The best veterinary candidates don't wait around anymore. A practice running three interview rounds and two weeks of internal deliberation before extending an offer isn't losing that candidate over pay, benefits, or culture fit. It's losing them to the calendar. According to Today's Veterinary Business, veterinary recruiter Stacy Pursell puts the window at about 10 days, roughly how long a strong DVM or technician candidate stays on the market before another practice locks them down.

Why the Vet Med Talent Pool Moves This Fast

More than 10,000 veterinarian and veterinary technician positions are open at any given moment, per Pursell's count. The gap isn't closing either. Veterinarian employment is projected to grow 10% between 2024 and 2034, with an average of 3,000 openings a year. About a third of those are entirely new positions, not replacements for people who left. Demand for veterinary professionals keeps outpacing the supply entering the field. That means the candidates who are qualified and available get scooped up first, often by whichever practice moves fastest, not whichever offers the most.

That math changes what "a good hiring process" actually means. A five-round interview loop that would have been unremarkable a decade ago now reads as indecision to a candidate juggling two or three offers at once.

A Five-Point Framework for Hiring Before the Window Closes

Pursell's framework isn't about skipping due diligence. It's about removing the delays that have nothing to do with actually evaluating the candidate:

  1. Set a clear timeline up front. Tell candidates exactly when they'll hear about next steps, and hold yourself to it. Silence between interview stages is one of the fastest ways to lose someone to a competing offer.
  2. Streamline the interview rounds. Involve only the people whose input is genuinely needed to decide. Combine rounds where possible instead of scheduling a new one for every stakeholder who wants to weigh in.
  3. Communicate consistently, even with no news yet. A quick note that a decision is still pending beats silence. Candidates read silence as disorganization, not thoroughness.
  4. Prepare the offer before you need it. Settle the compensation range and who has final approval authority before the last interview, not after. That's the difference between an offer going out within a day or two of deciding and one that takes a week. A candidate weighing that offer against another practice's terms can lean on Hound's guide to negotiating a first veterinary job offer to know what's reasonable to ask for.
  5. Trust the process once a candidate clears the bar. If someone meets the practice's criteria and fits the team, hesitating to keep looking usually costs more than it saves.

Every point on that list is something a practice can start doing this week, without adding headcount or budget. What it actually takes is treating a strong candidate's 10-day clock as seriously as their resume. Practices that want a faster pipeline increasingly list their openings directly on Hound, where the candidates already active in vet med's job market can find them the moment they start looking.