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How to recruit quality veterinary team members during the labour shortage.
On a recent webinar of nearly 400 people in the vet industry, they were asked “What is your biggest challenge as a practice owner or manager right now?”
In nearly 70% of the cases, the response was recruiting staff.
You may have noticed that what worked a few years ago simply doesn’t cut it anymore. To attract quality staff right now, a different process is required to fill the vacant positions in your practice effectively.
The 6-Step Veterinary Recruitment Process
Let me outline the six-step process that we are using to help you find your ideal team.
Step 1. Believe you can find someone!
This might seem a bit wacky, but it is founded on the tenets of quantum physics. Your intention influences the quantum field.
Another way to summarise it is “What you focus on, you create.”
When I ask practice owners how they are going to find staff, their usual response is, “There’s no one out there to employ”. Well, if that’s what you put out there…that’s what you’ll create.
So, step one is to change your mindset to this…“I always find the perfect person at the perfect time”.
Step 2. Have your recruitment process ready to go before you post an ad.
At the moment, a trained professional (vets and nurses) looking for a job probably has 20 interviews lined up. The old saying “If you snooze, you lose” definitely applies now.
As soon as someone has responded to your advert, it’s imperative that you respond immediately to have that first introductory, casual conversation to see if they could be a cultural fit with your business.
If this first conversation goes well, you then pull the trigger on the rest of your recruitment process, which should sound something like this.
“I’d be really interested in sitting down and having a deeper face-to-face discussion, and I’d like to do that as soon as you can make it (ASAP!). When could you come in? Between now and then, could you also please complete the profile I’ll send you and shoot me through two references from previous employers?”
This speed of the process is important because we are seeing businesses attract their ideal applicant but take too long to get a job offer and then find out they have missed out.
Being prepared ahead of time by having your process ironed out will allow you to still be thorough but also make a decision quickly and make an offer within a day or two.
However, please don’t confuse the idea of hiring fast with not doing thorough background checks or accepting someone who does not share your practice values.
That is the biggest no-no that you can do, and I’d rather have no staff than someone who is going to trash your culture and provide you with ongoing headaches for a longer period of time. (I’ve done this, and it didn’t end very well. In fact, it ended up on Julia Gillard’s desk!)
The takeaway from this part of the process is that you want to develop your recruitment process so you can respond, decide, and offer very quickly.
Step 3. Earn the right
This is a tough pill for some to swallow, but you must ask yourself – Have you earned the right to attract quality staff?
Put another way, would you want to work for you?
My observation is that, at the moment, those businesses that have developed a culture that precedes them in a positive way are finding it a lot easier to attract the right team members.
At the moment, there is a big shift of quality people who are looking to work in a business that values them and offers them an environment of meaningful work.
I heard a comment the other day from a business owner who asked, “When will this period of entitlement end?” I think given the tight job market, which could be expected to continue for quite some time, this is a dangerous mindset to have.
It’s not about keeping team members happy. Your job as a practice leader is to provide an exciting vision for them to participate in and create an environment that motivates them to turn up and do their very best every day.
This does not happen overnight, but it certainly gives you a huge advantage. Developing your mindset and understanding what motivates people will make hiring people much easier in the long term.
So, my suggestion is that you focus on developing your culture now.
Step 4. Be clear on who you NEED vs who you WANT.
When you become busy, your first thought is often that you need another vet or nurse to manage the new influx of clients.
What I observe in many businesses is that instead of needing another vet or nurse, they actually need more leverage for their key people—more support so they can do more of their “zone of genius work” and remove the elements that they don’t legally have to do or that they don’t enjoy doing. (This really helps with retention, too.)
If we look specifically at vets, most do not enjoy talking to clients about money.
Most get tired emotionally from developing rapport with clients all day.
Most get drained from having to talk about preventative treatment every single consult.
In the practices we work with, we look to leverage the vet so that they only diagnose, prescribe, and perform surgery.
Then, you can employ someone in a role we call a ‘vet liaison’ and train them to help the vet in the consult room achieve an exceptional outcome for the client while reducing the vet’s workload by over 50%.
What is interesting is that there is a huge cohort of people who would love to work in the veterinary industry but don’t want to be vets or nurses. These people bring a high level of customer service, communication, and sales skills and, of course, can write notes for the vet while in consult.
There are practices in Australia using this concept that have the leverage of six support staff to one vet, and the turnover per vet is $1.5 million in general practice.
This requires you to challenge your current business model and be ok to start changing it.
To summarise this step, there are two points to consider:
1. Review your current system and ask if I can use technology or better organisation to become more efficient and reduce my team’s workload.
2. If you’ve decided you definitely need a new vet or nurse, then get very clear on exactly what sort of person you want and exactly what they will be doing. This will help you write your unique job offer.
5. Create a unique job offer.
If you take a look at employment agencies’ websites, you may notice that every job roughly looks the same. To cut through the noise and stand out, it’s important that you create a job offer that is personal, reflects you and your business and offers what your ideal candidate would be looking for.
My suggestion here is that you write from the heart, put yourself in their shoes, and think hard about what would motivate your ideal candidate. It’s important that your advert reflects the truth of what their experience will be; otherwise, you can expect a high staff turnover, especially in the current environment.
Writing good adverts is called copywriting, and it is a skill that can be developed over time with the right support.
Having an awesome advert does not necessarily guarantee that you will be flooded with applicants for vets. However, it greatly enhances your ad’s readability and the likelihood that your ideal candidate will feel as though you are specifically talking to them.
The big takeaway here is that you have to be different and stand out; otherwise, your offer will look exactly the same as other competing offers.
6. Hustle, baby, hustle.
The final part of the process is don’t be lazy.
Once you’ve created your unique offer, you want to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible. You want to put it on every job board that you can find, see if there’s a university job board and get it on there, ask your team if they can put it on their social media to see if anyone’s interested, be everywhere.
Right now, if you are just placing an ad with one agency and sitting back and hoping that a quality team member will come along, you’d be betting on more luck than good management.
I know that you are super busy, and the idea of having to hustle to find someone to fill a role may sound exhausting, but trust me, when you find that ideal person, and you can move into flow into your practice, you will be glad that you hustled.
So you’ve found the perfect person – now what?
Now you’ve got someone great, make their decision to work with you a great one.
Don’t forget that once you have found a quality team player, give them a quality induction that you have mapped out.
Retaining quality players is as important as attracting them, so you want to think about the first six to eight weeks in your practice and how you can make their transition into your practice as easy, enjoyable, and meaningful as possible.
They must feel supported, or you may find yourself back at stage one again, looking to recruit another person!
If you have a well-designed induction process, you will find quality people will perform faster, more efficiently, and with more enthusiasm.
Putting aside some time to design your induction process will bear you great fruits.
If you have any questions for Sam about his 6-step process, ask them in the Comments section below or via email sam@acceleratepracticeacademy.com
Sam Bowden has spent 15 years as a practising vet. He has owned two practices during this time, each of them achieving phenomenal results in growth and profitability. He has devoted his last 12 years to helping practice owners increase their happiness, work-life balance and profitability. He is the founder of United Vets Group | The Ultimate Veterinary Practice | Complete Vet Systems | More Vet Clients Websites | Accelerate Mastermind Group | Vet Business Manager Program | The Dental Academy His skill set is combining long-lasting mindset changes together with proven practical strategies to allow practice owners and teams to reach their full potential. He is considered a leading educator on how to increase profitability, work-life balance and happiness in the veterinary industry.
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