by Stacy Pursell, CPC, CERS
The VET Recruiter®
For some professionals, it is customary for them to select a word or theme at the outset of each year. This word is typically one they plan to stress in the New Year in the pursuit of providing more value and growing.
And as we begin 2020, I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about the theme that The VET Recruiter has selected for this coming year. That theme is excellence, specifically excellence in terms of providing value to the Animal Health industry and Veterinary profession.
The dictionary definition of excellence is rather straightforward: “The quality of being outstanding or extremely good.”Or, according to Wikipedia, “Excellence is a talent or quality which is unusually good and so surpasses ordinary standards.”
Animal Health and Veterinary Excellence
There are certainly plenty of examples of excellence within the Animal Health industry and Veterinary profession. As an example, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) presents its “Excellence Awards” every year. These awards are “presented to individuals who have advanced the science and art of Veterinary medicine, and who have shown exemplary concern for, and commitment to, the welfare and humane treatment of animals.”
You might be tempted to think that achieving Animal Health and Veterinary excellence only requires the application of the definitions listed above. While those definitions are applicable, they are far from the only ingredients required, and this is definitely the mindset that we have as a firm at The VET Recruiter.
In fact, at the end of 2019, as we were planning for this year, I asked my team this question: “What does excellence mean to you?” Then we had a discussion about what excellence is, and I’d like to share some of what that discussion involved. Our conclusions included the following:
- Your life is a journey, and you are in the middle of it right now.
- The question you should be asking yourself is, “How do you want to live your life?”
- In terms of your professional life and your career, the question you should be asking yourself is, “How do you want to perform at work?”
Our answer to that final question: we want to perform our work with excellence. But how, exactly will we accomplish this? Based on our team’s conversation, below are some of the ways:
- Being people of integrity
- Being committed
- Not just meeting expectations, but exceeding expectations
- Taking ownership of your performance
- Striving to not be just good and not even great, but the BEST
All of these ways tie into The VET Recruiter’s core values. Our firm has 13 main core values, which are as follows:
- Integrity
- Reliability
- Candor
- Enthusiasm
- Perseverance
- Acting with urgency
- Coachability
- Active Listening
- Hard work
- Optimism
- Teamwork
- Win-win mindset
- Results
As you might expect, we plan to draw heavily from our core values to achieve Animal Health and Veterinary excellence in the coming year. (Click here to read more about each of these core values on The VET Recruiter website.)
Attaining Excellence in the New Year
But HOW, specifically, are we going to attain excellence in 2020? By starting with our collective passion, which is to solve problems and make a difference in the lives of people. And which problems are we going to solve in order to make a difference? The answer to this question lies in our mission, which is comprised of two parts:
- To help Animal Health companies and Veterinary businesses hire top talent to help their business grow and become more profitable
- To help Animal Health and Veterinary professionals attain career-enhancing opportunities that allow them to achieve the quality of life they seek
These are the problems that we want to help solve, and these are the ways that we want to make a difference in people’s lives. Simply put, we want to make people’s lives better, and from our perspective, it’s not just professional lives that we’re improving. That’s because when a person’s professional life improves, many times their personal life improves, as well. They go hand-in-hand.
So this is our commitment to you: to help you solve problems in the hopes of not just making your professional life better, but your personal life, as well.
However, what about YOU? Is achieving Animal Health or Veterinary excellence a goal of yours in the coming year? And if it is, how do you plan to achieve it? If you already have a plan, then good for you. If you don’t, then I recommend putting one together as soon as you can, so that you can implement it immediately.
Regardless of where you are with your plan, though, I have “10 Steps to Achieve Excellence in Anything,” courtesy of the Life Optimizer website and The Personal Excellence Blog:
- Have the hunger for excellence.
- Benchmark against the best.
- Believe that you can do it.
- Build concrete strategy and plans.
- Learn from the best.
- Do not limit yourself.
- Go all out; work really hard.
- Focus your efforts.
- Be adaptable.
- Never give up.
If your plan for achieving Animal Health or Veterinary excellence in 2020 doesn’t include these steps, then perhaps it should. That’s because another way to achieve excellence and to achieve it consistently is to never stop learning. No one knows it all, and anyone who thinks they do know it all is sadly mistaken and will eventually be proven otherwise. I’ve been a recruiter and search consultant for over 20 years, and I still participate in training on a regular basis.
At the VET Recruiter we are committed to helping YOU in the New Year. We’re committed to helping you solve problems so that we can make a positive difference in your life. Here’s hoping that 2020 is the best year of your life, both professionally and personally!
You can click here to find out more about our services for employers. Click here to learn more about our recruiting process.
We help support careers in one of two ways: 1. By helping Animal Health and Veterinary professionals to find the right opportunity when the time is right, and 2. By helping to recruit top talent for the critical needs of Animal Health and Veterinary organizations. If this is something that you would like to explore further, please send an email to stacy@thevetrecruiter.com.
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