WellHaven Paw-tners With iHire for a “Quality Over Quantity” Approach to Veterinary Recruiting

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Background

Since 2017, WellHaven Pet Health has been committed to helping veterinarians and their teams grow personally and professionally. Headquartered in Vancouver, Washington, WellHaven builds and buys industry-leading practices, and currently operates 40 veterinary hospitals in the U.S. The organization is committed to providing doctors with an opportunity to share in the rewards of practice ownership without the risk associated.

Hiring is an ongoing effort at WellHaven, which recruits for various positions across its hospital network – from doctors to technicians and receptionists. WellHaven is always seeking veterinary professionals who are “dynamic, curious, and love the challenge of solving problems,” and can support their mission to change the way veterinary practices engage with their clients and build relationships.

Challenges

When WellHaven reopened after the COVID-19 lockdowns in the spring of 2020, veterinary medicine began exploding. According to the American Pet Products Association, 11.38 million U.S. households adopted a new pet during the pandemic. The growing demand for pet care led to an increased need for hiring, and time was of the essence to find qualified veterinary staff to meet WellHaven’s hospitals’ recruiting requisites.

WellHaven’s recruiters relied on both active and passive tactics for sourcing candidates, which generated varying results. Job boards through veterinary associations proved to be too narrow (job seekers must belong to the organization to use them), and general job boards often brought in unqualified applicants. Additionally, WellHaven grappled with managing candidates, relying on multiple spreadsheets and online tools to track applicants throughout the hiring process.

Solutions

WellHaven found an ideal solution in iHire – an industry-specific recruitment platform with 50+ talent communities, including iHireVeterinary, comprising more than 418,000 veterinary job seekers. To reach those job seekers, WellHaven opted for iHire’s Job Slots, interchangeable, flexible job postings. WellHaven selected a 10-Slot subscription, allowing them to post multiple jobs at a time, and swap postings in and out as needed.

Through iHire’s advanced job matching technology, postings were promoted to relevant candidates on iHireVeterinary, through branded email alerts, and on WellHaven’s company profile.

Unlike many other job boards that require employers to manually repost jobs to keep them fresh, iHire’s platform automatically pushed WellHaven’s jobs to the top of search results every 15 days, helping to attract new applicants. And, through iHire’s Nationwide Upgrade option and geo-targeting capabilities, WellHaven could reach candidates near the hospital that was hiring.

In addition to Job Slots, WellHaven leveraged iHire’s Resume Search. Recruiters received daily notifications when matching resumes were uploaded and searched the database a couple of times a week using iHire’s intuitive Boolean search tools. Resume Search was optimal for recruiting WellHaven’s hardest-to-fill positions, such as veterinarians and technicians.

Lastly, WellHaven could easily manage its candidates from direct applies and Resume Search right on iHire’s platform. Without the need for its “clunky” spreadsheets, WellHaven could sort, tag, disqualify, pipeline, and message candidates and track where each applicant stood in the recruitment process. Plus, by looking at each candidate’s iScore – an iHire tool that grades the applicant’s resume against a job posting’s requirements – WellHaven could see at a glance if a candidate was a good fit.

Results

To date, WellHaven has made four high-quality hires through iHireVeterinary – a solid number from WellHaven’s perspective. The company also experienced an above-average 15% view-to-apply rate (the industry average is approximately 13%), meaning that 15% of candidates who viewed a job also applied.

Without a doubt, the “quality over quantity” approach enabled by iHire’s industry-focused solutions allowed WellHaven to hire qualified talent faster and more efficiently.

Further, if applicants were not the right fit for a specific opening, WellHaven added them to their talent pipeline through the iHire platform’s candidate management tools. Currently, WellHaven has 59 candidates in their talent pipeline to help them fill future roles quickly.

“WellHaven has received better-qualified candidates through iHire than anywhere else – fewer candidates, but they are more qualified,” said Jennifer Bruns, VP, Provider Relations, WellHaven. “The candidate management tools are easy to use and the support iHire’s team has provided has been really high-touch. As a practice, we gravitate towards vendors who we see as partners. Working with iHire is more like a relationship and less transactional, and we appreciate that.”

Looking forward, WellHaven is preparing to implement an applicant tracking system (ATS) and integrate it with iHire’s platform for easier candidate management and even faster recruiting.

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