Have You Polished the Feeling Right Out of Your Clinic’s Culture Stories? — ep 296

Can our clinic sound too good to be true when we’re recruiting?

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Have you polished the feeling right out of your clinic’s culture stories? Could trying to make your clinic’s culture stories sound better end up making it harder for a vet or a nurse to believe? What if you end up making working at your clinic sound almost too perfect, too good to be true?

Hello and welcome. I’m Julie South, and you’re listening to Veterinary Voices, culture storytelling conversations for vet clinics that want to be found by Their Kind of People: the vets and nurses who genuinely, absolutely can’t wait to start working at your clinic.

This show is for you if you are responsible for recruitment at your clinic. Veterinary Voices is brought to you by VetClinicJobs, helping clinics give vets and nurses the answers they need to their job application questions before they apply.

In this REAL•CULTURE•STORY series, we’re unpacking the framework that we developed at VetClinicJobs when we’re working with clinics to create, tell and share their culture stories. This is Episode 296, and today we’re looking at Truth, which is all about whether your culture story feels honest enough for a vet or a nurse to trust the experience.

Stay to the end for this week’s how-to takeaway: how to Spot it, Source it and Share it as a culture story from your own clinic.

Last week in Episode 295, we looked at Specificity: the details that help a vet or a nurse on the outside imagine how they could feel on the inside.

How can we make “supportive team” believable in our recruitment?

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There’s a link to Episode 295 in the show notes if you haven’t caught up with that episode yet. Today we’re asking what happens when those details get tidied up for recruitment.

With our REAL•CULTURE•STORY framework, REAL is all about what’s seen, CULTURE is what’s understood, and STORY is what’s felt. Today we’re unpacking STORY. And Truth, T in STORY, sits here because a vet or a nurse might understand every word of your culture story and still feel, “That sounds a bit too good to be true.”

Hypothetically speaking, let’s say one of your nurses is telling you about a busy afternoon. She might say something like this: “We were running behind. I was trying to finish a discharge and answer the phone.”

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“I told the vet I couldn’t do both, so the vet took the call while I went through the medication with the client. We still finished late, but I didn’t feel like I was dealing with everything on my own.”

Now, your job ad might call that a “supportive team”. The nurse’s story gives that vanilla claim of “supportive team” meaning.

But imagine tidying her account into something like this: “Our collaborative team ensures seamless patient care in a supportive environment.”

I’ll say the cleaned-up statement again: “Our collaborative team ensures seamless patient care in a supportive environment.”

Does that sound like a real nurse or someone in marketing or HR? The original story has been so cleaned up, it’s completely sterile and devoid of any human personality.

Why isn’t professional-sounding wording enough to show what our team is like?

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The pressure, the tension, it’s all gone. The nurse saying that she couldn’t do both: answer the phone and work with the client. Ditto, the vet doing something practical to help.

“Seamless” makes the afternoon sound easier than the nurse described. And when you do this, when you tidy things up, you change the picture. You don’t just change the wording.

A nurse reading the first account might recognise the feeling of being pulled in two different directions. Likewise, a vet might imagine feeling relief, reassured perhaps, that a nurse could speak up when stretched rather than struggle on.

Should we mention a difficult day when we’re trying to attract vets and nurses?

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A vet or a nurse reading the original story can imagine being in that situation and how they might feel. The cleaned-up version gives them none of that.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you deliberately add a difficult moment to make a story sound real. That’s not what it’s about at all. You need to let your team tell their stories.

Sometimes a story starts with something difficult, but what happened next may have made a positive difference. When this happens, keep enough of that beginning for a vet or a nurse to understand why the outcome felt good. Obviously, I’m talking about stories that can be used for good.

How much should we edit what our team says about working here?

[05:24]

Now, I’m not saying you need to hang all your dirty laundry out for everyone to see. What I am saying is that if you’re going to go to all the effort of getting a culture story from your team, show them the respect by telling their story without corporatising it with big fancy marketing or recruitment words.

In the example I used earlier, our nurse shared that she felt like she wasn’t dealing with everything alone. That’s the story that she told. But when we changed it to “a collaborative team ensures seamless patient care in a supportive environment”, it says absolutely diddly squat.

In the cleaned-up version, there’s nothing that would make a vet or a nurse say, “Yes, these feel like My Kind of People. I want to work there.”

You can make your clinic’s culture stories easier to read without strangling the life out of them or making them corporate, meaningless and sterile.

Do all our team’s stories have to go in the job ad?

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The litmus test is whether a vet or a nurse outside your clinic can follow the story and imagine being there, which means you keep the meaning and the team member’s way of expressing it.

So where do all these stories go? Well, I’m not saying that every single job ad has to include examples of every single scenario. That’s not the purpose of a job ad. Its job—the job ad’s job—is simply to signal that you have a vacancy.

So what do you do with all these examples so they serve a purpose and add value to your recruitment marketing? Well, that’s where Culture Story Centres come into play.

Culture Story Centres are purpose-built hubs specifically for recruitment. Your regular clinic website is built specifically to get more clients through your front door. Your Culture Story Centre gives vets and nurses somewhere to find out about working with you and for you.

Why put stories about working here somewhere other than social media?

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Social media posts get buried. Their shelf life is limited on purpose. The Culture Story Centre gives your stories an enduring, a lifelong home, making different stories easy to find and different Decision Gap questions easier to answer.

Decision Gap questions are the questions that a vet or a nurse has between seeing your job ad and deciding whether or not to apply. It helps a vet or a nurse decide, “Does this sound like My Kind of Clinic with My Kind of People?” And it’s designed to start the “I’m interested in working for you” conversation.

If the timing’s not right for either side when that chat kicks off, it gives you at the clinic a way to keep in touch with vets and nurses.

I promised you a takeaway. Here’s this week’s.

How do we check that we haven’t made working here sound better than it is?

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We Spot it, we Source it, we Share it.

Spot it. Find one culture story you’ve edited for recruitment. Put the team member’s original account beside it. Has something disappeared that explains how that experience felt? Have you corporatised it?

Source it. Go back to the team member who shared the story. Ask them what happened, how they felt at the time, and what you have changed or left out that makes the edited version sound different from their experience. Ask what you’ve misunderstood or made sound better than it was.

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Give them time to answer and accept their version. Obviously, if the story relates to a problem that still needs fixing, then deal to that issue and find another story for your recruitment marketing.

Share it. Use the version your team member recognises and has agreed that you can share. Keep the relevant limits and their own description of how it felt. Put it in your Culture Story Centre with a way for vets and nurses to ask about working with you.

Then read it from the outside. Would a vet or nurse think, “I can believe that happened and I’d like to know more”? That’s Truth through the STORY lens.

Next episode and getting in touch

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Next week in STORY, we’re looking at O for Orientation. And that’s when a story might feel honest, but can a vet or nurse work out where they would fit inside it? We’ll look at the context that helps them imagine their own part.

If you’d like help telling your team’s culture stories in a way that turns vanilla into something meaningful, then let’s have a chat, even if you’re not trying to fill a vacancy at your clinic right now. Because culture storytelling needs to be an always-happening, organic thing, not just something you do when you’re advertising a job vacancy.

Get in touch with me. I answer every single email: julie@vetclinicjobs.com.

This is Julie South signing off and inviting you to go out there and be your most fantabulous self, because you work in Your Kind of Clinic, with Your Kind of People.

Until next week.