An Employer’s Biggest Challenge: How It Handles People

by Stacy Pursell, The VET Recruiter®

Employers in the Animal Health industry and Veterinary profession face plenty of challenges. They face all of the challenges that every employer faces, and then they face the challenges that are unique to the profession in which they operate.

However, when you get right down to it, an employer’s biggest challenge is how it handles people. More specifically, it’s how it handles the people that it hires and employs.

I’ve written articles, recorded podcasts, and given presentations about the topic of personal branding. It’s true that those articles, podcasts, and presentations were geared toward job seekers and candidates.

Despite that, the topic of employer branding is still an important one within the employment marketplace, including in the Animal Health industry, and the Veterinary profession. And at is core, employer branding is all about how the management of an organization handles candidates and employees. In other words, it’s all about how management treats candidates and employees.

Universal rules of engagement

There are fundamental rules regarding human interaction that are universal and unbreakable. These rules dictate that people are attracted to certain types of other people and they’re repelled by other certain types of people. And when I shares these rules, you’ll probably agree that they’re both simple and logical. Here they are.

People are attracted to others who relieve pressure, reduce stress and do not cause drama in their lives.

On the other hand, people are repelled by others who create pressure and stress and do cause drama in their lives.

So the basis of the experience that your organization provides for other people should involve relieving pressure, reducing stress, and not causing drama.

Using these universal rules of engagement as a guide, we can now create some other simple rules for employers. These rules are as follows:

1. If you want to hire the best candidates in the market, you must convince those candidates that your organization’s culture is one that does not create undue amounts of pressure and stress and does not contain an inordinate amount of drama.
2. If you want to retain the best candidates in the market once you hire them, you must prove to those candidates that your organization’s culture is one that does not create undue amounts of pressure and stress and does not contain an inordinate amount of drama.

Why am I using words such as “undue” and “inordinate”? Because it’s almost impossible for a workplace setting to contain absolutely no stress, no pressure, and no drama. That type of workplace setting doesn’t exist. It’s a myth. However, candidates and employees don’t like stress, pressure, and drama any more than you do. They want to avoid it if the can and limit it if they can’t.

So what can you do?

The role of the hiring process

Obviously, the best place to start when it comes to proving to top candidates that your organization can and does handle people well is the hiring process. This is especially true during the interviewing stage of the hiring process.

I’ve addressed the hiring process on numerous occasions in a variety of articles and blog posts for employers. That’s because the process is extremely important in terms of an employer’s attempts to hire successfully in this candidates’ market. I’ve seen countless candidates who were interested in a position before the interview stage of the hiring process, and after they witnessed how the organization handled the interview stage, they were no longer interested in the position. The difference in their interest was like “night and day.”

Why is that? Because when they saw that the organization’s management was not able to handle the hiring process well, including the people involved in that process, they doubted whether they would be managed well once they became an employee. As a result, they dropped out of the hiring process and the organization missed out on what could have been a great hire.

The top candidates in the Animal Health industry and Veterinary profession have plenty of options. The onus is on you as the employer to convince these candidates to choose your organization’s employment option over the other options they have, including the option to stay with their current employer. If you don’t manage people well during the hiring process, then you will NOT convince them that your employment opportunity is the best one. Consequently, they will not choose it.

With all of this in mind, the following seven steps can help prove to top candidates that your organization’s culture is one that does not create undue amounts of pressure and stress and does not contain an inordinate amount of drama:

1. Showing that you value both the candidates’ time and their confidentiality
2. Effective communication throughout the duration of the process, including on the telephone or via email
3. Consistent follow-up after events such as phone screenings and face-to-face interviews
4. The clear setting of expectations, so that candidates know where they stand in the process and what should happen next
5. Keeping candidates engaged and making them feel as though they’re valued and wanted as a potential new employee
6. Not making unrealistic or unreasonable demands on candidates’ time, even if those demands are more convenient for you or the organization
7. Making a compelling offer to your top choice candidate and not trying to low-ball them on the offer

Hopefully, this does not seem like too much effort. This is exactly the kind of effort it takes to hire top candidates in the Animal Health industry and Veterinary profession. Since these candidates have so many options, you must convince them of a lot of things.

Most of all, you must convince them that your employment opportunity is the next best step in their career. And to convince them that this is the case, you must also convince them that your organization’s culture is one that does not create undue amounts of pressure and stress and does not contain an inordinate amount of drama.

And then, after you hire them, you must prove to them that’s the case. If you’re able to accomplish that, then you have overcome your biggest organizational challenge.

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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