Pre-employment assessments and internal surveys are not commonly used tools on dairies, typically due to informal on-farm recruiting and retention practices. However, these resources can provide relevant information about the job performance abilities of an applicant or an existing employee.

During several in-depth interviews with dairy owners and managers regarding personnel management, we often heard about challenges and the difficulties associated with managing people. However, in most cases, mixed in with those challenges were bits of human resource (HR) “gold.” The purpose of this article is to highlight a few of those best practices and provide some insight into how you might incorporate something similar on your dairy.

Nearly every day, a dairy producer asks us if we know of anyone looking for work. Milkers and herdsmen are in great demand here in the Midwest, and many feeder and manager positions are open as well. As your business grows or an employee moves on, you are tasked with hiring a quality employee. While you may dread this process, employees are the lifeblood of any business.

When dairy farmers are asked how they recruit new employees, the response is usually the same: “We don’t need to recruit.” Owners report that the current economic situation has meant no shortage of people looking for work. In fact, many owners have a stack of applications, most of which will never receive a call back. This is not because there aren’t qualified applicants, and not because the owners don’t care, but simply because there aren’t enough jobs nor time to deal with each.

For cattle operations of any size, the “documentaries” churned out by undercover animal rights activists can be intimidating – marked often as they are by deceptive editing, scary music, jarring visual effects and anguished voiceovers rife with half-truths and outright lies.