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 it is the premise AAHA adopted for its own guidance to 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 leaving doesn't always stop at the practice door: in AAHA's "Stay, Please" study, half of those planning to leave planned to leave clinical practice altogether.

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 veterinary support staff experienced at least moderate burnout symptoms.

The guidelines don't name which edition of the Merck study they're citing, and the measure is a lower bar than high or very-high burnout — so don't merge it with the 4th-edition figures showing 20% of companion-animal veterinarians specifically at high or very-high burnout (Merck, JAVMA 2024).

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.

One boundary worth naming before the build: everything on this page is the retention lever for a hire you have already decided to make.

Whether a new graduate is the right hire for your practice at all — against an experienced associate — is the decision that comes before this one, and our new-grad vs. experienced veterinarian comparison works through the year-one cost, ramp and calendar trade-offs behind it.

This page starts where that call has been made.

AAHA defines mentorship as a two-way relationship, and distinguishes it from three adjacent concepts: 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).

By those definitions, assigning a new associate a "go-to" for procedure questions is training, not mentorship.

Mentorship is broader and relationship-based — and the guidelines note there is currently no widely accepted definition or generally acknowledged criteria for mentorship within veterinary medicine.

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, responsibilities, timelines, and guidelines," the form workplaces frequently develop to provide structured support for onboarding or career advancement — or informal and mentee-initiated, which the guidelines describe as less structured and more flexible.

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 needs 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.

No — and mixing the two up leads practices to build the wrong thing.

Mentorship, as AAHA frames it, is an ongoing two-way relationship wrapped around a real job.

An internship is a formal training year: the Veterinary Internship and Residency Matching Program (VIRMP), run by the American Association of Veterinary Clinicians, defines it as "primarily an educational program for the intern rather than a service benefit to the hospital" — a structured year some new graduates complete between school and their first practice job, or before a specialty residency.

Hosting that kind of year is a different build from a mentorship program, with its own match calendar and listing requirements; our guide to starting a veterinary internship program covers it.

The two can coexist — an intern benefits from a mentor too — but one is not a substitute for the other.

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 do 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.

The action plan then walks through mutual expectations and boundaries — accountability, how and how often you'll communicate, confidentiality, and conflict-of-interest boundaries — plus a vision plan covering the relationship's overall purpose and long-term goals.

The guidelines suggest capturing the roles and goals in "a verbal or written agreement" and note that conflict "may arise when the agreement is not specific or written down" — which makes the case for putting it in writing.

Critically, they also call for a defined time frame: "a time frame for the relationship that works for both parties," clarifying "a mutually agreeable end point or time for reassessment."

An open-ended "mentor for life" assignment is exactly the kind of arrangement that end point exists to prevent.

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 with no counterpart in a name-and-a-desk pairing are a defined escalation path — "a process whereby a mentee can ask for immediate help as needed," which the guidelines say "might include a back-up mentor or providing a list of resources" — and a separate mentor–mentee evaluation form, explicitly not the same instrument as the associate's performance review.

Conflating the two risks turning 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, virtual mentorship and professional-development program for recent veterinary graduates, so a practice anywhere in the US can point a new hire to it.

The outcome research published on MentorVet's site is the company's own; no independently published, peer-reviewed study with a stated sample size confirms the program's effect on retention or burnout — treat it as an option worth exploring rather than a proven fix.

The general-workforce research the guidelines cite — corporate case studies, not veterinary data — links formal mentoring programs with lower turnover and higher retention for both mentors and mentees.

None of it is veterinary-specific, so it isn't a number to quote to your team, but the direction matches what the guidelines themselves claim for the profession: that mentorship can be helpful in decreasing turnover rates and improving retention.

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 outside perspective and structured programming it adds, rather than treating "we're too small" as a reason to skip the parts you can control.