we're always looking for ways to think bigger and more outside the box on how do you alleviate that supply problem through different strategies.
[00:16:10] Dave Travers: I love that. So one like you’re the biggest player out there. So using your scale to do shift swapping in that way is something that is hard for a lot of others to compete with. And two, create your own supply. Like you have the scale to help address the problem by giving people the confidence that they can go get trained, and they know there's a job at the other end of the rainbow.
That's awesome. Okay, we always end these episodes, Tyler, with a lightning round. So I want you to imagine you're grabbing a cup of coffee at headquarters and the CEO walks up to you and says, Hey, Tyler. Like, I've been wondering, technology's affecting everything we do. So much is changing. How should we, in light of all the change that's going on in dentistry and in our business, how should we be measuring the effectiveness of the talent acquisition organization over the next year or two? What's your answer to that?
[00:17:02] Tyler Micenheimer: I'd give a really short answer, and that's, did I increase your bandwidth enough that you were able to meet your business goals, and that, did I do it fast or faster than you thought I needed to? Those are the two biggest things. Did I increase your capacity, and did I do it on time?
And then if I could add a third, I would say, and is the quality higher than what you expected. Yeah. If I can nail those three, none of the other KPIs really matter.
[00:17:21] Dave Travers: You're never gonna upset the CEO by tying the answer back to business goals. Love that. Okay, one more lightning round question for your own talent acquisition team. As you think about the way the world is changing and automation and AI, and all the other things that are happening out there, what's the skill? That you are gonna need that team to develop more of over the next few years, that as the world changes around them,
[00:17:48] Tyler Micenheimer: I'm gonna cheat and give you two answers. The first is probably what everyone would say, and you've gotta be super fluent in technology, particularly in AI. If you're not already using it, you're already late, so that's a huge one. The flip side of that, and it's completely related, is I think as a function, you have to get better and better at empathy.
And I don't mean that in like a squishy way, but you need to really be able to understand people in a way that AI is probably not gonna replace right away at least. And if you can leverage that skill more at plus being able to leverage technology, you've really got the total package to be able to compete in this environment.
[00:18:23] Dave Travers: Tyler, I can see why you are aTalent All-Star. Thanks so much for taking the time with us today. Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.
That's Tyler Micenheimer. He's the Senior Vice President of Talent Acquisition and Workforce Planning at Heartland Dental. We'll drop his LinkedIn profile in the notes below. And just a reminder, we put the video versions of these conversations on YouTube, also on the official ZipRecruiter channel. If you have feedback for us or ideas for future episodes, send us an email at talentallstars@ziprecruiter.com. I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars, and we'll see you next week.