The Employee Experience is Critical for Animal Health and Veterinary Talent

by Stacy Pursell, CPC, CERS

The VET Recruiter®

What you want as an Animal Health and Veterinary employer is simple. You want to hire the top talent in the employment marketplace, and you want that talent to help grow your organization and your business. You also want to hire highly productive employees.

That’s all fine and good, but the obstacles and challenges are many, starting with the fact that top talent is scarce right now. And according to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends 2020 Report, even if you find qualified candidates for your open positions, successfully recruiting and then hiring them is far from a foregone conclusion.

In fact, it might be more difficult to recruit and hire these candidates than it is to find them. And it’s certainly tough enough to find them in the first place. But then, after you successfully hire them, are you “out of the woods”?  Unfortunately, you are not. That’s because, as difficult as it was to both find and hire top candidates, it might be even more difficult to retain them as employees for a considerable amount of time.

Although there is no “silver bullet” or “secret sauce” to hiring top talent in today’s marketplace, there are plenty of best practices and things that your organization should absolutely be doing. According to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends 2020 Report, one of those things is focusing on the employee experience.

The candidate experience vs. the employee experience

We’ve already addressed the topic of the candidate experience before in our newsletters and blog posts, and with good reason. Employers must provide a great experience during the interviewing and hiring process. If they don’t, then they put themselves at risk for losing out on top Animal Health and Veterinary talent.

Here’s what’s important to remember: the key to both the candidate experience and the employee experience is the same. That key is empathy, which is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. In a broader sense, empathy can be included under the umbrella of emotional intelligence. Those who are proficient in it and practice it will enjoy more professional success, including within the realm of personnel management. It all boils down to this critical statistic from LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends 2020 Report:

Ninety-six percent (96%) of talent professionals say employee engagement is becoming more important.

That’s not half or three-quarters of professionals. That’s nearly ALL of them. According to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends 2020 Report, the employee experience (or EX) is “is everything an employee observes, feels, and interacts with as a part of their company.” You can see how this is tied directly to retention. That’s because everything that a person experiences with their employer will either convince them to a.) stay with their employer or b.) leave their employer.

So you can see how the employee experience or employee journey is the number-one factor in determining whether or not a person will leave their employer—and even when they’ll leave. LinkedIn breaks down EX into four P’s:

1. People—The relationships that an employee has with colleagues and customers
2. Place—The physical environments in which the employee works, whether in an office or remote
3. Product—The actual work that the employee does
4. Process—The rules or systems by which the employee abides and tools that they use

So, the question becomes this one: what kind of experience does your Animal Health Company or Veterinary Practice provide in each of these four areas?

The employee journey for Animal Health and Veterinary talent

Here’s another statistic that illustrates the gap exists between what professionals want in terms of an employee experience and employee journey and what their employer actually provides for them. Although 96% of talent professionals say employee engagement is becoming more important, only 52% say their company provides a positive employee experience.

This means that on average, for every two employees you have at your organization, one of them is dissatisfied with the experience that you are current providing to them. And if they’re dissatisfied with the experience that you’re providing, then it’s only a matter of time until they start looking for employment opportunities somewhere. (In fact, chances are good that they’ve already started doing so.)

In addition to being a Certified Personnel Consultant (CPC), I am also a Certified Employee Retention Specialist (CERS). I’m one of less than 50 professionals and search consultants around the world who holds this certification. I firmly believe this certification helps clients of The VET Recruiter become better at retaining their employees in order for them to have a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

This belief is also one of the reasons that I wrote this article. As a recruiter and search consultant for nearly 25 years, I’ve witnessed all of the reasons why Animal Health and Veterinary talent has left their employers for “greener pastures.” And I can say without a doubt that unless you make a concerted effort to focus on the quality of the employee journey and the employee experience within your organization, then it will more difficult to maintain the type of retention rates necessary for more production, and by extension, more profit.

I encourage you to partner with The VET Recruiter for your Animal Health and Veterinary hiring needs, whether they involve identifying and hiring new employees or effectively retaining the top employees that you already have.

You can click here to find out more about our services for employers. Click here to learn more about our recruiting process.

We help support careers in one of two ways: 1. By helping Animal Health and Veterinary professionals to find the right opportunity when the time is right, and 2. By helping to recruit top talent for the critical needs of Animal Health and Veterinary organizations. If this is something that you would like to explore further, please send an email to stacy@thevetrecruiter.com.

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