Episode #190 – How an Animal Health Recruiter or Veterinary Recruiter Provides Real VALUE to Your Career
Julea: Welcome to “The Animal Health and Veterinary Employment Insider,” brought to you by The VET Recruiter. In this podcast, Animal Health Executive Recruiter and Veterinary Recruiter, Stacy Pursell, founder, and CEO of The VET Recruiter, provides insight and practical advice for both employers and job seekers in the Animal Health industry and Veterinary profession. The VET Recruiter’s mission is to help Animal Health and Veterinary companies hire top talent, while helping Animal Health and Veterinary professionals attain career-enhancing opportunities that increase their quality of life.
In today’s podcast episode, we will be talking about how an Animal Health recruiter or Veterinary recruiter provides real value to a person’s career who is working in the Animal Health Industry or Veterinary Profession. Hello, Stacy, and thank you for joining us today.
Stacy: Hello, Julea. As always, I am glad to be here with you today.
Julea: Stacy, we’ve discussed the importance of value before on the podcast. In those instances, though, we talked about the value that a professional can provide for their employer, is that right?
Stacy: Yes, that’s right. It should be the goal of every professional to provide a tremendous amount of value to their current employer. That’s how you advance professionally and grow your career. Today, I want to put “my money where my mouth is,” so to speak, and talk about the value that an Animal Health recruiter or Veterinary recruiter can provide to professionals.
I want people to realize how important it is to provide value. I don’t just tell professionals that they should provide value to their employers and then not provide value to them. I’m a big believer in providing value, and I have made this a priority in my firm during my more than 20 years as an Animal Health recruiter and Veterinary recruiter.
Julea: Stacy, do you find that some professionals still misunderstand the role of an animal health Recruiter or Veterinary recruiter and the value they can provide to them?
Stacy: Absolutely! And that’s a shame because they’re missing out on that value and they’re missing out on opportunity. So, I want to address this topic today and clearly present the real value that an experienced Animal Health recruiter or Veterinary recruiter can provide to Animal Health and Veterinary professionals.
Julea: Sounds great! Where would you like to start Stacy?
Stacy: Well, I’d like to start by touching on what we discussed in our previous podcast episode. That’s because part of the value that recruiters provide to professionals is access to the “hidden job market.” As we discussed last week, the “hidden job market” consists of those employment opportunities that are not posted online through job boards and are typically filled through the use of executive search consultants or recruiters. Employers look to fill their open positions in this fashion for confidentiality reasons.
This is a tangible form of value that Animal Health recruiters and Veterinary recruiters provide to professionals in the employment marketplace. Since they have access to these “hidden” job opportunities, the professionals who work with them also have access to these opportunities.
Julea: And don’t recruiters also make sure that the candidate’s job search is confidential, too?
Stacy: Yes, and that is absolutely another form of value and it’s also something that we discussed during our previous podcast episode. When you work with a carefully selected recruiter, you can have a partner and an advocate who can strategically market you into the right opportunity while maintaining your confidentiality.
Julea: Stacy, if job seekers post their resume on job boards, don’t they run the risk that their current employer will find their resume? Isn’t that risky?
Stacy: Yes, there is risk involved with doing that, and that risk involves jeopardizing your current employment situation over the long haul. Your employer may view you as a “short timer” and you may get passed over for a promotion or opportunity to advance and your loyalty might be questioned. I’m not saying that it happens all the time, but it does happen and it does represent a risk.
So this is another form of value that a recruiter provides. By working with a recruiter, job seekers and candidates can maintain control over their resume. When you post your resume to a job board, you lose control. Just about anyone can view your resume, even your current employer, which we just mentioned. In fact, some companies have set up searches so they will know if one of their current employees has posted their resume to a job board. Hiring managers and HR professionals often scan the job boards looking for employees of their own company who have their resumes posted. Who would want to deal with that?
If you post your resume on certain job boards, then you don’t know where your resume is going. It could end up just about anywhere. And there’s another reason why candidates, especially top candidates, don’t want to put their resume on the job boards.
Julea: I am sure our listening audience would like to know more about that Stacy.
Stacy: Top candidates have told me that they had to remove their resume from job boards because they were getting hounded with phone calls.
Julea: And with the market the way that it is right now in the Animal Health industry and Veterinary profession, with top talent still in high demand, I imagine that is still happening. Is that the case?
Stacy: Yes, that’s right! When you have a good recruiter on your side, though, you have one point of contact and fewer phone call interruptions. But there’s even more value that an Animal Health recruiter or Veterinary recruiter can provide in terms of a person’s resume.
Julea: What’s that?
Stacy: It’s a matter of numbers, really. When a larger organization posts an ad to a job board, in those instances when it is not trying to fill a position in a confidential manner, it could receive as many as 5,00 resumes for that one job. Statistically, only about 10% of those resumes are going to be read by an actual person. This can also happen if a person sends their resume directly to a company and bypasses the job boards.
One time, I was speaking with one of my clients. He told me that his organization had just posted an ad on a job board and the job received 400 resumes. He then told me that he had better things to do than sort through and read 400 resumes, so he asked me if I would send him our three best candidates for him to interview so that he didn’t have to spend his weekend looking at 400 resumes. He jumped at the chance to do that. He only ended up looking at a handful of those 400 resumes and he hired one of the three people that I sent to him.
Julea: I bet he did! But I would not want my resume to be one of those 400 that had a good chance of not being seen!
Stacy: I agree, but for those three candidates whose resume I sent to him for consideration, they benefitted from the value that an experienced recruiter can provide. In this case, these candidates were presented as exclusive candidates, and the hiring manager viewed them as such.
If you are wanting to make a job change, you want to distinguish myself as an exclusive candidate. It’s a challenge to stand out when you are one of the masses of resumes, as we just talked about. Your odds of being noticed increases greatly when you align yourself with a good experienced animal health executive recruiter. If you are aligned with a good recruiter, then you can show your worth and stand out from the crowd.
Keep in mind that organizations do not have an interest in finding you a job. Their main interest and their top priority is to fill their current opening, so if you apply for a job and you are not considered to be the right fit, then your resume might go into a filing cabinet or database and stay there. On the other hand, a recruiter can often get your qualifications in front of the hiring manager to be reviewed. As a result, they’re often able to get you an interview, and once you’re in front of the hiring manager in an interview situation, your chances of getting hired are greater.
However, it is also a good idea to choose one recruiter with whom to work. There is such a thing as overexposure.
Julea: What do you mean?
Stacy: If three recruiters are contacting the same hiring manager to talk about you, it can have a negative effect and can result in you looking less credible. It makes you seem desperate in your search and you don’t stand out much when the hiring manager keeps hearing your story from three different people.
The hiring managers at some of our firm’s clients have told me that it raised a red flag when the same candidate kept coming into the company through more than one source. In fact, they actually started questioning the credibility of that candidate. The hiring manager started to wonder, is this candidate about to get fired or do they change jobs often? These are legitimate concerns that hiring managers have, and you don’t want to give them a reason to question the legitimacy of your candidacy or the circumstances surrounding your job search.
But the value that an Animal Health executive recruiter or Veterinary recruiter provides still does not end there.
Julea: What other value does an Animal Health executive recruiter or veterinary recruiter provide?
Stacy: An experienced recruiter can give a job seeker or candidate valuable insight into an organization’s environment and culture. They can also give the candidate a feel for the hiring manager’s personality and their “hot buttons,” as well as their expectations for what they want in a good candidate. A recruiter can give you an up-close view of the employer, they can provide interview feedback, and they also help with salary negotiations.
Julea: That is a big benefit with helping with salary negotiations. Salary negotiations can be uncomfortable for some people.
Stacy: Yes, and that might be one of the best forms of value that a recruiter can provide. Just because a person is considered a top candidate in the Animal Health industry or Veterinary profession, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are good at negotiation. By relying on a recruiter during the negotiation stage of the hiring process, you give yourself a much better chance of securing the best offer of employment and compensation package possible.
Julea: Stacy, we’re just about out of time. Is there anything else that you’d like to add before we end today’s episode?
Stacy: Yes, I want to add one more thing about the value that an Animal Health executive recruiter or Veterinary recruiter can provide to job seekers and candidates in the marketplace. That value is tied to the fact that a recruiter can relieve some of the stress associated with changing jobs. Changing jobs and exploring employment opportunities can be stressful, and it is even more so now to some people now that we’re in the midst of a global pandemic.
As an example, our firm, The VET Recruiter, holds our candidates’ hands during the interview process. We prepare them every step of the way, through each interview they have with one of our clients.
Many of our candidates have told us that it was our coaching that got them the job and that they would not have gotten the job through their own efforts. These are personal touches that you would not be able to get from posting your resume on a job board or applying to the company directly. In fact, some of our hiring managers have stated that our candidates are better prepared walking into an interview than those candidates they get through other avenues.
Once again, this increases the chances that you will be hired over someone who applies on their own, without representation by a recruiter.
Julea: Stacy, this is great information. For those in our listening audience today who are open to other of opportunities I encourage you to visit the The Vet Recruiter website to review the open Animal Health jobs and veterinarian jobs.
Stacy: Yes, we have a number of great veterinarian jobs posted on The VET Recruiter website as well as some great Animal Health Jobs. For those listeners who want to change their current situation and are interested in exploring Animal Health jobs or Veterinarian jobs, I invite you to visit our website at www.thevetrecruiter.com. We have new veterinarian jobs and Animal Health jobs posted on a regular basis. For those hiring managers in our listening audience who need to hire top Animal Health Executives or hire veterinarians I encourage you to contact me as well through The VET Recruiter website.
Julea: Once again, the website address for The VET Recruiter is www.thevetrecruiter.com. Stacy, as always, thank you for joining us today.
Stacy: It has been my pleasure Julea, and I look forward to our next episode of The Animal Health and Veterinary Employment Insider!
Notes: The VET Recruiter is your source for finding top Animal Health Executives for the Animal Health Industry and Veterinarians.