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* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio

Getting great technical people through the door is hard. Keeping them is where most companies really struggle. In a specialist industry like animal health, the talent pool is small. The expertise takes years to build, and your competitors are fishing in exactly the same pond.

So today I wanna get practical. We are gonna talk about what actually works when it comes to attracting and retaining technical talent. And I’ll be honest with you, some of it isn’t glamorous, but it’s where the gap opens up between the companies that keep winning and ones that keep wondering why the best people keep leaving?

Welcome to the Animal Health Show by S8. I’m your host, Shannon Wood, and this is where we talk about the latest trends shaping the animal health industry. We’ll be sitting down with leading voices from across the sector, sharing practical insights to help you grow your animal health business, build a stronger team or land your dream role. If you are looking for your next dream job or you are ready to hire your next standout team member, reach out to us at S8 Expert Recruitment Solutions. You’ll find our contact details in the show notes for today’s episode. Alright, let’s talk animal health.

Before we talk strategy, let’s be clear-eyed about the market we’re in. Technical talent in the animal health, and I’m talking about roles like technical services vets, senior nutritionist, reg affairs, r and d scientists, quality assurance leads, field technical specialists. These are very niche roles, so the pipeline of candidates is small because.

You can’t fast track the experience. A strong regulatory affairs expert in, say, vet biologics for example, has come up through specific pathway that takes years. You can’t hire from a generalist pool and hope for the best. So what this means in practice is that you’re often competing with the same handful of companies for the same people, and those people know their value.

If they’re not purely motivated by, say, salary, although salary absolutely matters and we’ll come back to that. But they’re also thinking about the work itself, the quality of leadership above them, and whether the organization will genuinely invest in them. There’s also geographic reality.

So depending on your market technical talent may be concentrated in particular cities or regions. So if you are asking people to relocate, that’s a real barrier, especially for people with established families, partners with their own careers. And then there’s the generational shift more on this in the next episode, but the way the younger generation think about employment is really different. Purpose matters more. Flexibility matters more. The old pitch of a stable company with good benefits doesn’t land the way it used to. So attracting technical talent, how do you get good people interested in your organization? The first thing I’d say is know your story.

So what makes your company compelling place to work? For someone with deep technical expertise, not just like a mission statement or corporate values, the real stuff. Are you working on genuinely interesting signs? Are you growing into new markets? Do your technical people get to present at conferences or publish influence product development?

These are the things that matter to technical professionals. You can’t articulate why top talent or candidates should join you over your competitor, you’ll lose them. And the answer needs to be specific to technical roles, not the same pitch you’d give a salesperson. Now, second, your job description needs work.

I see so many technical job descriptions that are essentially a list of tasks and requirements. They don’t tell the candidate anything about. What they’re actually gonna be doing day to day, or who they’re gonna be working with, what problems they’ll be solving or what success looks like in 12 months.

Technical people are detail orientated, so give them the detail, be honest about the challenges as well as the opportunities. Third, think carefully about sourcing strategy. For specialist technical roles, posting on job board and waiting is rarely enough. You need to be actively building relationships in the industry at conferences, through technical forums via professional associations.

The best candidates often aren’t actively looking. They need to know who you are before a role even comes up. This is where specialist recruiters add real value, not just as a CV forwarding service, but as someone who genuinely knows the talent landscape, has relationships with passive candidates, and can represent your organization credibly to people who aren’t on the market.

Fourth, this is a big one. Move fast. Technical hiring processes that drag on for three months lose candidates, not because the candidates are impatient, but because the good ones have options. If you’ve found someone exceptional, they’re probably talking to at least one other organization Every week, you delay is at risk.

That doesn’t mean being reckless. It means having a clear, efficient process with defined decision markers, timely feedback and genuine mandate to make decisions. Lastly, salary and conditions needs to be competitive. I know that sounds obvious, but I still see organizations lose strong candidates because they’re benchmarking against what they paid someone five years ago, rather than what the market looks like today, or this is a killer for me, squabbling over 5,000 or $10,000. Do your research, technical salaries have moved significantly in recent years, so if you want top talent, you have to pay for it. Getting great people through the door is only half the equation.

Keeping them is where most organizations struggle even more. The number one reason I hear from technical professionals who leave is not salary, it’s a lack of development. They feel they’ve stopped learning, they’re not being stretched, and they can’t see where their career goes next. That’s fixable, but you have to be intentional about it.

What does good development look like for technical talent? Now, look, obviously it varies, but broadly meaningful projects that challenge them. Maybe access to external learning, professional communities, clear feedback on performance and honest conversations about career pathways. It doesn’t have to be formal program with a big budget.

It does have to be consistent and genuine. The second thing that matters enormously is the quality of management. Technical professionals, especially strong ones, will tolerate a lot if their direct manager is good. Now, they will leave quickly if their manager is poor, and by poor, I don’t just mean technically incompetent, managers who micromanage, who don’t advocate for their team, who are inaccessible, or, I’ve heard this one, take credit for others work. If you are a business leader listening to this, here’s a direct question. Do you actually know how your technical managers are performing as managers, not just technical contributors, because those are very different things.

A great scientist does not automatically make great people leader. The transition needs support. Third, recognition technical work is often invisible to broader business. So the regulatory submission that took six months, the troubleshooting that saved a production batch, the technical training that kept key customer.

Make it visible. Recognize it. Thank people for it genuinely, specifically, and publicly. Fourth, flexibility for roles that can accommodate remote or hybrid arrangements without compromising the work. You’ll retain more people by offering it for roles that genuinely require physical presence.

Manufacturing lab work field roles. Be upfront about that from the start and think about what flexibility looks like within these constraints. And finally, exit data. If technical people are leaving, find out why. Actually find out not a bland exit form that no one reads. Have a real conversation. You can’t fix a retention problem if you don’t understand it.

Here’s a reframe I find useful when I talk to leaders about a topic. Attracting and retaining technical talent isn’t a HR function. It’s a business strategy. The organizations that get this right have a structural advantage over the ones that don’t in speed of innovation, quality of execution. Customer relationships, the technical people in your business are the carriers of intellectual property, so the institutional knowledge, and in many cases, the customer trusts when they leave.

They take all of that with them, sometimes straight to a competitor. So investing in your employer proposition, the technical talent in your manager’s capability as people, leaders, and in real development pathways. So that’s not a nice to have, that’s a competitive priority. Wanna have a chat about what top talent are looking for in your industry?

Give me a buzz and I can share my industry insights With over 20 years in the animal health industry and having thousands of conversations each year, I have the finger on the pulse. The contact details for S8 are in the show notes for this episode. Thanks for tuning in and I’ll chat to you again in the fortnight.

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Thanks so much for tuning in to today’s episode of The Animal Health Show by S8. If you’ve found the value in this conversation, please share it with your colleague and industry mate or on social media so we can keep the discussions moving across the sector. If you’d like to get in touch, all of our details are in the show notes for today’s episode.

I thank you for listening, and I look forward to chatting with you again in the fortnight.

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio