Looking to Recruit for Your Vet Practice? Here are 4 Staffing Strategies That Could Help

‍

Nearly every practice that we speak with is looking to bring on more veterinarians and ultimately boost their productive hours. Please find a list of some of the ways that you could potentially increase the number of veterinarian hours worked at your practice below:

‍

1. Provide mentorship to new graduates

‍

If you’re considering hiring a new graduate, providing mentorship could be a strong way to attract talent to want to work at your practice. According to the AVMA “85% of newly graduated veterinarians said the reason that they selected the offer that they did was mentorship.” This was followed by location, people, and compensation, respectively. 

Two paths to help mentor new veterinarians are by developing your own mentorship program or by using third-party mentorship services.

If you’re considering creating your own program, a helpful resource is AAHA’s Mentoring Toolkit. AAHA recommends that a successful mentorship program has three primary components, these are clear expectations, an action plan and consistent communication, which they’ve detailed here. 

‍

2. Work with third-party recruiters

‍

If you find that you are too busy to recruit or feel that an expert might be better suited to the task, you could lean on recruiters. A recruiter can provide a great deal of value. For example they can help tap into pools of talent that you may have not thought of, will likely have a current awareness of what talent is looking for from a compensation and benefits standpoint and for many people can take a very time consuming task off of your plate. 

‍

3. Tap into relief veterinarian networks

‍

For a variety of reasons, a significant number of veterinarians are shifting to relief work. These include the desire for better work-life balance, potentially better pay and the ability to travel.

For practices, relief vets can provide immediate support to bandwidth-stretched teams. Additionally, they can serve as a recruiting tool, where both you and the relief vet get to know each other during a trial period, which could lead you both to want to work together full time.

‍

4. Partner with or sell to a corporate group

‍

Given the funding and resources available to corporate groups, they’re often able to recruit in ways that are unavailable to independent practices. For example:

1. They can hire dedicated recruiters. Some corporate groups might have 10+ internal recruiters dedicated to this task, whereas an independent practice might not be able to have teammates solely dedicated to this task
2. They have experts on their teams that can run sophisticated online and offline marketing campaigns to target and engage with talent
3. They have staff that can engage with veterinary students years ahead of graduation
4. They can provide benefits that smaller practices might not be able to, for example, some might offer paid parental leave 
5. They’re more likely to be able to offer regular hours
6. Since they often operate practices across a wide range of geographies, they can help doctors transfer to different areas if they’d like. This can be attractive to early career doctors who are not certain where they want to settle down yet 

Today there is a wide range of different types of corporate veterinary groups. The ownership stakes that they might take in your practice and the resources that they can provide you will vary. We’re happy to help guide you if you’re considering this option. 

‍

At VetVet, we help practice owners sell their practices. If you’re considering selling now or in the future, just want to learn about what that could involve, or chat about any of the topics in this article, please get in touch with us at 510-969-2792 or hello@vetvet.co.