For most of dentistry’s history, a dental hygienist who needed to pick up extra shifts had two options: ask around or call a staffing agency. The first depended on who you knew. The second meant handing over a cut of your earnings and accepting whatever office an agency placed you in, with little say in the matter.
That model defined dental staffing for decades. Then GoTu changed it.
The Problem Was Structural, Not Incidental
The traditional staffing agency model was built for employers, not workers. Agencies earned placement fees from offices. The professional was the product being placed, not the party being served. Pay transparency was low. Choice was limited. A hygienist or dental assistant looking for flexibility had no real marketplace to turn to.
At the same time, dental offices were running a parallel frustration. The traditional temp model was slow, expensive, and unpredictable. Last-minute cancellations left chairs empty and revenue on the table. Offices often paid premium markups without any guarantee of quality.
Both sides of dentistry’s labor market were stuck in a system that wasn’t designed with them in mind.
GoTu Built the Marketplace Both Sides Were Missing
Founded in 2019 by Cary Gahm and Ed Thomas in collaboration with Deborah Simmons, RDH, a registered dental hygienist with more than 30 years of clinical experience, GoTu was built with a specific thesis: dental professionals deserved the same kind of marketplace control that had transformed other industries. They should be able to see the shifts available to them, choose the ones that fit their schedule, and get paid fairly for the work.
The company started as TempMee before rebranding to GoTu, a name that reflects the speed and directness of its model. Today GoTu operates as the largest dental talent marketplace in the United States, with more than 200,000 dental professionals, 45,000-plus dental offices, and over a million shifts filled across all 50 states.
That scale did not happen because GoTu made staffing marginally more convenient. It happened because GoTu fundamentally changed who held the leverage.
Dental Professionals Gained Something the Old Model Never Gave Them: Control
Before on-demand dental staffing platforms existed, a hygienist’s options for picking up temporary work were narrow and largely opaque. There was no way to compare pay rates across offices. No way to read reviews of a practice before committing to a shift. No way to build a book of shifts around a life, rather than building a life around a book of shifts.
GoTu inverted that dynamic. Professionals on the platform can browse open shifts by location, date, pay rate, and office rating. They can accept what fits and pass on what does not. Every completed shift generates a mutual review, so both the professional and the office build a verified reputation over time.
The company has paid out more than $100 million to dental professionals on its platform. That number reflects more than transaction volume. It reflects a significant redistribution of where the money in dental staffing actually lands.
Workforce Flexibility Became a Retention Tool, Not Just a Stopgap
One of the underappreciated outcomes of GoTu’s model is what it has done for workforce stability in dentistry. The dental industry faces a structural staffing shortage with no short-term resolution in sight. According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, there are currently 6,861 dental professional shortage areas across the country, requiring nearly 10,000 additional dental professionals to fill them. McKinsey projects the U.S. will be short more than 36,000 dental professionals by 2031. The ADA found that roughly 90% of dentists actively recruiting dental hygienists in late 2024 described the process as very or extremely challenging.
GoTu’s platform gave dental professionals an alternative to leaving the field entirely. A hygienist dealing with burnout at a single full-time office now has a viable path to temporary or supplemental work that keeps her in dentistry on her own terms. A dental assistant who wants to explore different practice settings before committing long-term has a marketplace to do that.
For practices, this has a parallel benefit. An office that builds GoTu into its staffing model gains a flexible coverage layer that reduces the risk of single-provider dependency. It also gives offices a vetted pipeline of professionals they can assess in real working conditions before making permanent hiring decisions.
Verification Changed What “Qualified” Actually Means in the Market
One of the persistent risks in dental staffing was credential verification. Offices booking through informal networks or traditional agencies often had limited visibility into whether a professional’s licenses were current, their certifications valid, and their background clear.
GoTu built verification into the core of the marketplace. All dental professionals on the platform are screened before they can accept shifts. All offices are reviewed as well. The mutual rating system that follows every shift creates an accountability layer that the old model never had.
For HR leaders and workforce administrators in multi-site dental groups and DSOs, this matters significantly. Hiring and staffing risk in healthcare is not just operational. It is regulatory and reputational. A platform that embeds credential verification and ongoing performance tracking into every transaction reduces that exposure in a way that informal staffing networks cannot.
What This Means for the Broader Healthcare Staffing Conversation
Dental staffing has historically been treated as a subset of healthcare staffing without many of the innovations that have transformed adjacent markets. GoTu’s growth suggests that gap is closing.
The patterns GoTu established in dental, transparent pay, verified professionals, mutual ratings, direct marketplace access, are not dental-specific innovations. They are workforce-design principles that apply across any healthcare context where skilled professionals are underserved by the traditional agency model.
For HR leaders, workforce strategists, and healthcare staffing professionals watching where on-demand labor markets are heading, the dental sector is now one of the cleaner case studies available. A segment defined by opacity and inefficiency now has a functioning marketplace with hundreds of thousands of active participants, billions of dollars in shift coverage capacity, and a track record of filling gaps that the old model routinely missed.
GoTu did not improve dental staffing by optimizing a broken process. It replaced the process with a market. That distinction is why the company’s growth has been as fast as it has, and why the model is likely to have a longer run than most staffing innovations of the past decade.
