369 Dental Talent Network Files IPO Prospectus: Pioneering Guaranteed Recruitment and Building a Service-Oriented DSO Platform Mode Inspired by Heartland Dental

Amid the rapid expansion of dental institutions in China, demand for dental professionals is surging. Currently, there are approximately 250,000 dentists nationwide, with around 20,000 newly licensed (assistant) practitioners added each year. In developed countries, the dentist-to-population ratio is nearly 1:2,000, whereas in China, it falls far short of this benchmark. During their expansion, dental institutions often encounter a variety of recruitment challenges:

Issues with the positioning and internal development of dental institutions, leading to a lack of attractiveness for technical talent;
There is a shortage of specialized human resources professionals in the dental industry, making it difficult to meet the needs of dental enterprises;

Dental institutions suffer from a scarcity of specialized recruitment channels, making it difficult to attract high-level dental talent through mainstream job platforms;

Traditional dental institutions exhibit pronounced regional operational characteristics, and their cross-regional expansion faces a shortage of talent.

How to find suitable dental talent is an urgent issue that most dental institutions need to address. Recognizing this industry opportunity, 369 Medical Talent Network, as a talent service provider for the dental industry, has chosen to deepen its presence in this field. Currently, while continuously expanding its own talent database, it is exploring new business models.

Sanliujiu Medical Talent Network was established in 2016 as a subsidiary of Sanliujiu Technology Co., Ltd. and serves as its strategic product for deploying dental DSO (Dental Support Organization) operations. At that time, it coincided with the first wave of internet entrepreneurship opportunities in China’s dental industry. After conducting market research, Sanliujiu Technology identified that financing capabilities and dentist recruitment were the two major bottlenecks hindering the growth of dental chain brands. This raised the question: Could the solution lie in enhancing dental institutions’ ability to recruit dentists? Thus,In response to the need for a one-stop solution to address the talent demands of dental institutions, particularly for dentists, 369 Medical Talent Network was established. It aims to build stickiness with dental institutions by creating a dental talent database and enhancing their ability to recruit dentists, thereby entering the dental DSO sector.

As the industry develops, the landscape of talent recruitment in the dental sector is undergoing continuous changes: The state places greater emphasis on cultivating healthcare professionals with technical expertise and encourages multi-site practice; dental institutions are prioritizing talent reserves and team building, gradually breaking away from traditional recruitment channels and approaching talent acquisition with a broader strategic perspective; dental healthcare professionals with technical expertise are placing greater importance on enhancing their academic and technical capabilities.

Prior to joining Sanliujiu Medical Talent Network, Weng Ting, General Manager of the Headhunting Division, had long served in the broader healthcare and medical industry. Currently, the company’s nationwide team comprises more than 50 employees, with consultants and marketing personnel making up the majority. Its core team members include a technical partner who graduated from Tsinghua University and brings extensive experience from major, well-known internet platforms; a head of training who comes from a large state-owned financial group; and a head of branding with prior experience at a prominent Beijing-based online media outlet. In 2021, Sanliujiu Medical Talent Network plans to double its workforce to over 100 employees. The company is currently recruiting managerial talent, intending to first establish a core management team before gradually bringing in entry-level personnel.

Over the past four years, it has cumulatively served and attracted more than 2,000 dental clinic clients to join the platform.Among them, approximately 80% of dental clinic clients are distributed across the Yangtze River Delta, the Greater Bay Area, and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Capital Region.Its clients include well-known leading national dental chains and strong regional brands, such as Jicheng Dental, Meiao Group, Topchoice Medical Group, Taikang Bybo, Guorui Dental, and Yaboshi.

In the diverse talent needs of dental institutions served by Sanliujiu Medical Talent Network,It has established a dual-channel service model comprising an Internet-based, scaled traffic-generation platform through its vertical recruitment website for the dental industry, and precision value-added executive search consulting services targeting dental enterprises and high-end talent.

On the website platform, corporate and individual users can post job openings and submit resumes, engaging in direct communication and autonomous matching. The platform also provides intelligent match recommendations based on user profiles.

To address enterprises’ reluctance to publicly disclose their hiring plans and the strong emphasis high-level talent places on privacy protection, 369 Medical Talent Network provides RPO (Recruitment Process Outsourcing) and executive search services. This approach ensures the precise and efficient matching of high-quality dental professionals while safeguarding the interests of both parties.

To provide efficient, large-scale services to dental enterprises and professionals, 369 Medical Talent Network, for the dental talent data stored in its database,Implemented refined management and professional growth tracking, establishing data models for DSO membership management in dental institutions and full-lifecycle management of dentists.By enhancing the AI algorithms and deep learning capabilities of the talent database, we achieve intelligent matching efficiency and precision for dental professionals and dental institutions, reduce reliance on front-end headhunting consultants, and improve the matching efficiency of high-end talent supply and demand.

369 MedTalent Network: Distribution of Professionals in the Oral Health Talent Database

Currently, its AI-driven HR algorithms combined with headhunting consultant services enable the placement of senior talent for most headhunting projects within 35 days. The company plans to shorten this delivery cycle to 15 days by enhancing its AI algorithm capabilities and expanding its database scale. Typically, for expanding dental institutions, recruitment efficiency is directly linked to operational performance; helping enterprises secure suitable talent more rapidly can create greater value for the business.

Its target service audience includes more than 100,000 dental hospitals, dental clinics, and dental practices, as well as over 200,000 licensed dentists and nearly one million professionals in the dental industry.It also plans to expand the provision of ancillary non-clinical roles for dental institutions and dentists, such as operations, marketing, branding, nursing, and customer service personnel. This initiative aims to deliver comprehensive, multi-role, and multi-tiered bundled talent solutions for dental institutions, providing a one-stop solution to meet their staffing needs.

Throughout its development, the company has continuously made strategic adjustments. In 2020, 369 Medical Talent Network officially transitioned from operating as a vertical recruitment platform for the dental industry and providing ad-hoc executive search services to clients, to offering annual contract-based talent services for Dental Support Organizations (DSOs).

369 Medical Talent Network provides dental institutions with guaranteed recruitment commitments and annual contract-based DSO services, thereby establishing long-term relationships with clients. Meanwhile, it better manages the non-medical service needs of dental clients. By collecting, entering, and leveraging AI learning on demand data from dental enterprises, combined with HR AI algorithms and headhunter consultant services, the platform continuously enhances the precision and timeliness of matching dental talent with enterprises.

Historically, traditional executive search firms have operated on a phased installment payment model, requiring an upfront payment of 30% of the talent sourcing fee upon engagement, with this amount being non-refundable. This practice has become nearly an industry standard. However, for enterprises, this means a waste of funds if suitable dental professionals are not ultimately secured. Taking the lead, Sanyoujiu Medical Talent Network has drawn on the performance-based pricing model common to internet platforms and introduced the market strategy of “full refund if recruitment fails,” thereby alleviating client concerns.

To safeguard the platform’s interests, it opts to collect the full service fees for projects upfront, then calculates the final cost based on recruitment outcomes. Full refunds are issued for headhunting positions that remain unfilled within the agreed period. This strategic adjustment at the business level means the platform assumes all risks. The willingness of 369 Medical Talent Network to adopt this model stems largely from its substantial reserve of dental professionals and its strong confidence in its talent sourcing capabilities.

In line with strategic adjustments to its market strategy, 369 Medical Talent Network has optimized the data within its dental talent pool and restructured its organizational framework.Amid a shift in market strategy and a surge in business volume, it re-tagged and digitized over 100,000 dental talent records accumulated in the backend, thereby enhancing the responsiveness of the dental talent database and improving the accuracy of candidate-job matching. During this process, it also proactively onboarded a big data technology partner.This has also driven further transformation of the team’s organizational structure, enabling the company to operate more efficiently, adopt a flatter management hierarchy, and implement more modular business units, thereby allowing teams to respond more flexibly to strategic adjustments and business layout changes.

The strategic adjustments initiated in the second half of 2020, as the pandemic eased, laid the foundation for a dramatic turnaround and multiplicative growth in its annual performance. The company plans to continue promoting its “Full Refund if Recruitment Fails” service policy in 2021, leveraging this guaranteed-service model to support the operational recovery and expansion of dental institutions. Additionally, it will continuously optimize its dental talent database by increasing the number of registered professionals, thereby enhancing the efficiency and precision of talent matching, while further refining its organizational structure to better meet market demands.

For Sanliujiu Technology, the 369 Medical Talent Network serves as a big data resource aggregation platform dedicated to serving dentists and dental institutions. Due to the unique nature of the dental profession, dentists often establish their own dental clinics once they have accumulated sufficient resources; however, if their entrepreneurial ventures fail, they may return to working as employed dentists within other institutions. In addition to embodying the institutional brand IP of their dental practices, dentists also cultivate their own personal brand IP.Based on this, by leveraging the 369 Medical Talent Network to position dentists as dynamic and transformable “dental brands,” it is possible to provide additional services under the DSO model centered around them.

Furthermore, it prioritizes key strategic directions, including big data-driven platform management, AI-powered intelligent talent matching, vertical specialization in the dental industry, a focus on leading brands, and the adoption of the DSO (Dental Service Organization) service model.

Sanliujiu Medical Talent Network secured millions of yuan in angel funding after its establishment. Currently, it is in negotiations with institutions for an A-round financing plan of RMB 10 million, which will be primarily used for market development and technological development.In the future, Sanliujiu Technology will continue to consolidate the data-driven leadership of Sanliujiu Medical Talent Network in the field of dentistry. Centered on its DSO positioning as a “one-stop dental enterprise service platform,” the company will integrate resources and professional services to develop proprietary SaaS software solutions. It aims to gradually evolve into a comprehensive one-stop dental enterprise service platform that integrates human resources, administrative management, finance and tax management, supply chain management, investment and financing services, and operational support, thereby becoming an innovative practitioner of the independent, service-oriented third-party DSO model in the dental industry.

For Weng Ting, dental DSO platforms feature either a heavy-asset, management-intensive model or a light-asset, professionalism-focused model. The former is represented by Aspen in the United States, and by Meiwei Dental, Happy Dental, and Taikang Bybo in China; the latter is represented by Heartland in the United States and Sinopharm Dental in China, with relatively few players overall. 369 Medical Talent Network positions itself within the latter category, benchmarking against Heartland, and aims to build a competitive moat through a light-asset, professionalism-focused model to serve the dental institution market.

For these entities, the high cost of dental education in the United States has facilitated the development of Dental Support Organizations (DSOs) there. However, unlike American dentists, Chinese stomatologists do not have an urgent demand for external DSOs to provide comprehensive services. Nevertheless, future trends remain favorable for the development of professionally specialized DSOs. Driven by professional services, such DSOs enjoy relatively flexible business expansion and can rapidly capture market share. They establish strong professional barriers within sufficiently segmented service domains. Meanwhile, they boast advantages such as the absence of potential conflicts of interest with their DSO clients, scalable service expansion, standardized business management, and the digitalization of non-clinical operations.

Weng Ting stated that both the asset-heavy, management-intensive model and the asset-light, expertise-driven model will coexist and grow in tandem, “as they differ in motivations, business models, and exit mechanisms, and may even intersect and integrate.”As a builder and promoter of large-scale, chain-based, and standardized development in China’s dental industry, DSO platforms hold substantial market potential for future growth.