The Importance of Screening Your Staff as a Veterinarian

A lot goes into running a successful veterinary practice. 

You need a passionate and well-educated veterinarian at the top leading the practice. You need to settle down in a location where locals a) have pets and b) don’t have too many other local vets to choose from already. You also need an excellent staff.

In the veterinary world, recruiting and retaining good staff is an underappreciated art. The vet might do the job everyone comes to the practice for, but their staff does everything else. They intake customers, manage the paperwork, collect payments, answer all the phones, dole out prescriptions, and much more. The vet staff is the face of the business, and for that reason, you must have a reliable team.

Implementing a background screening system at your veterinary practice is the best way to ensure that you’re hiring honest candidates with appropriate experience. In what follows, we’ll overview the four most important reasons you should screen your staff as a veterinarian.

1. Working with Animals

Not every who works inside a veterinarian’s office needs prior experience working with animals. A receptionist who stays behind the counter, answers phones, files paperwork, and handles cash may never handle clients’ pets. They don’t need an animal science degree or prior experience with animals.

But if you’re hiring a vet tech or for any job that interacts with clients’ pets, you need to be sure that candidates’ stated background working with animals is legitimate. That requires employment verification.

What is employment verification?

Employment verification is a sub-process within the background screening process that verifies a candidate’s claims about their professional history. Handling animals requires a special kind of education and training. You risk endangering your client’s pets if you don’t ensure that those who you hire are who they say they are.

2. Workplace Safety

Verifying your candidates’ experience also keeps your workplace safe. According to one 2017 study, 85% of job candidates lie on their resumes. 

Much of that percentage involves harmless white lies, like saying you worked at your past job for 14 months instead of 12. 

But employment verification and the broader background screening process will catch more significant lies. Lying is never a hirable quality, but some lies are more disqualifying than others. 

3. Your Practice’s Reputation

People put their whole hearts in their pets. Perhaps even more than their doctors, people are vigilant about their veterinarians, making sure they’re honest, fair, and good at what they do. 

If it starts to come out, whether, through word-of-mouth or online reviews, that staff at your practice aren’t doing an A+ job, you run the risk of losing business. An estimated 87% of people read online reviews before they patronize a business. 

Protect your practice’s reputation by hiring well and avoiding scandal.

4. Honesty and Transparency

If you find out someone’s lied to you before you’ve even spoken to them in person, chances are they will lie again. Weed out the rotten eggs before you even waste time on interviewing them with background screenings. 

Screen for drug and alcohol test history, DMV records, educational records, and more. These screenings will tell you if the person you interviewed is honest and transparent about their background.

Take Your Practice to the Next Level

An honest, highly-skilled, hard-working staff makes a happy veterinarian. A happy veterinarian does good work and makes their clients happy. That encourages repeat visits and positive word-of-mouth spread.

Hiring good staff is crucial to running a successful veterinary business. Get yourself there with background screening services.