Hiring top talent in the veterinary profession isn’t getting any easier. Due to low unemployment in the economy overall and our industry specifically and a shortage of talent, job candidates enjoy leverage in the vast majority of hiring situations. Those dynamics are unlikely to change anytime soon. Therefore, the question becomes, “What can employers do to overcome recruiting and hiring challenges?” The first and perhaps most crucial step is to audit your recruiting and hiring process.
With most people, the word “audit” has a negative connotation. However, all it means here is to assess your practice’s process. After all, improving the process is difficult if you don’t know how it’s performing (or underperforming).
You can audit — assess, if you prefer — objectively and subjectively. The objective way is collecting and analyzing specific data points (key performance indicators). The subjective way is analyzing the experience you provide candidates during the process. (Keep in mind that subjective elements of the analysis can impact objective elements. In other words, a candidate’s experience with your practice during the recruiting and hiring process will ultimately affect your objective data points.)
Two-Part Evaluation
Here are a series of questions you can use to help with the analysis.
OBJECTIVE ASSESSMENT
- Have all the candidates I extended an offer to over the past three years accepted it?
- If they haven’t, what is the percentage of rejections?
- What’s the average time my practice needs to fill a position, starting when the job is created or opens?
- How many employees have quit my practice over the past three years to pursue another opportunity?
The answers are key performance indicators of your offer-acceptance, time-to-fill and turnover rates. Of course, those are not all the KPIs you can track, but they are three of the most critical ones. Monitoring the metrics provides valuable data to measure the health of your recruitment pipeline. If you can measure it, you can improve it.
SUBJECTIVE ASSESSMENT
- Why do employees quit my practice? Did I conduct exit interviews?
- How do top candidates view my practice in the marketplace?
- How do I want my organization viewed?
- How do we treat candidates during the interview process?
Doing It the Right Way
Your practice’s brand is its reputation in the marketplace and how people with direct or indirect experience perceive your clinic. You can brand yourself positively or negatively, and as you might have guessed, the more positive the employer brand, the greater your chances of hiring top talent.
The experience you provide to job candidates encompasses many things. Falling short in one can upset the process and your results. As a recruiter in the animal health industry and veterinary profession for 25-plus years, I’ve seen tremendous recruiting and hiring processes and, unfortunately, substandard ones.
Keeping that in mind, here is the step-by-step process used by one of my recruiting firm’s best clients:
- The external recruiter sends the candidate’s resume to the internal director of talent acquisition.
- The director of talent acquisition responds within five to 10 minutes.
- The job candidate is interviewed by phone shortly after that.
- The internal recruiter sends the candidate’s resume to the hospital.
- A face-to-face interview is scheduled with the candidate.
- The employer promptly makes a job offer.
- Hopefully, the candidate will accept the offer.
On the other side of the spectrum, another company I am familiar with has a less-than-optimal recruiting and hiring process that doesn’t positively brand the organization. The process is as follows:
- The external recruiter sends the candidate’s resume to the recruiting manager. A week passes.
- The external recruiter resends the resume due to no response.
- The recruiting manager says she will forward the resume to the internal recruiter.
- Days or another week pass.
- The external recruiter follows up.
- The internal recruiter says internal checking is underway. More time passes.
- The external recruiter follows up again.
- The internal recruiter calls the job candidate but doesn’t get a response.
- The internal recruiter calls the external recruiter.
- The external recruiter calls the candidate.
- The candidate has other job offers now and isn’t sure about scheduling an interview.
In the first instance, the communication is swift. In the second, not so much.
The Keys to Success
Now that you’ve seen the differences between good and poor processes, what can employers do to increase the chances of landing top talent? Here’s what I’ve seen that leads to successful recruiting and a great candidate experience:
- The candidate receives an agenda before the interview.
- The candidate is greeted upon arrival and gets a tour.
- The interviewer sticks to the agenda.
- Practice representatives take the candidate to lunch.
- The interviewer and the candidate discuss the veterinarian’s needs, wants and desires. The job offer centers on the candidate’s wants.
- The hospital sends a gift basket to thank the veterinarian for interviewing.
On the other hand, here’s what leads to a poor candidate experience:
- A veterinarian flies across the country for an interview, but the hospital is dark, and no one is there.
- The practice manager quit the week before, but HR set up the interview and didn’t tell the external recruiter or candidate about the change.
- A veterinarian who drove from out of town arrives in the city late at night, but the recommended hotel is now a homeless shelter.
- A veterinarian is invited to interview at a restaurant, but no one from the practice is present when she arrives. She waits for an hour and leaves.
- A veterinarian shows up for an interview, but hospital staff members aren’t aware of it.
- A veterinarian arrives for an interview, but no one read her resume beforehand.
I cannot stress enough the importance of consistently auditing your practice’s recruiting process if you want to hire top talent. In today’s candidate-driven market, when you need the best candidates more than they need you, assessing your process is a necessity, not a luxury.
Therefore, measure the process objectively, analyze it subjectively and do whatever is needed to provide the best experience for candidates you want to hire and for employees after they join your team. Consider what you can improve to make the process better for everyone.
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A Resume Builder survey conducted in December 2023 found that 62% of companies use badge swipes to track employee attendance.