A veterinary practice with an open role today is rarely short on candidates because none exist.
More often, the practice is looking in the wrong places, or moving too slowly to keep the good candidates it does find. In The VET Recruiter's 2026 Workforce/Workplace Survey, 51.5% of veterinary and animal health employers disagreed that their organization had experienced "no trouble finding the right candidates" over the past year, while only 32.9% agreed it had gone smoothly.
The talent pool really is tighter than it used to be. But a shrinking supply of qualified people only explains part of why so many roles stay open for months.
The Talent Pool Really Is Shrinking
Employment for veterinarians is projected to grow 9% between 2025 and 2035, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), much faster than the average for all occupations, adding roughly 3,100 openings a year. Credentialed veterinary technicians are growing at a comparable pace. New graduates entering the field each year aren't keeping up with that growth.
The gap shows up immediately in open positions. Today's Veterinary Business reports that more than 10,000 veterinarian and veterinary technician roles sit open at any given time, a number kept high by burnout and stress pushing experienced people out of clinical practice even as new openings keep appearing.
A practice hiring today is competing against every other open veterinary role in the country, not just the clinic down the street, for a pool of qualified people that isn't growing fast enough to fill them all.
Most Practices Are Recruiting in Only One Direction
Even in a tight market, a lot of the qualified people a practice wants aren't visible to a standard job posting, because they aren't looking at job postings at all. Word of mouth is the leading way veterinary and animal health employers actually make a hire, selected by 58.2% of hiring respondents in the same 2026 survey, ahead of every other channel:
That gap matters because job boards, veterinary-specific or general, only reach people who are actively searching. The same survey found that 58.7% of respondents hadn't been on a single interview in the past year, even though 76.3% said they look for a new role at least occasionally.
A posting that leaves out pay, or reads like a duties list instead of a reason to apply, loses candidates before a single application arrives. Hound's guide to building a veterinary employer brand covers the deeper fix for that side of the problem: what the posting says, and what a practice's reputation already says before anyone applies.
The Ones Who Do Apply Often Slip Away Anyway
Finding a qualified candidate and losing one to a slow process are two different failures, and the second is easier to fix.
Today's Veterinary Business reports that the strongest veterinary candidates are often off the market within 10 days of becoming available, gone to whichever practice moves first, not necessarily the one offering the most.
Multiple interview rounds, scheduling delays, and slow-arriving offers are the most common reasons practices lose candidates they were genuinely trying to hire, per the same report.
A candidate weighing several opportunities at once reads a slow process as disorganization or disinterest, whether or not that's true, and drifts toward whichever employer responds first.
Closing a hard-to-fill role fastest usually comes down to deciding the interview rounds and the decision timeline before the search starts, not while it's already underway.
These three problems reinforce each other: a smaller qualified pool, most of it invisible to a standard job post, and a hiring process slow enough to lose the candidates who do apply. Fixing any one of them helps. Fixing where a practice looks and how fast it moves once it finds someone worth hiring helps the most.
That's the gap Scout by Hound exists to close, putting an opening in front of the veterinary professionals worth hiring instead of waiting for them to go looking first.