Birmingham's dental hygienist market is deep and low
Birmingham pays dental hygienists a median of $61,730. The national median is $98,100, and the local bench is deep.
Birmingham posted a hygienist wage that would have been ordinary somewhere else and called the silence a shortage. The silence is the wage. The city is not short of dental hygienists.
The median is $61,730. The national median is $98,100. The lower quarter is $61,030, a few hundred dollars under the median, which means the bottom half of this market is a cluster, not a slope. The upper quarter is $70,500. Even the top of the local middle sits far under the country. You cannot "meet in the middle" of Birmingham and the nation. There is no middle that is a real job here.
OEWS counts 1,150 dental hygienists in the metro, and the share is deep. Birmingham has far more of these workers than a typical metro. A quiet req on top of a deep bench is a design problem. People exist. The posting is describing a different pay world, often a national one, sometimes a coastal one.
The work is hygiene itself: the prophy, the films, the conversation in the chair. Clinics that add a long list of extras and still price the median are hiring the cluster and screening for the upper quarter. The upper quarter doesn't reach $98,100 either. The extras won't conjure a Seattle candidate who plans to stay.
Seattle is the temptation
Seattle's median is $133,740, with 3,500 hygienists and a deeper-than-typical share of its own. Same license. Opposite pay problem. A recruiter who just worked a Seattle search will feel Birmingham's $61,730 as a data error. It isn't. Import the Seattle range and you will talk to people who cannot accept it, or you will approve a number the practice will not pay. Leave Seattle on the briefing as the proof that this license is local. Price Birmingham with Birmingham's cluster and its upper quarter.
Cost of living is the sentence owners reach for when the national median embarrasses the local one. It doesn't hire. A hygienist comparing two Birmingham offices is not comparing Birmingham with Seattle. Answer the local comparison.
What to do with a crushed band
You have two honest offers, not five. The cluster around the median, for a standard column. Something nearer $70,500, if the book is heavier and you will say so. Write which one. A range from the national median down toward the local median is a range from a city you don't hire in to a city you do. Candidates read that as confusion.
Because the bench is deep, ask the offices you already know before you buy a board. The occupation is common here. A posting is a backup to that ask, not the other way around. Put the days in the first line. A hygienist choosing among several local offices will not wait until a phone screen to learn the schedule.
Illustrative story
The practice approved a range anchored on the national median and a hopeful line about Birmingham's cost of living. Applicants with experience wanted to know whether $70,500 was the real top. It wasn't in the ad. Applicants who would have taken the local median never saw a number they recognized, because the band started too high and read like a different market that the clinic couldn't actually pay.
The owner said hygienists had left the state. The share said the state, at least this metro, had more of them than a typical city. They reposted at the local median, named the four-day schedule, and called three offices for a name before the board spend. The national figure stayed in the comp notes, where it belongs, as the measure of how far Birmingham sits under the country.
Stop recruiting Birmingham hygienists with a national wage.
https://reqradius.com/hiring/dental-hygienists-birmingham-al/
Sources
The same read for your own opening is a Hiring Pack.
First Hiring Pack free.
Then Was $24Now $0.99 per req report.
Or Was $149Now $19.99/month unlimited.