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You what if there was a way, a simple yet powerful way to attract dream job applicants, reduce employee turnover, and enhance your clinic's employer reputation? There is. In today's episode, we delve into the critical importance of providing a positive of recruitment experience in your clinic's hiring process. You'll discover the power, the benefits, and some strategies for creating a lasting and positive impression on job seekers, regardless of whether you hire them or not. Stay tuned as we uncover the secrets to success and reveal the game changing benefits that await you.
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Welcome to the Vetstaff podcast, your go to guide for navigating the vet recruitment scene and boosting employer brand power. Discover practical strategies for both employers and employees to enhance your personal and clinic brands. Get ready to rock the recruitment market and create an exciting workplace where everyone loves going to work on Monday mornings.
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I'm your show host, Julie South.
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Welcome to episode one, four, three.
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Today, we are exploring the critical importance of providing a positive candidate experience in your clinic's hiring process to help you shine online as a good employer so you can attract the type of applicants you want to have on your clinic's team. To lay the foundation, though, let's start by defining what the candidate experience entails, what it is and what it's not. The candidate or the job seeker or the applicant experience refers to the impressions and the interactions a job seeker has with your veterinary practice throughout their application, interview and hiring process. Regardless of the outcome, it doesn't matter whether you hire the job applicant or not, whether they join your team or not. It's the sum total and each individual touch point that forms part of their experience, good and bad. It includes all touch points for example, your career site if you have one, your job advertisements, the application process, interviews and communication. Because each one matters and each one plays a part.
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It's really important that each of these different segments is considered important by you. No one has any more importance or more criticalness than the other. So let's look at why providing a positive experience is so important.
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Because it's long gone. Long gone are the days when clinics were in the recruitment driving seat and could get away with doing everything according to how it suited the clinic. Providing a positive recruitment experience helps attract motivated employees. You want the get up and goers. You don't want those that are just ho hum about their job. So this is all about attracting motivated people to your clinic.
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Job seekers who have had a positive experience are obviously and crucially, more likely to speak positively about your practice, recommend you to others, and contribute to building your strong employer brand.
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This, in turn, gives you a competitive advantage, a competitive edge in the market, if this is the first time you've heard the term employer branding. Put simply, Vet clinic employer branding is the reputation that your clinic has as an employer among your employees past, current and future and inside the veterinary industry at large. Therefore, when you're able to provide a great recruitment experience, you'll have the competitive advantage over the clinic down the road or in the next town if you're a large animal practice who's also trying to attract the same professionals as you. When you really get how powerful providing a positive recruitment experience is, you'll understand why you'll want to shine in all the different components of recruitment marketing, because they all interlock together. Providing a positive recruitment experience also plays an important role in employee retention. Get that? Isn't that a surprise when candidates, and I say that tongue in cheek when candidates have a favorable experience right from the get go, not only are they more likely to accept your job offer, they're also more likely to stay engaged, have a higher level of job satisfaction, and guess what? They're also more likely to stay on your payroll for longer. And guess what else? Having lower turnover rates in recruitment and HR, that's referred to as churn.
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So if you lower your churn, you actually save your practice time and the resources associated with recruitment and training, which is dollars. Job seekers who have had a positive recruitment and job application experience, even with if and even when just create a new word there with when, even if and even when selected are more likely to maintain a positive perception of your clinic. And who knows, they may just refer their bestie from university to you when they are looking for a job. Conversely, giving them a negative application experience can lead to surprise, surprise, negative word of mouth, which in turn will put a bit of a dent into your reputation as an employer. And then you'll need to work even harder to counter that. Providing a positive experience not only attracts the active job seekers, but it also catches the attention of passive candidates. Passive candidates are those who may not be actively seeking new opportunities right at this point in time. They are more likely. So even if they're not looking but you're given their bestie a good experience, they're more likely to consider your clinic if and when they hear positive experiences from others like their bestie from varsity when the time comes for them to make their next career move. And let's face it, it's not a good idea in anything, not just recruitment to burn bridges. So always do your best, please, to keep that in mind. Because with veterinary being just a few degrees of separation between us all, you just never know which bridge you may need to walk across in the future or you may need to go back and cross it again in a competitive job market like we're in the throes of right now. And who knows when this is going to end.
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A positive recruitment experience sets your clinic apart from competitors. I've said this so many times on this show.
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If you want to seriously compete in the recruitment market, you need to differentiate your clinic from the clinic down the road who's also looking for staff. Job seekers will remember and prefer the clinics and the people who treat them respectfully and provide, wait for it a seamless and a positive experience. It's these little things that aren't so little, the little points of differentiation that can give your clinic the recruitment edge. And that's what you want. So now let's have a look at five examples of what a good recruitment experience can look like, along with some features and benefits that they provide. Number one, a positive recruitment experience involves clearly, clear and timely communication at every step of the process. The very first step is personal acknowledgment of an application. If someone goes out of their way to hand deliver their CV, the least you can do is acknowledge receipt of it, as well as that providing updates on the hiring timeline. So how long is it going to be? And what are the steps? And promptly notifying applicants about the status of their application. The benefits of clear and timely communication include building trust, which is critical, and it also reduces the likelihood of losing out on a great new hire. Because that clinic down the road, the one I mentioned just now, has snapped them up while you are still trying to sort your act out. So you want to maintain a positive impression of your practice. There are a truckload of research and stats about why it makes great business sense to provide a good recruitment experiencer. I'm not going to bore you with all of them here, but if you're interested, please check out the show notes of this episode where you're listening to it right now because I will put a link to research for you there so that you can check it out. But two stats I will quote though, is that according to Career Builder, nearly four in five candidates, the actual number was 78%. Say the overall candidate experience they receive is an indicator of how a company values its people.
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It makes sense, right? So just keep in mind that in marketing and recruitment is a form of marketing, perception is paramount. When you want to attract team members who respect others on your team, then you need to front foot their experience by showing them that you respect them. Another stat that's interested or interesting, another stat that's interesting is that only 46% of employers report making so this is less than half. 46% of employers report making regular improvements to their recruitment processes and that's done at least every six months that affect the candidate experience. When was the last time you and or your team looked at what you're doing recruitment wise and how you can do it better? So timely and look at what you're doing?
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The second thing is feedback is so important. Providing candidates with respectful and constructive feedback even if even when or especially if especially when they're not selected or even shortlisted helps contribute to a positive experience. Think about it from your side. If you were applying for a job and you didn't make the cut or you didn't get offered the job, you'd want to know why, wouldn't you? I'm sure you would. I certainly would. Constructed feedback helps give job applicants or helps job applicants improve and understand the areas that they can develop for their next application. Providing feedback also fosters goodwill. It maintains a positive employer brand for you and encourages candidates to reapply again in the future.
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Honestly, it's not like you're going to have large numbers, huge numbers of applicants I don't think it is, to give feedback to. It's not like you have hundreds lining up at your door, so it's not going to be hard.
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Please give feedback. Next one. Number three be genuinely interested in your applicants.
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Whoa. You want to be interested in your applicants?
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Genuinely interested in them. Now, providing that you have a matrix of standard questions you'll ask job applicants, you still can have that, but you can still be genuinely interested in each one.
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And you can throw in tailored interview questions for each person's skills and experience, but you've still got to judge everybody by the same criteria, by the same matrix. Please provide the opportunity for applicants to also ask you questions. And I'm not just talking about that. PS. At the end of the interview, by the way, have you got any questions?
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Yeah. Okay. Number four. How streamlined and user friendly is your application process?
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Part of continuous improvement? I mentioned earlier is looking at how you can simplify your application steps and get rid of all those unnecessary barriers. For example, if you've got an application form that you need people to fill out, is it mobile friendly? I can't believe I'm talking about this sort of consideration here in 2023, because way back in 2016, mobile search mobile overtook desktop for online search results. I'm talking about the different screen sizes here. I recently still saying that I recently came across a veterinary website that looked like it hadn't been updated since the early 2000 or the late 1990s. In a world where you want to be seen as tech savvy, switched on, and have an efficient clinic, having a website that looks like it's come from the arc or forms that people have to swipe to the side, keep extending to the side to see the edge, doesn't put you in a good light. It's not a good experience. Number five, let's talk about onboarding. What does yours look like? How thoughtful and comprehensive is your onboarding process? Or are you one of those clinics that asks your new hires to sit over there and watch these videos about how we do things? Or maybe you're not even that digital. Maybe you hand them a printed employee handbook and ask them to sit over there and let me know when you've read this. If you want people to stay, then you need to make sure that they can see a future at your clinic. And this starts on day one with your onboarding process. Please include some kind of career development that's personal to that person. Let them know where they can go. Remember that I said the need for continuous improvement earlier. One of the ways that you can do this right off the bat, if you don't already, is to include this career development program that I've just referred to into each new hire's onboarding. Now, according to Catalyst, addressing a new hire's development during Onboarding increases satisfaction by 3.5 times. That's a whopping 350%. That's huge. If you're interested in some Onboarding stats, then check out the show notes because I'll put a link for you there, which will be surprising, I'm sure.
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But also, what about the sucky experiences or the poor experiences? Obviously they're the opposite of what we've just talked about. So this is what you want to avoid, okay? You want to avoid no communication, starting with no acknowledgment or receipt of the application, giving poor or no feedback to successful applicants. Lengthy, complex and complicated or maybe even unnecessary application processes. Professionals and disrespectful interviews and Onboarding, those that say, go sit over there and let me know when you're finished, or watch this. Right, so now let's look at what you can do to consistently improve your experience about who's applying. Regardless of who's applying, the first is to put SOPs standard operating procedures in place for all of the stages of your recruitment process so that you can look at the communication and the response times. Some easy things to start with is acknowledgment of applications. If you're actively recruiting and if you're not, for those who if you're not actively recruiting, you can still acknowledge applications.
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So you can have standard emails, but that give you the opportunity to personalize things. You don't want one of these standard we've received your application, we'll get back to you in due course. Everybody does that. That does not differentiate you providing regular feedback through all the different stages of your application process. Look at what you do. Where do you provide feedback, if at all?
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Do you let applicants know what your recruitment process looks like?
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So what are the different stages? How can you communicate this?
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The next thing to look at is streamlining your application process so that it's user friendly and efficient. For example, I mentioned unnecessary steps before. How many of those unnecessary steps do you have? Maybe you can get rid of some of them or merge them with others. What do your forms look like on both your mobile, on a mobile device, a tablet, which is a mobile device as well, and desktop then are they both iOS and Android friendly? Go around your clinic. Ask people to look at what you're doing on their phones, on their tablets, on their desktops. Do it yourself. Are you impressed? Does your HR team find themselves constantly asking the same questions?
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Ask yourself this are they constantly instructing people on how to do the same things all the time? If so, there's an opportunity there for you to streamline something for both the job applicants and your team, because if they're constantly doing something, it's wasting time, and it shows that there's a gap there that something's broken. So a process of some kind is broken at your place.
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Then the third thing you can do is to make sure that all of your interviewers your HR practice manager, your vets, your nurses, anyone involved in the interview process are all well trained and are all working from or to the same systems. If you haven't got an interviewing rubric or a matrix set up so that all applicants are interviewed according to the same set of measurements, then start implementing these. Start with just one.
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That's all you need. Just one. You'll feel so much better having ticked something off, because it's the little things like these. And I know that they're not little, really, but they do make the big differences. You want to avoid remaking the wheel each time you put out a job. Advertisement one of the upsides of recruitment training like this is that your clinic will start to look more professional than the one down the road that I keep referring to, that you're competing with. It's just another way that you can uniquely differentiate yourself.
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The fourth thing that you can do is make sure that you've got systems for providing all applicants, regardless of the outcome, with proper closure and constructive feedback. Communicate any rejections respectfully, and please highlight areas for improvement. You're doing the Sector A service by doing this, and you're offering like, please offer encouragement, especially for those whom you have actually interviewed. They've invested time and energy into meeting you, and the least you can do is provide feedback for them so that their time wasn't entirely wasted. When you've put these steps, these steps into place at your clinic, it will help job seekers grow professionally, and it also helps them maintain a positive perception of your practice, and that's what you want. And finally, thank you for still being here with me. Finally, make sure that you regularly evaluate and improve the recruitment experience by asking feedback from job applicants so that you can look at and assess your hiring, your internal hiring process. Actively listen to their feedback without getting defensive if you hear anything negative and regard if you do get something back that doesn't exactly suit you, you don't like what you are hearing, please regard it as a gift for improvement. Thank you for tuning in to the Vetstaff podcast, where we've discussed today the critical importance of providing a positive candidate recruitment experience in your hiring process.
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By understanding what constitutes a positive candidate experience, its benefits, and the potential pitfalls of a negative experience, you'll be able to better recruit and retain the types of professionals who will be an asset to your team the ones that you want to apply to your job advertisements. Remember to prioritize effective communication, streamline your application process, provide feedback and continuously improve your recruitment processes. And talking of positive employer experiences, the Vetstaff Podcast is dedicated to those vet clinics that prioritize their people and the professionals who aspire to work for them. I invite you to join us on this journey of empowerment and discover a world where veterinary clinics thrive by putting their people first. If you're working for a clinic you believe deserves to shine online, then I invite you to visit Vetclinicjobs.com and give your clinic a five star review to make future or current recruitment easier.
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All you have to do is make sure that your clinic has a clinic business listing which is free to do so. Talk to your practice manager about that. Once your clinic has a profile@vetclinicjobs.com, you can give it a five star review and encourage your colleagues to review it as well.
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If you're recruiting right now, then please visit Vetclinicjobs.com and list your job vacancy for free. This is a global website, so wherever you're listening from, you can review your clinic and or list your clinic's vacancies for free@vetclinicjobs.com. Thank you for spending the last half an hour or so of your life with me.
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I appreciate your time today. I look forward to spending time with you again next week at the Vet Staff Podcast, where we'll be looking at mentorship, why it's so critically important, and how it helps separate the good employers from the not so good employers.
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This is Julie South signing off and inviting you to go out there and be the most fantabulous version of you you can be. God bless. The Vetstaff Podcast is proudly powered by Vetclinicjobs.com, the new and innovative global job board reimagining Veterinary recruitment connecting veterinary professionals with clinics that shine online.
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Vetclinicjobs.com is your goto resource for finding the perfect career opportunities and helping vet clinics power up their employer branding game. Visit Vetclinicjobs.com today to find Vet clinics that shine online so veterinary professionals can find them.
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Vetclinicjobs.com.
