Why Temporary Employees Make the Best Permanent Employees
Is one of your veterinary practice’s major pain points finding—and keeping—good employees? While your resume file may be filled to overflowing with the contact information of animal lovers who claim to have years of experience, finding an actual veterinary professional who is the perfect fit for your practice can be tough. Or, you may have thought you assembled the dream team, only to have it fall apart when personalities clashed and tensions mounted. In veterinary medicine, the team must work well together, and be ready to take orders, leap into action, and help each other without prompting when a critical case is rushed through the hospital’s doors. Veterinary medicine is an incredibly stressful career field, and heaping on more problems because of understaffing and poor staffing only makes things worse.
Rather than hanging all your hopes on your latest and greatest hire, look at how temporary employees can benefit your team and your practice. They may become your next star employee, too.
#1: Take your new employee for a test drive before committing
Hiring a new employee is a huge commitment. While their interview may have blown you away—and they brought cookies!—a good interview does not necessarily equate to a quality, long-term employee. By using a temp employee to fill in your staffing gap, you can essentially take them for a test drive before filling out all the paperwork, adding them to your insurance plan, discussing benefits, embroidering scrubs, and the millions of other tasks you do when hiring a new permanent employee. Of course, many temp employees enjoy the freedom relief work brings, and may not be interested in a full-time permanent position. But, many are looking at relief work as a way to find their “unicorn clinic,” and want to test drive different practices before making a permanent choice.
#2: Temporary employees know their stuff
Do you become frustrated with the endless cycle of training new staff, only for them to quit after a week or two? You keep desperately digging at the bottom of the barrel for help—and went so far as to hire the 20-something-year-old who had a kitten when she was young and called that veterinary experience. However, once she realized how much cleaning was involved—rather than playing with kittens all day—she left, never to return. If this cycle sounds like your practice, turn to temp employees from a specialized veterinary staffing agency to lend a helping hand. At Veterinary System Services, we are proud of our temp employees’ knowledge and skills, and that they’re ready and willing to jump right in with their years of veterinary experience, and prove they can be an asset to your practice.
#3: Temporary employees maintain staffing flexibility
It’s no secret that we have a nationwide veterinary professional shortage. With too few employees, your team is no doubt working overtime and harder than ever, which can rapidly lead to burn out, especially if no one is available to cover vacations and time off. Keep your team in good spirits, boost morale, and provide a refreshing break by using temp employees to maintain staffing flexibility.
#4: Temporary employees save you time and money
Working with a Veterinary System Services temp employee can save yourself time and money. You don’t need to wade through dozens of applications from poor candidates, conduct time-wasting interviews, train new employees, and fill out the stacks of paperwork associated with new hires. VSS covers it all—worker compensation, insurance, and taxes. Plus, benefit waiver agreements are part of the deal, which protects you from the dangers of traditional relief staff and non-employee workers.
#5: Temporary employees can turn into permanent hires
Perfect matches are hard to find in the veterinary field. So many are introverts and type-A personalities, which may not mesh well in a work setting. Instead of hiring people with whom we can work well together, we often simply hire people we like, ignoring the goals set forth for a productive practice. By choosing a temp employee to fill a needed staffing gap, you can get to know the person, and see how well they interact and work with your team. If you decide your temp employee is a good fit, you can always offer them a permanent position or, if not, let them go and not rehire them.
The best part about trying out a temporary employee? There’s no commitment and no obligation. All our temp employees participate in background checks and drug screenings, so you get the best of the best in terms of skills and reliability. To learn more about how Veterinary System Services can solve your staffing woes, contact us to create a relief staffing plan that works for you.
Brad’s love for animals and exposure to working with them has come in many forms, and spanned decades. From volunteer work, that includes 5 years with the Denver Dumb Friends League, to countless hours being a victim for Search and Rescue dogs, or a chew toy for police dogs, he has a passion for working with animals. In college, Brad worked for a small, three-doctor practice cleaning kennels. Before starting VSS, he spent almost 10 years as an inventory manager for one of the state’s largest animal hospitals. He has seen this industry from many angles.