It's not common to contact a business and speak to a live person, let alone establish an ongoing relationship with one.
But with the right internal technology, veterinary relief staffing company Evette is able to prioritize this
Evette matches veterinarians and vet technicians with shifts at animal clinics around the U.S., offering them full or part-time hours based on their needs, as well as salary and benefits options. Unlike other job platforms where matching to positions is often done online, every vet and tech is connected with an Evette concierge manager in their region and receives
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For this level of human touch to work well, the company uses various tools to help their concierge managers and other staff
"We use tech behind the scenes, where you don't necessarily see it, and the clinics don't see some huge tech background or platform," says Elise Burns, Evette's founder and CEO. "But internally, we use it to make the clinics' and the vets' lives easier so that we stick to our mission, which is our concierge service."
From the time vets and techs are first connected to their designated concierge manager, details regarding work type preferences, availability, distance they're willing to travel, specific accommodations and more are gathered and put into Evette's talent management program. Communicating all this directly with an Evette staffer makes matching vets and techs to the right jobs more efficient, and a written record is available if, for instance, a staffer is out of town and someone filling in needs to be brought up to speed quickly.
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To streamline administrative tasks, Evette's Krista AI software sends out schedules and calendar invites to their vets and techs, as well as copies of the schedules to the clinics they're working with. On the internal side, concierge managers get automatic notifications for monthly 30-minute check-in with the veterinary professionals they're assisting — a practice that keeps them updated on how things are going — and alerts to employee milestones so people can be recognized and rewarded. These things are part of what helps the internal staff of 70 make impactful connections with the just under 300 vets and techs employed by Evette, Burns says.
"We have a retention specialist who takes care of all the perks for our vets, and she uses tech to keep track of all that," she says. "The vet will never see it; it's streamlined, it's on time and they're never communicating with a bot, but we have [tools] that are helping keep track of all those things."
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To make communication with clinics more seamless and ensure concierge managers have up-to-date job postings, Evette has also partnered with veterinary clinic software system Shepherd. That platform allows any of the more than 600 clinics that use it to quickly communicate their upcoming needs for vets or techs directly to Evette without leaving the Shepherd site.
"Every clinic has their own internal software system they use, and almost all of them have to go out of their own system and into these different staffing agency systems to book [relief vets], and there's a lot of frustration," says Burns. "If I use three different staffing agencies, I have to remember my login and password, and I have to [post] a shift in every single system — with us, you just send us an email."
To stay highly engaged with a workforce that is spread out and extremely busy is a challenge, but there are many ways technology can help. For Burns, bringing in the right tech tools makes her mission of keeping Evette people-centered and successful much easier.
"For us, it's been finding a way to use technology to help us grow and get the best service, but not making it a swap-out for humans," Burns says. "It's been fun but challenging — finding that happy medium of using technology, but [technology] not becoming who we are."
