22 Jan 2018
With practices nationwide complaining of a lack of clinical team members for hire, Dave Nicol explores why this is happening, and offers some practical suggestions for maximising your mid to long-term chances of hiring the right people to power your practice.
Image: pressman / Adobe Stock
Before we get into the action items, we first have to try to work out what’s going on with recruitment, and why.
We can view the lack of applicants for jobs in general practice in many ways. For me, one is a lot more helpful than others, and it is simple – recruitment is nothing more than marketing.
In marketing, our objective is to find people with needs and give them what they want. In recruitment terms, our vacancies are “the product”, the job seekers are “the market” and the individual who may work for you is your customer.
Couched in these terms, my suggestion and belief is the market is giving us feedback – clear, neon-lit, giant feedback – that it does not like or want the product we are offering and, if that’s the case, we had better listen and respond, because companies that do not heed the market end up in trouble.
Marketing theory states four areas of your offering can be tweaked to meet customer needs. These areas are called the four Ps:
Let me attempt to crowbar some useful learnings into each category. Let’s begin by placing price under the microscope. Are we offering our product at a price our market finds attractive? A quick analysis of wage inflation suggests while we do not pay a pittance by any means, the approximate starting salary for a vet (approximately £30,000 per annum) is less attractive now than it was 20 years ago.
Back then, in 1998 (the year of my own entry into the veterinary profession), a starter new graduate could expect to be paid a salary of approximately £25,000, when you accounted for house, car and bonus payments. The same comparative wage, when adjusted for inflation in the 20 years since, would need to reach £42,000 – some £12,000 above the current benchmark. So the new graduate vet of 2017 enjoys significantly less spending power compared to 20 years ago.
Next, let’s look at the product we offer. Not many jobs require the same level of physical and mental pressure to be borne as that of the vet. This has always been the case, although today’s vet, I would argue, has a bigger challenge. The mental load on vets has increased due to the following trends:
A further problem is the disruption of the traditional learning pathways caused by a loss of core work to niche marketing providers, a fear-based referral culture and the loss of skilled mentors as corporatisation rapidly accelerates.
Surgical skills, long a staple of general practice, are a great example. Few would argue the general surgical skill level is gradually dwindling and it’s not hard to see why. “Entry level” procedures, such as neutering, are increasingly done in low-cost clinics.
Students are taught and trained to be fearful of errors, and, therefore, are increasingly making referrals to specialists.
Plus, the clinical mentors in general practice, who would once help younger vets develop these skills, are now selling their businesses to corporate consolidators and exiting the market shortly after.
This drain on the top end of the talent pool is sure to be having a detrimental effect on the transfer of skills and – perhaps, most importantly – attitudes to risk and learning.
Of course, we have said nothing of the toxic blame cultures that are rife in general practice. The lack of leadership skill and active culture development is one of the enormous “elephants in the room”.
The depressing reality is the job of a general practice vet appears to be losing its shine. Less money, more stress and poorer developmental prospects paint a bleak outlook – one millennials seem to be rejecting, and who can blame them?
Would you honestly advise your children to spend five years at university – and acquire £50,000 to 75,000 of debt – for these prospects?
Next, if you’re not too depressed, let’s briefly consider place. The UK has always been an attractive place to work as a vet, due to our “love-in” with pets. But a weak currency coupled to the political uncertainties of Brexit, plus the recently reported drop-off in UK pet ownership, casts even these fair and pleasant lands in a duller light.
Finally, as we step through the marketing equivalent of the rings of hell, it’s worth considering how we promote our jobs to the market. Millennials, the likely target of many of our recruitment campaigns, are glued to their smartphones and have the attention span of forgetful goldfish. A small advert in print alone, I respectfully suggest, is not going to cut through the noise and reach your target audience.
If the market is giving us feedback then it is our job to listen. The only way things are going to improve is if we actively take up the challenge, listen to the feedback and take remedial action.
As always, my advice is pragmatic – 80/20 logic suggests any issue or system can be modified best by focusing on the small number of significant issues responsible for the problem.
So, what are the big impact factors you can work on to improve your business outcomes as defined by your talent? Here are some thoughts to get you started:
Better salaries, or, at the very least, develop the perceived value of our job offerings. Refocusing on, and growing, pet insurance is an obvious starting point, but much can be done to help boost the perceived value of a job without inflating the actual cost to your wage bill.
For example, I have operated eight-hour shifts in all of my hospitals since 2011. This has allowed my team members space at the beginning or end of each day to undertake “life admin”, go to the gym, or (wait for it) even have an early dinner with a partner or friend.
Your people want and deserve a supportive, humble, caring and compassionate leader – one who helps them grow and has their back. They do not want, or need, a task-focused, arrogant, bullying jackass. Good leaders are not born, they are made, so get to work on you.
I suspect you think you do this already – but do you really? You see, I think it’s more likely you have a toxic blame culture, which is a drain on you and your team. So it’s time to step up and learn how to deal with this.
Create a documented set of objectives and behavioural standards. Define what your learning pathways look like. Hire people who share your values and be the leader they all deserve. If this is beyond you, then make way for someone else to develop into this role.
I’m not saying ignore print advertising completely, but you are most likely going to have to up your budget and negotiate for longer postings. Millennials are on Facebook and LinkedIn, so getting your job adverts seen in this space is essential. Think long range, too – engage future jobseekers with materials and content that adds value to their day, such that you start to stand out from the crowd and develop a relationship.
Then you will be in a better position to connect with your target audience when the time comes to hire.
Sadly, what I’m saying is unless someone opens two new veterinary schools tomorrow, no quick fix to the issue exists. This appears to be a systemic issue stuck partway between modern veterinarian job design and the modern veterinary graduate.
As business owners, we are in control of one of those things at this time, so I recommend getting to work on product improvement quickly to attract jobseekers back to our practices. Those who are prepared to innovate will make recruitment look easy.
For everyone else – especially if you hold the belief “I had to do it tough, so why shouldn’t they?” – it’s going to continue to be a challenging market to operate in – one in which you might just run out of options.
