Hiring a veterinary nurse
Thirty-five applications for a registered role with a national shortage — and a profession where the person you hire is statistically quite likely to leave it altogether within five years.
The hiring problem and the retention problem are the same problem. Veterinary nursing has a small registered population, an acute shortage, and one of the highest attrition rates of any qualified profession — driven not by pay alone but by the emotional load of euthanasia, difficult owners and clinical outcomes that cannot be changed. That reframes screening entirely: with thirty-five applicants you are not filtering, you are trying to identify someone who will still be here in three years. The CVs cannot help. They list procedures, species and practice types, and the thing that predicts staying — a settled, worked-out relationship with the hardest part of the job — is something nobody writes down and most job ads pretend is not there.
Caseload, out-of-hours, and the hard part
Selene asks about the emotionally difficult parts of the role directly, because leaving them out of the ad is how practices lose people in year two.
Species mix, rota, and what the difficult days look like
Practice type sets the clinical requirement, but the rota and the emotional load set the retention. Both belong in the requirements, and the second is almost always omitted.
One sentence changes the guide
It is a striking answer because the kind number is the tempting one and it does real harm — owners who were told what they wanted to hear make worse decisions and are angrier afterwards. A nurse who can hold that line honestly and gently is doing the hardest part of the job, and is usually also the person who has made peace with it well enough to stay in the profession.
Exceptional, not just good —
“The ones who can give an owner the honest number instead of the kind one.”
→ Handling a bad-prognosis conversation became a must-have, weighted alongside clinical competence.
What the guide ends up measuring
Six criteria, and one of them is about a conversation rather than a procedure. That is deliberate and unusual for a clinical guide — it follows from a practice where the realistic risk is not incompetence but attrition.
Two facts, asked immediately because the pool is this small
RCVS registration and right to work are absolute. On a pile of thirty-five the argument for asking them up front is not cost saving — it is that the two or three applicants who turn out to be unregistered take a week each to discover, and in a shortage market a week is often the whole difference between making an offer and hearing that someone has accepted elsewhere.
Scored on the conversation as well as the clinical work
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
She reads for how candidates describe the hardest parts of the job, which is both the clinical signal the practice asked for and the closest thing available to a retention signal.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Putting the emotionally hard parts of the role into the requirements rather than leaving them implied
- Reading all 35 the week they arrive, blind, against the same guide
- A ranked shortlist that weighs staying as well as starting
- A decision record that still explains itself months later, to whoever asks
Yours
- Advertising the vacancy — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or sourcing sites
- Verifying RCVS registration and indemnity; she records what candidates state, she doesn’t verify it
- The interview and any practical day, with her brief in hand
- Every hiring decision, and any override — stored with your reason
Nearby roles
A small practice hiring alone, from a pool limited by how far people will travel.
The scarcity case: too few applicants, an absolute gate, and speed that matters more than filtering.
Accuracy under heavy repetition, where the exception is the entire job.
Put the hard part in the ad
Say what the difficult days look like — the candidates who stay are the ones who answered it honestly.