Imagen Dental Augmented Referrals from 16% to 26% in 9 Months with Eqo: Saving $187,000 & Achieving 93.5% retention

The Problem

Only 16% of Imagen Dental’s external hires came through employee referrals, while their team spent ~10 hours per week manually tracking referrals in spreadsheets – limiting program scale and efficiency.

Imagen Dental faced ongoing challenges sourcing clinical talent, particularly dentists and dental hygienists. Their referral program was highly manual, making it difficult to engage frontline employees and drive consistent participation.

With only 16% of hires coming from referrals, their team lacked a scalable way to activate their workforce and streamline referral management.

Solution with Eqo

Imagen Dental partnered with Eqo to automate employee referral tracking and deliver a seamless SMS-based referral experience for their frontline workforce.

Eqo helped enhance the overall employee experience by making it easy to refer candidates via text, while also increasing program awareness through targeted SMS outreach and physical marketing assets such as posters and fridge magnets across locations.

In addition to the product, Eqo worked closely with Imagen Dental on strategy to drive engagement and adoption across their teams.

The Results

In just 9 months, Imagen Dental increased their referral rate from 16% to 26%, filled roles 24 days faster, achieved 93.5% retention among referral hires, and saved $187,000.

They eliminated ~390 hours of manual work annually and saw a substantial improvement in hiring speed.

Referral hires also proved to be higher quality, with a 26% application-to-hire rate and just 6.5% turnover.

Imagen Dental’s referral hires included:

• 17 Dental Hygienists
• 16 Dental Assistants
• 4 Associate Dentists
• 8 Front Office / Administrative roles
• 4 Revenue Cycle (RCM) roles

Employees were highly satisfied with the experience, giving the program a 4.91/5 rating, with feedback such as:

“This process is so easy!!! I can’t recommend it enough!”