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What’s it like to use our Gold Recruitment Service?
Poppy Ritchie is a Veterinary Surgeon and Partner at Bishop’s Stortford Veterinary Hospital in Hertfordshire. The practice used our Gold Recruitment Service after it was recommended to Poppy by a friend of a friend whose practice had already found new vets with our help.
1
The problem
The team at this Hertfordshire practice have found recruitment more difficult since Brexit, with COVID adding more challenges.
As a busy veterinary hospital with multiple branches and its own out-of-hours provision, maintaining staff numbers was essential, but they also needed someone experienced who was a good fit for the team and would appreciate the combination of clinical freedom and support
on offer.
Unfortunately, the vets they needed weren’t responding to their usual job advert routine. Poppy and the team were keen to find the answer and explore other options but based on their previous interactions, they didn’t have
much faith in recruitment agencies as a possible alternative.
“We were getting very few applicants and the people that were applying were just not what we were looking for.”
— Bishop’s Stortford Veterinary Hospital
Hertfordshire
“It was really good to speak to Fiona and get her take from a recruitment point of view as to what people were looking for and wanted to know in the advert.”
2
Our solution
When Poppy ran into a friend of a friend who mentioned that they hired two or three vets after using our Gold Service, she convinced the rest of the leadership team to look into it further, after which they decided to give Gold a try.
Our team helped highlight things that set their practice apart from other ads, including the practice Whatsapp group, the on-call backup, and the general support available.
Adding testimonials to their job ad was really effective because they had staff who were happy to let people know about the support they had received from the team, giving readers a clearer picture of what it would be like to work at the practice.
As Poppy said, ”There are so many adverts that say ‘We’ll give you all of this,’ and then they get there and actually they’re sole charge and everyone else is on holiday!” So, having evidence in the form of a testimonial was really valuable.
3
The result…
With the help of our Gold Service, the practice hired a new, experienced vet. Not only did they have applicants, but the applicants were of good quality.
The screening process provided by Gold meant that only suitable applications were passed on to Poppy and the team. They were encouraged to make contact quickly to get a feel for whether the vets were a good fit, which meant even less time wasted on those who didn’t match the role.
Poppy found this aspect of the Gold service a real positive, saying, “I personally enjoyed the slight informality in that I could get the details of the applicant and offer them a quick message and say ‘Hi, this is who I am. We’ve had your application and we’re really interested in talking to you.”
After using our service, Poppy has already recommended us to a friend and says she would use the Gold Service again in the future!
“This is the first time as long as we remember that we’ve actually had a choice of vets. They were all good enough, it was just which one is the best, which is a lovely position [to be in].”
“They knew what questions to ask and what to look for. They could give us a lot of information about what people were looking for which we just weren’t getting from anywhere else.”
Need a new vet or nurse?
Book a call with Sue, our Head of Recruitment, to find out how our clinician-led Gold recruitment service can help, leaving you time to focus on the jobs that you love!