If you're responsible for hiring at your vet clinic, do you have dread words? Words you know you have to include in the job ad, but the moment you type them you can already feel the applications not coming?

This episode is about two of those words: after-hours.

In the fourth episode of The Elephant In The Room, Julie South looks at why "shared across the team" tells a vet or nurse almost nothing — and why the clinics that have genuinely solved after-hours are sitting on something worth saying, and saying nothing.

Episode notes

Most vet clinic job ads that mention after-hours say the same thing: shared across the team, rostered. Nothing else. Yet behind those words, the experience can be completely different from one clinic to the next.

This episode looks at what that difference actually looks like — from a clinic where most of the team want to be on the after-hours roster, to one where one or two people quietly carry the load while the roster looks balanced on paper.

The key example: a small animal clinic whose owner doesn't call it after-hours at all. She calls it the Emergency and Critical Care roster. Same obligation — completely different story around it. The financial reward is genuine, recovery time is real and honoured, and being on the roster is a choice most of the team actively make.

The episode argues that clinics which have built something genuinely fair and well-supported around after-hours have specific, true things to say that very few clinics are saying — and that vets and nurses who'd thrive in that environment can self-identify from the way it's described. Generic language gives them nothing to go on.

This is the fourth episode in The Elephant In The Room — a series examining the things everyone in veterinary knows and almost no one says out loud.

About your host

Julie South is the founder of VetClinicJobs and the host of Veterinary Voices. She has been in veterinary recruitment since 2019 and is known for her work in culture storytelling — helping forward-thinking vet clinics build the kind of genuine, specific culture evidence that attracts Their Kind of People long before any job ad runs.

Julie has spoken on culture storytelling and employer branding at VetEXPO in Melbourne and works with clinics across Australasia and beyond who want vets and nurses to be excited about going to work on Monday mornings — for all the right reasons.

Struggling to get results from your job advertisements? 
If so, then shining online as a good employer is essential to attracting the types of veterinary professionals who're a perfect cultural fit for your clinic.   

The VetClinicJobs job board is the place to post your next job vacancy - to find out more get in touch with Lizzie at VetClinicJobs