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iHeartRadio The Harder Your Clinic Is to Understand, the Easier It Is to Keep Scrolling — 288
A vet or nurse may begin researching your clinic months before you advertise a vacancy. They’re not necessarily ready to apply—but they may already be deciding whether yours is a clinic worth remembering.
If the answers they need are scattered across job ads, client-facing webpages and old social posts, they may simply move on before finding a reason to keep your clinic on their watchlist.
In episode five of the REAL•CULTURE•STORY series, Julie South unpacks the first letter in CULTURE: C — Clarity.
Previously in this series:
- Real Stories → veterinaryvoices.com/284
- Everyday Evidence → veterinaryvoices.com/285
- Actual People → veterinaryvoices.com/286
- Lived Values → veterinaryvoices.com/287
This episode covers:
- Why vets’ and nurses’ due diligence may begin long before a clinic starts recruiting
- How AI tools are changing what prospective jobseekers can discover about working at a clinic
- Why an AI-generated answer does not necessarily give someone clarity
- The two jobs of clarity: making answers easy to find and making them unmistakably yours
- Why familiar claims such as “supportive”, “close-knit” and “collaborative” need real culture evidence behind them
- How scattered information makes prospective jobseekers work too hard to understand your clinic
- The one-question Clarity Test you can run on your own clinic
- Three steps for making an important answer clearer: Spot it, Source it, Share it
The episode closes by setting up next week’s letter—U, for Understanding. Finding an answer is one thing; understanding what it could mean for someone’s working life is something else.
If you’d like Your Kind of vets and nurses to understand and remember your clinic—even before you’re advertising a vacancy—email julie@vetclinicjobs.com.
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.
Julie helps forward-thinking vet clinics build the kind of genuine, specific culture evidence that attracts Their Kind of People long before any job ad runs.
She 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.
Could Your Kind of People recognise Their Kind of Clinic?
A job ad may catch a vet’s or nurse’s eye. But it’s their own due diligence that determines whether they apply—or keep in touch.
Culture Story Centres turn real experiences from inside your team into credible, discoverable recruitment evidence, giving vets and nurses meaningful reasons to choose your clinic.
Explore Culture Story Centres for veterinary clinics
The Harder Your Clinic Is to Understand, the Easier It Is to Keep Scrolling
Why clarity matters before your veterinary clinic advertises a vacancy
[00:00]
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 there.
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.
This is Episode 288, and it’s the fifth in the series about the REAL•CULTURE•STORY framework.
REAL—R, E, A, L—is all about what’s seen.
Today, we’re moving into the next absolutely critical part of the framework: CULTURE.
And CULTURE is all about what’s understood.
What does clarity mean in veterinary culture storytelling?
[01:02]
Today, we’re kicking off with C for Clarity.
I’m going to put links to the four REAL episodes in the show notes if you haven’t listened to those, or if you want a refresher to help you piece all the jigsaw pieces together.
Please stay to the end to get the Clarity Test.
It’s one question that’ll help you see whether Your Kind of vets and nurses can find meaningful answers about working at your clinic without having to conduct a peer-reviewed research project.
I started building culture stories way before we had AI search as we know it today. Over the years, I’ve kept testing what vets and nurses can find about clinics they may be considering applying to.
I randomly take a couple of clinics and do the comparisons.
Those search results have certainly become more informative. Some are factually accurate. Others are completely muddled, and I’m really not sure what I’m looking at.
How are vets and nurses using AI to research clinics?
[02:12]
Now, with AIs such as Comet, Copilot and ChatGPT—if that’s your thing—it’s easier for job-seeking vets and nurses to ask questions about what it’s like to work at a clinic and receive an answer.
Sometimes, that happens even when the clinic isn’t advertising a job.
Think about it.
A vet’s or nurse’s due diligence, when they start checking out clinics as prospective employers, doesn’t have an arbitrary start time.
It can kick off when they know there’s a job-changing event somewhere on their horizon.
Maybe their partner is being transferred.
Maybe they want to move closer to a parent who has become ill.
Or perhaps they already know they’re going to be moving next year.
For these vets and nurses who know they have a change on their horizon, after they’ve finished a hard day, they finally get to sit down and start researching clinics near the place where they may soon be living.
Their decision-making may begin before your recruitment
[03:19]
They’re not ready to apply yet.
There may not even be a vacancy.
Right now, they’re working out which clinics might be worth keeping an eye on.
Clinics that think solely in relation to their own recruitment timing are missing out on all those vets and nurses whose timeframes are different.
You may not be recruiting yet, but Your Kind of vet or nurse could already be deciding whether you are Their Kind of Clinic.
What can AI find about working at your veterinary clinic?
[03:56]
As I was doing the research for this episode a couple of weeks ago, I asked a search tool to compare what it was like to work at two veterinary clinics in the same region.
For one clinic, it found employee stories, employer reviews and detailed information about working there.
It could tell me about the team, the clinical environment, professional development and how people work together.
For the other clinic, most of what it found came from job adverts and corporate descriptions.
The answer was full of words such as supportive, close-knit and collaborative.
Vanilla words. I’ve talked about those before.
But there were no real stories rising to the top and showing when any of those things had happened.
There was no everyday evidence showing how the clinic ordinarily worked, and there were no actual people describing what they had experienced.
The search tool found the claims, but it couldn’t find enough culture evidence to make those claims clear.
In one case, it even substituted a clinic in a nearby town for the location I’d asked about.
Sure, the AI gave me an answer.
But that didn’t mean it gave the vet or nurse considering their next move any clarity.
Clarity has two jobs
[05:38]
That’s why clarity—the C we’re talking about today in CULTURE—has two jobs:
The answers need to be easy to find, and they need to be unmistakably, absolutely yours.
Clarity tells them what happens at the clinic.
Understanding—which we’ll come to next week—helps them work out what that could mean.
Now think about the vet or nurse who’s researching clinics after a hard day.
One clinic’s website is written entirely for pet owners.
Its team page lists qualifications, hobbies and pets. I’m sure you know the type of listing I’m talking about.
Its social channels show Christmas photographs, puppy preschool and fundraising events.
Somewhere amongst all of that, there may be useful information about working there.
But the vet or nurse has to find it.
They have to piece it together.
They have to work out which parts were written for pet owners and then decide whether words such as supportive and collaborative mean anything meaningful to them.
That may be more work than they’re willing to do at the end of a hard day.
The harder someone has to work to understand your clinic, the easier it is for them to keep scrolling.
They haven’t exactly rejected the clinic.
They may have simply moved on to the next one before finding a reason to remember it.
But when they can understand and remember your clinic, they’ll likely add it to their watchlist.
By the time a suitable job ad—or a vacancy—appears, the clinics already on that watchlist have a head start.
What answers do prospective vets and nurses need?
[07:34]
Clarity has nothing to do with publishing more information everywhere.
It’s about making the answers that are important to vets and nurses easy to find and understand.
Answers to questions such as:
Who will answer when I ask for help? How much autonomy will I have?
What happens when the day turns to custard?
Can nurses use the skills they’ve been trained for?
Will unusual clinical interests be encouraged?
Those are what I call the Job Application Decision Gap questions.
Clinics have those answers. You really do.
They’re sitting inside the experiences of the people who already work there.
But having the answers inside the clinic isn’t the same as making those answers clear to someone outside it.
How does a Culture Story Centre create clarity?
[08:37]
That’s why having a Culture Story Centre matters.
It gives your clinic’s culture evidence—your culture stories—a permanent, dedicated and discoverable home.
Instead of expecting jobseekers to assemble a picture from your job ad, your client website, old social-media posts and whatever else the AIs can infer, a Culture Story Centre brings all those relevant answers together in one place.
It’s obvious which clinic those stories belong to.
The people sharing them are clearly identified.
And the questions are answered through the lens of Real Stories, Everyday Evidence, Actual People and Lived Values.
I’m not saying a Culture Story Centre can control every answer the AIs produce.
But it does give the AIs clearer, more relevant and more attributable evidence to work with.
The Clarity Test for veterinary clinics
[09:49]
Here’s the Clarity Test—one of the many we run ourselves when we’re telling culture stories:
Can Your Kind of vet or nurse find a clear, credible answer to an important question about working at your clinic without having to piece it together from five different places?
I want you to choose one question this week.
We’ve covered a few of those in the previous episodes, so go back and listen to them.
But here’s an example for today.
Search for your clinic as a jobseeker would
[10:16]
Ask:
What happens at [your clinic’s name] when someone needs clinical help?
And when I say “ask”, I mean enter this question into your browser.
Use your clinic’s name and search that question exactly as a jobseeker might.
What answers appear?
Are they clear?
Are they credible?
And are they unmistakably about your clinic in your location—not a clinic with a similar name across the sea?
If the answer isn’t clear, you need to spot it.
How to make an important culture answer clearer
[10:55]
1) Spot it
Find the real moment when someone in your clinic needed clinical help—or whatever happened in relation to the question you asked—and what happened next.
Not sure what I’m talking about?
Go back and listen to Episodes 284 and 285. They’ll help you find genuine moments and check that those reflect how your clinic ordinarily works.
2) Source it
Source the answer from a real person—an actual person—who experienced it inside your clinic.
Ask what happened, who responded and what difference it made to them.
3) Share it
Share a short version where it can catch someone’s attention.
My recommendation is LinkedIn.
Why LinkedIn? Because it’s professional.
Then give the full story a permanent home in your Culture Story Centre, clearly connected to your clinic, your people and the questions it answers.
Spot it. Source it. Share it.
Your recruitment timing isn’t their decision-making timing
[12:16]
A job ad catches people’s eyes.
What they find when they do their due diligence affects whether your clinic feels like Their Kind of Clinic.
Or not.
But their due diligence may have started before you advertised anything—before you had a vacancy.
Your recruitment may start with a vacancy, but their decision-making may have started months earlier.
Your timing isn’t their timing. Their timing isn’t your timing.
If you want to make sure Your Kind of vets and nurses can understand and remember your clinic—even before you’re advertising a job—then you need to start right now.
Because the search and the AIs won’t wait for your next job advert.
Neither will the vets and nurses who are already looking.
Get in touch with me and we’ll do it together: julie@vetclinicjobs.com.
Wrap-up and what’s next
Next week, we’re going to look at U for Understanding.
Because finding an answer is one thing, but understanding what that answer could mean for someone’s working life is something else.
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.