Best practices to attract and keep top talent in vet med
Bottom line
Veterinary practices trying to attract and keep top talent need to think beyond salary alone, according to a recent Veterinary Practice News article on recruitment and retention. The piece argues that compensation still matters, but practices are more likely to compete successfully when they also address scheduling flexibility, team culture, career development, and day-to-day workload. Broader industry research supports that view: AAHA’s Stay, Please studies found that fair compensation is a major attrition driver, while disconnects between leadership and staff over appreciation, career development, and caring leadership can also push people out. Meanwhile, AVMA’s 2025 profession report said veterinarians considering leaving were more likely to cite mental health, lifestyle, and work hours than pay alone. (aaha.org)
Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, the takeaway is practical. Recruiting may start with pay and benefits, but retention depends on whether teams feel supported once they arrive. AAHA’s research suggests practices with turnover problems should first shore up foundational issues like fair compensation and appreciation before expecting loyalty-building efforts to work. AVMA’s findings also point to flexible schedules, protected breaks, and support for time off as concrete steps employers can take to reduce turnover risk. (aaha.org)
What to watch: Expect more practices to pair compensation reviews with role-specific retention plans, especially as workforce shortages and competition for veterinarians and technicians continue. (veterinarypracticenews.com)
Veterinary hiring remains difficult, and the latest guidance for practices is increasingly clear: pay matters, but it’s not enough on its own. In Veterinary Practice News, a recent article on attracting and keeping top talent framed recruitment and retention as a broader management challenge, one that now includes compensation, culture, flexibility, workload, and clearer pathways for growth. That message lands at a time when the profession is still grappling with persistent staffing pressure. (veterinarypracticenews.com)
The backdrop is a veterinary workforce that remains strained even as some wellbeing indicators have improved. AVMA’s 2025 report said burnout scores have eased somewhat from pandemic highs, but 8.6% of veterinarians still reported considering leaving the profession. Among those thinking about leaving, the leading reasons were better mental health and lifestyle or work-hour concerns, suggesting that retention pressure is now tied as much to sustainability of the job as to compensation. (ebusiness.avma.org)
AAHA’s retention research adds more detail on what that means inside practices. Phase 1 of the Stay, Please study, based on responses from more than 14,000 veterinary professionals, found that some factors function mainly as attrition drivers, especially fair compensation, while others are stronger loyalty builders when done well. Phase 2, published in February 2025 and expanded on in subsequent AAHA coverage, found that leaders and team members often agree on which factors matter, but not always on what those factors actually mean in practice. Appreciation, caring leadership, and career development were among the areas where definitions and expectations could diverge by role. (aaha.org)
That’s important context for the Veterinary Practice News framing. The article’s central point, based on the source summary, is that a healthy compensation package is necessary, but practices also need a wider set of recruitment and retention techniques if they want to compete for talent. Recent industry commentary points in the same direction. In AAHA’s March 2025 announcement on Stay, Please Phase II, Chief Medical Officer Jessica Vogelsang said staff in the same practice may identify the same retention factors, yet experience them very differently by role. AAHA CEO Garth Jordan added that if practices can’t offer a living wage to credentialed technicians or support staff, those employees may not be able to afford to stay. (aaha.org)
Other industry voices are also tying retention to operational design, not just hiring tactics. In a June 12, 2026, Veterinary Practice News article, Charlotte Weir wrote that practices are beginning to use relief veterinarians more strategically, not just as emergency coverage, but to protect teams from burnout, expand appointment capacity, and create a lower-risk path to full-time hiring. She also argued that tools such as AI transcription can reduce after-hours recordkeeping and administrative burden, which may improve retention by making clinical work more manageable. Those examples suggest that “best practices” for keeping talent increasingly include workflow and staffing model changes, not only compensation adjustments. (veterinarypracticenews.com)
Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, this is really about matching the employment offer to the lived experience of the job. A practice may recruit successfully with a competitive salary, signing incentives, or benefits, but retention will be fragile if team members encounter chronic schedule overload, unclear advancement, poor communication, or a culture that feels misaligned with what was promised. AAHA’s hierarchy of needs model suggests practices with turnover issues should address foundational attrition drivers first, especially fair compensation and appreciation, before expecting higher-level efforts like culture branding or professional fulfillment messaging to stick. AVMA’s recommendations, including flexible hours, designated breaks, and encouraging use of leave, reinforce that retention is increasingly an operations issue as much as an HR one. (aaha.org)
For practice leaders, that means “top talent” may be won less by flashy recruiting language and more by credibility: transparent pay, realistic scheduling, support for wellbeing, and role-specific development. It also means listening more carefully to how veterinarians, technicians, assistants, and managers define a good workplace, because AAHA’s data suggest those definitions are not interchangeable across roles. Practices that close that gap may have an advantage in a market where replacing a veterinarian can be costly and where workforce shortages are expected to remain a long-term challenge. (aaha.org)
What to watch: The next phase for many practices will likely be turning broad retention advice into measurable plans, including compensation benchmarking, stay interviews, workload redesign, and role-specific career pathways, as workforce pressure continues across veterinary medicine. (aaha.org)