The Recipe for a Successful Recruitment Process

Recently I was invited to speak on the lovely Laura Mairesse’s podcast Vet Vibes. She asked me, “What is the recipe for a successful recruitment process?” and I wanted to share my response with you here.

People often think they are making the decision to move jobs based on things like clinical development, to earn a better salary, to have a better work life balance, but there’s something going on beneath the surface in all our decision making, and it relates to our values.

People are (often unknowingly) making values led decisions, and I would say the top values that drive a career move are purpose, meaning, and contribution, so if you’re a practice looking to hire a vet or a nurse, you need to get in tune with that.

This is part of the work I do with practices – uncovering their sparkle, establishing their value proposition, and seeing how that aligns with people’s values so they can capture that in adverts or recruitment conversations.

If you’re a vet or nurse considering moving jobs, getting really clear on your values means you’ll be able to make a very solid choice about which practice you choose.

Laura and I also talked about the current situation in the profession, with a shortage of vets and nurses, and acknowledged that people have been reassessing what’s meaningful for them, and are making better choices about what they invest their time and energy into.

There has been a huge shift, which was already in motion pre-covid, but covid and the lockdowns gave people a real kick up the bum to stop tolerating things that no longer serve them.

This is because during this time everyone was forced into a state of surrender. There was nothing else you could do, you couldn’t fit it, so we had to surrender and let it unravel. This is very hard for some people to do, especially people who like to feel in control.

The thing is, as soon as you learn the power of surrender, you then develop this amazing courage to start making decisions and choices that you couldn’t make before, or procrastinated over. People now have the courage to go after what they want and leave behind what doesn’t serve them anymore, whereas pre-covid the “better the devil you know” mentality was more common where people stayed in jobs because it was familiar, comfortable, and safe.

People are more comfortable with being uncomfortable.

For more recruitment and leadership gold, head over to episode 1 of Vet Vibes.