The Veterinary Staffing Crisis Has a New Playbook. Here Is What Is In It.

If you have tried to hire a veterinarian in the last three years, you already know what the data confirms. Demand for qualified veterinary professionals is outpacing supply by a margin that is not narrowing. The candidate who accepts your offer today has three other offers on the table. The technician you finally trained to the level you need leaves for a practice that pays fifteen dollars more an hour. The associate you recruited from out of state gives notice at six months because the culture was not what they expected.

The veterinary staffing crisis is not new. The approaches most practices are still using to address it are.

Gwendolyn Lowder Delavar has been recruiting in veterinary medicine since 1992. She has watched this profession navigate staffing challenges across three decades of change and has spent that time building the systems, relationships, and institutional knowledge that separate practices that retain great people from practices that are permanently in hiring mode. Her new book puts that body of knowledge into a format that practice owners, managers, and anyone responsible for building a veterinary team can actually use.

What the Book Is

Published in January 2026, "Your Veterinary Dream Team: A Practical Guide to Attracting and Retaining Top Talent" is a direct response to the staffing conditions veterinary medicine is currently navigating. Delavar does not write around the problem. She names it plainly: finding and keeping great veterinarians, technicians, and support staff has never been more difficult, and practices that continue to rely on outdated hiring methods are not going to compete effectively in the current talent market.

The book is structured as a practical guide rather than a theoretical framework. Delavar covers the full arc of the hiring and retention process, from writing job postings that attract qualified candidates to conducting interviews that reveal genuine strengths and motivations, evaluating culture fit, knowing when and how to partner effectively with external recruiters, and building the long-term retention strategies that keep strong team members engaged after the hire.

The through line is a core argument that Delavar makes explicitly: recruiting has become a leadership skill. Practices that treat hiring as an administrative function, something that happens reactively when a role opens, will continue to face the same outcomes. Practices that treat recruiting as a strategic discipline, something that reflects how the organization thinks about its culture, its values, and the experience it offers to the people who work there, will build teams that perform differently.

"This book was written for leaders who are tired of reacting to staffing shortages and ready to take control of their hiring outcomes," Delavar said. "Recruiting in veterinary medicine has become a leadership skill. When it's done thoughtfully and strategically, it can transform not only a practice's team, but its culture, profitability, and quality of care."

Who Gwendolyn Lowder Delavar Is

Delavar is the founder and president of VetProCentral and the founding president of the National Veterinary Talent Acquisition Association, an organization she created to establish professional standards and community for the veterinary recruiting field. She has spent more than 30 years helping veterinary practices across the United States and internationally hire, train, and retain talent. She runs her San Diego-based firm alongside her daughter Julia, with a shared commitment to building stronger teams for a profession they have both devoted their careers to.

That biography matters in the context of this book because the credibility behind it is not theoretical. Delavar is not an academic writing about hiring from the outside. She is a practitioner who has placed candidates, navigated difficult searches, worked through the specific friction points of veterinary culture fit and compensation negotiation and contract terms, and seen what separates the practices that build lasting teams from the ones that perpetually struggle to hold them.

That lived experience shows in the specificity of the content. The templates and tools in the book are not generic HR frameworks applied to veterinary medicine. They are built from the ground up for the realities of veterinary practice, where the hiring pool is small, the stakes of a bad fit are high, and the cost of turnover, in lost productivity, in recruiting expense, in team morale, is enormous.

Why This Conversation Matters Right Now

The veterinary profession is at an inflection point in how it thinks about people. For a long time, the profession operated on an implicit assumption that the work itself would be enough to attract and retain talent. That talented people would accept difficult schedules, compressed compensation, and challenging working conditions because veterinary medicine is a calling and not just a job.

That assumption has been steadily eroded by a generation of veterinary professionals who are making different calculations. The debt load entering the profession has increased dramatically. The emotional toll of clinical work, including compassion fatigue and moral injury, is being named and discussed in ways it was not a decade ago. The range of career options available to someone with a veterinary degree has expanded. And the practices competing for talent are no longer just other veterinary hospitals. They are corporations with human resources departments, signing bonuses, and retention infrastructure that independent practices often cannot match dollar for dollar.

In that environment, the quality of the hiring process and the intentionality of the retention strategy are competitive differentiators. A practice that communicates its culture clearly in a job posting, that conducts interviews designed to genuinely assess fit, that onboards new hires with structure and investment, and that builds a work environment people actually want to stay in is not just being a good employer. It is making a strategic decision that affects patient care, client experience, and long-term practice viability.

Delavar's book is a resource for practices ready to make that decision with intention.

For the Veterinary Professionals on the Other Side of the Table

Most of Vet Candy's community is not the practice owner or the hiring manager. Most of you are the candidate, the associate, the technician, the new graduate trying to figure out what a good offer looks like and what questions to ask before you sign.

Understanding how thoughtful practices approach hiring is useful information from that side of the table too. A practice that writes the kind of job posting Delavar describes, that conducts the kind of interview she outlines, and that has built the kind of retention strategy she advocates for is a practice that has thought seriously about the people who work there. That is a signal worth recognizing when you are evaluating where to build your career.

The staffing crisis is a two-sided problem. Practices need better tools for finding and keeping great people. Professionals need better tools for identifying the practices worth joining. A book that improves the quality of hiring conversations across the profession makes that whole system function better for everyone in it.

"Your Veterinary Dream Team: A Practical Guide to Attracting and Retaining Top Talent" is available now. For more information visit vetprocentral.com or nvtaa.org.

Vet Candy covers career, practice management, and community news for 50,000 plus veterinary professionals. myvetcandy.com