Winder-Barrow Alum Brings Big Smiles to Dental Job Seekers’ Faces

As a young girl growing up in Barrow County, Tonya Lanthier had no idea she was learning the lessons she would need to succeed later in life.

Today, she credits her grandparents, many of her coaches and teachers at , and her former employers at a Bethlehem convenience store and for teaching her the value of hard work, the importance of striving to be the best and the lasting power of encouragement. All of the lessons she learned have served her particularly well in recent years with the wildly successful launch of her internationally recognized online business venture, DentalPost.

Lanthier was first inspired to pursue a career in dentistry at the age of 8, when she had a tooth knocked out in a biking accident and was rushed to a dental office in Gainesville. She still recalls how warm and kind the staff was to her. In the years that followed her graduation from Winder-Barrow in 1990, Lanthier would go on to find success as a registered dental hygienist, as well as happiness in both marriage and motherhood.

While taking a brief hiatus from her career to be home with twin daughters and considering her own return to the workforce, Lanthier received a number of calls from friends and associates seeking employment in the dental field. That’s why in 2005, Tonya and her husband Chris, a software engineer, developed an idea for a virtual job board intended solely for employers and employees in the dental industry — a dedicated “bridge” to help them find one another.

“After I started putting the word out through marketing, DentalPost grew at 40 [percent-plus] every year,” Lanthier said. “I reached out to everyone in my network, including friends and past employers. I asked everyone if they would help me grow.”

And grow she did. As of May 2012, DentalPost represents 25,000 employers and more than 300,000 job seekers worldwide. The site currently receives approximately 2 million page views a month, generating a monthly revenue of more than $100,000. Through DentalPost, employers can view the resume database bank and post jobs, which are then syndicated to other job boards and sent to subscribing job seekers via e-mail. In turn, job seekers can post their resumes and search open jobs. As an added perk for using DentalPost, every time registered job seekers log into the site, it bumps their resumes to the top,  keeping them fresh for potential employers.

Most recently, Lanthier's company released a DentalPost app so job seekers can post resumes and apply to jobs directly from their mobile phones in real time.

While she admits it has been a challenge juggling her career as a dental hygienist, heading up grassroots marketing campaigns to promote DentalPost, traveling to countless events and conventions across the nation, initiating improvements to her website’s offerings and being a mom to two girls, Lanthier's would not trade this experience for the world.

“I am proud of what I have built, and the money is not what drives me,” she said. “It is growing the company and helping people find a job to feed their family, pay the rent, buy something nice, and have security. Those are the things that make me happy.”

Although Lanthier now lives in Brookhaven with her husband and daughters, she returns to Winder as often as she can to visit family.

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