by Stacy Pursell, CPC, CERS
The VET Recruiter®
During the course of my career as an Animal Health Executive Search Consultant and Veterinary recruiter, I’ve been asked many of the same questions. These questions often form the basis of my newsletter articles and blog posts, and just such a question is the center of the blog post you’re reading right now.
That’s because I’ve had more than one hiring manager ask me about the difference between using a recruiter to hire and using national job board posting sites. This, of course, is a logical question, especially for an organization that is looking to hire. Consequently, I thought I would take the time to explain in detail the benefits of using an Animal Health Executive Search Consultant or Veterinary recruiter instead of the job board posting sites.
When hiring managers ask me this question, one of the reasons they do is they’re not thinking in terms of active job seekers vs. passive candidates. Any discussion of hiring in this current environment must be in these terms, because they directly impact the size of the talent pool. That’s because these two groups are not as similar as some people might think, and the size of the talent pool is incredibly important if an employer is looking to hire the best candidates in the market.
With all of this in mind, let’s look at the size of the talent pool when using job board posting sites and when using an Animal Health Executive Search Consultant or Veterinary recruiter.
Job Board Posting Sites
In this scenario, there is a limit to the size of the talent pool. That’s because the people who typically use job board posting sites are those who are actively looking for a new job. These are, of course, active job seekers. However, they do not represent every qualified candidate in the employment marketplace. That’s because the marketplace also contains passive candidates.
Passive candidates are not actively looking for a new job. The reason? Their current employer is keeping them relatively satisfied, not to mention very busy. That means passive candidates are not looking on the Internet for jobs, which means they’re not looking at job board posting sites. As a result, the talent pool associated with using job board posting sites does not include passive candidates.
The reason this is important is that passive candidates typically constitute the top talent in the marketplace (defined as the top 5% to 10%). So if you only use job board posting sites to find candidates for your open positions, then your talent pool going to be limited. Even more importantly, though, is the fact that your talent pool is also going to be missing some of the most highly qualified professionals in the marketplace.
But wait, there’s more. According to a study conducted a couple of years ago by one of the major job board posting sites (CareerBuilder), 60% of job seekers quit in the middle of filling out online job applications. And they quit for two main reasons:
- The length of the online application process
- The complexity of the online application process
So if you only use the job board posting sites, not only will top passive candidates not be in your talent pool, but only 40% of active job seekers will be in it, as well. Let’s qualify that further: only 40% of the active job seekers that actually see your online job ad and start the application process will be in your talent pool. As you can see, this approach greatly reduces both the size of your talent pool and your hiring effectiveness.
Animal Health Executive Search Consultant or Veterinary Recruiter
When you use a recruiter to help fill your organization’s positions, you increase the size of your talent pool. In fact, the size of your pool increases to nearly every single qualified candidate in the employment marketplace. This includes, of course, the most critical portion of the marketplace—passive candidates. However, the benefits of using a recruiter extend far beyond just the expansion of your organization’s talent pool.
That’s because an Animal Health Executive Search Consultant or Veterinary recruiter provides a tremendous amount of value to organizations:
- Recruiters not only know who the top candidates are in the marketplace, but they’ve also built relationships with those candidates.
- As a result, recruiters know the career goals and ambitions of these candidates, and more importantly, they know what kind of opportunity it would take for them to make a move.
- Recruiters have the ability to convince a top candidate to consider your organization’s employment opportunity, even if they were not actively looking for a new job.
- Recruiters have the ability to convince a top candidate to enter your organization’s hiring process in pursuit of a new opportunity.
- Recruiters help keep top candidates engaged throughout the duration of the hiring process, decreasing the chances that those candidates will drop out of the process.
- Recruiters help close a top candidate during the offer stage of the process, extending the offer to the candidate personally to increase the likelihood that the candidate will accept it.
- Recruiters help with the onboarding process, further ensuring that the candidate will start the job on their first day of work and not “ghost” their new employer.
- Recruiters reduce the amount of time that it takes to fill an open position, thereby reducing the costs associated with leaving the position open for an extended period of time.
- Recruiters reduce the likelihood that an organization will hire someone they shouldn’t, thereby also reducing the costs associated with making a bad hire (including the costs of having to hire another person).
As you can see, an Animal Health Executive Search Consultant or Veterinary recruiter provides far more value and many more benefits for an employer than if that employer was to use online job board posting sites alone. A recruiter can help to fill your organization’s most important, high-level positions with the best candidate in the employment marketplace in a shorter amount of time than if you didn’t use a recruiter.
The evidence is overwhelming. Using a recruiter beats only using job board posting sites, and it does so in every way that’s conducive to the long-term health and well-being of your Animal Health organization or Veterinary practice.
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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