Hiring New Grads: Mentorship That Actually Retains

AAHA's 2023 Mentoring Guidelines state plainly: "lack of high-quality mentorship remains one of the most common reasons new graduates leave their first practice." The guidelines cite two peer-reviewed studies behind that claim — one from New Zealand, one from Canada — so treat it as the closest sourced answer available for a US audience rather than a US-specific statistic, but AAHA, a US organization, adopted it as the premise for its own guidance to American practices.

The retention stakes behind that claim are real.

AAHA's separate 2023 "Path to Better Retention" survey found close to a third of the veterinary workforce planning to leave their current job within the year, and a bad first year doesn't just cost you one associate — for a meaningful share of them, it costs the profession that associate entirely.

See our retention data breakdown for the full survey figures, including why fair compensation alone doesn't fix this.

The mentoring guidelines themselves cite the Merck Animal Health Veterinary Wellbeing Study to note that more than half of veterinarians and three-quarters of support staff reported at least moderate burnout symptoms — a lower bar than, and from an earlier survey wave than, the 4th-edition figures showing 20% of companion-animal veterinarians specifically at high or very-high burnout (Merck, JAVMA 2024).

Don't merge the two numbers — they measure different thresholds — but both point the same direction: a new grad walking into an unstructured first year is walking into an environment where burnout is already common before you add the isolation of having no defined mentor relationship.

AAHA defines mentorship as a two-way relationship, and deliberately distinguishes it from three things practices often substitute for it: advising (focused on one specific outcome or event), coaching (aiding toward one specific, often skill-focused goal), and training (helping someone master one specific process or procedure).

Assigning a new associate a "go-to" for procedure questions is training.

Mentorship is broader and relationship-based, and it's the piece AAHA says practices most often skip.

The guidelines name four delivery models: paired (one mentor, one mentee), peer (mutual support between similarly-positioned professionals, roles can invert), group (one mentor, multiple mentees at once), and team or committee (a formal group aligning recommendations to one mentee).

Any of them can run formal — specific, mutually agreed-upon roles and responsibilities, the model AAHA recommends for onboarding — or informal and mentee-initiated.

For a solo new-grad hire, paired is the obvious default; for a practice bringing on two associates from the same graduating season, peer or group mentorship is worth considering deliberately rather than defaulting to paired because it's familiar.

The mentor doesn't have to be the practice owner or the most senior veterinarian on staff — it has to be someone with the bandwidth and willingness to actually run the relationship.

AAHA's guidelines cite formal mentoring relationships correlating with mentors themselves being "promoted six times more often" than non-mentors, which is worth naming to whoever you ask to take this on: it isn't unpaid extra work with no return for them either.

AAHA's Action Plan lays out what a structured program actually contains, and it's worth building each piece deliberately rather than assuming the relationship will self-organize.

It starts before the pairing: a readiness assessment for both sides (strengths, needs, what the mentee wants in a mentor) and research and matching against existing programs or networks before the first meeting.

The guidelines are candid about the ask itself — whoever initiates should "be prepared for rejection and not take it personally."

From there, the first meeting should be structured, not casual: a shared agenda, an explicit discussion of roles and responsibilities, and agreement on which delivery model you're actually running.

That meeting is where mutual expectations get set in writing — accountability, how and how often you'll communicate, confidentiality, and any conflict-of-interest boundaries — along with a written vision plan and, critically, a defined time frame with an end point or reassessment date.

An open-ended "mentor for life" assignment is exactly the kind of thing that quietly lapses within a few months.

Ongoing, AAHA calls for a fixed meeting cadence and follow-up meetings built around SMART goals that the mentee defines, not goals the mentor imposes.

The two structural pieces most name-and-desk pairings skip entirely are a defined escalation path — "a process whereby a mentee can ask for immediate help as needed," including a named backup mentor for when the primary one is in surgery or otherwise unavailable — and a separate mentor–mentee evaluation form, explicitly not the same instrument as the associate's performance review.

Conflating the two turns the one person a new associate is supposed to be able to ask a hard question to into the person grading them.

A single-doctor or two-doctor practice may not have the bench to run a full internal program, and that's a real constraint, not an excuse to skip mentorship.

AVMA's MentorVet Connect partnership offered a free, structured mentor program to newly graduated AVMA members beginning with the classes of 2018 through 2023 — check current eligibility directly with AVMA before promising it to a candidate, since program windows shift.

MentorVet's flagship offering, MentorVet Leap (founded 2021), is a national mentorship and professional-development program for recent veterinary graduates; MentorVet's own site reports roughly 500 early-career veterinarians have participated.

No independently published, peer-reviewed study with a stated sample size confirms the program's effect on retention or burnout — treat the participation figure as self-reported, and treat the program as an option worth exploring rather than a proven fix.

General workforce research outside veterinary medicine — corporate HR case studies on formal mentoring programs — consistently finds a link between structured mentoring and lower turnover.

None of it is veterinary-specific data, so it isn't a number to quote to your team, but it's consistent with the direction AAHA's own veterinary-specific research points: structure retains people, and the absence of it is felt fastest by the people with the least tenure to fall back on.

An external program and an internal one aren't a choice between two — a practice too small to run its own structured pairing can still handle the pieces that don't require a second senior doctor: the written expectations, the defined cadence, the end point.

Pair that with an external program like MentorVet Leap for the parts genuine peer perspective adds, rather than treating "we're too small" as a reason to skip the parts you can control.