this post is a year old, I'll bet this person doesn't check it anymore.
I never worked for PDS, but I did interview. I think the interview process is a little clunky. I had three interviews before I finally told them I was done with their interviewing and had already been offered a couple opportunities. First I met a regional director and another manager I am not sure how he fit in...an investor maybe...and interviewed for an hour. At the end of that interview they told me that they liked me and apologized that a regional managing dentist was out of town and would also need to meet me. So a week later I interviewed with that guy. After that, they said it was looking good and told me they'd give me a call. When they did call, they told me the last step was a mock patient interview. I wasn't too pleased with having to do yet another interview with the same three people when we could've done all of this in the first one or two meetings, but I said yes. I arrive, do the mock interview, yet again, you did good...we'll call you. Each interview was progressively also farther away. First one was 20 minutes away....next was at an office 30 minutes away, last one was an hour away. I decided to talk to a new dentist in the office at the last office and he told me he'd been working for 3 months at the office with the managing doc. Very nice guy, but saw few new patients, and mostly had the kids pushed on him. This wasn't a brand new dentist either, he'd been working a couple years. That day, by noon, he'd seen a limited exam and done two fillings on a kid from earlier that week. I got home, waited til the next day and called to tell them I'd accepted another offer.
I've had at least 12 friends work for Pacific dental in Cali, Arizona, and Texas now. Very few still work there, actually, only one that I can think of. All the others have moved on. Each region will interview a little different. Almost all do the multi-interview with mock patient interview. some will also do a working interview instead of the mock interview (make sure you get paid for a working interview).
Each office is also very different based on the managing dentist. Some are great, very hands off and very fair with good experience and good learning opportunities, but you might also get managing dentist who feel there shouldn't be a fair split of new patients, get angry if you treatment plan class 2 fillings instead of inlays and onlays (cerec only) for every proximal lesion, etc.
There are a lot of pros and cons:
Pros:
good network, free CE, learn to use digital fixed dentistry, fair compensation, clean, nice offices with low management responsibility, sometimes great managing dentists to learn from
Cons:
Very heavy push to use Cerec on all indirect restorations, some places take HMO-and you can't opt out (low reimbursement rates), a lot of push for docs to do same day dentistry (this is fine if that's what you want, but for those who like to know what their schedule is like, same day dentistry is like a constant gamble of who knows what I'm doing today).
