VetSurgeon Jobs

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs

Arlo Guthrie — Sat, 11 Jun 2016 10:09:27 GMT

As a PS to the above, I reviewed 20 jobs advertised by independent practices and found that on 80% of their websites, there was no indication that they are hiring!

https://www.vetsurgeon.org/news/b/veterinary_news/archive/2016/06/10/139990.aspx

Of course, most visitors to practice websites are going to be pet owners, but you never know if a veterinary surgeon or nurse who is looking for a job might stumble on your site, and if I was recruiting, I'd CERTAINLY want something to indicate that on my own site.

Thoughts anyone. Do you think this is a good idea? Or not?

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs

Arlo Guthrie — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 17:42:27 GMT

Back up from the engine room again, and the latest news is:

Sales of job advertisements on VetSurgeon and VetNurse have got off to a really good start.
Equally, visitor traffic to the job section is continuing to improve. We now up to more than double last year's page views.
This means I've already started reinvesting in more stuff designed keep improving the service, drive more visitors and improve response rates.

So ... without further ado, the first bunny out of the hat is ...

Find our jobs on VetSurgeon - a badge (or text link) for practices to add to their websites which, when clicked, takes the visitor to a display of only THEIR jobs on VetSurgeon.org.

Here's an example. This badge is one created for the Vets Now account, and displays just their jobs.

To create a badge for your practice website, you need to be logged into VetSurgeon with the account used to post adverts, then visit this page:

https://www.vetsurgeon.org/p/find-our-veterinary-surgeon-jobs.aspx.

Copy the code and then add it to your website (or get your IT person to do it).

Three reasons to do it:

If you have an advert on VetSurgeon, it'll give it a boost.
Vacancies should always be posted on practice websites, just in case a jobseeker happens to pass by. That can be a hassle. If you add the badge to your website now, you can forget about it. Whenever you have a job available, visitors will find a link to it.
More badges on more practice websites means more awareness of the service, more traffic, better response rates. So even if you don't think you'll advertise a job here for a long time, it's still going to help my efforts to keep recruitment costs in the profession low.

There's another badge (an orange one) to add for jobs for veterinary nurses, over on VetNurse.co.uk.

Next week, I've got something for locums, and for practices looking for locums.

And there's more in the pipeline after that ...

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs

Arlo Guthrie — Wed, 18 May 2016 16:58:11 GMT

I've been quiet for a couple of days, because it's been frenetic behind the scenes monitoring the new job advertising / payment systems and dealing with the odd glitch.

But wow. I'm feeling shellshocked. It's all really starting to take off in a site-changing, life-changing sort of a way.

Very early days, of course. Above all else I am conscious of the need to get more people seeing and responding to the adverts, and that is what I am concentrating on at the moment. But it's looking good on that front (the traffic graph continues to climb), and I'm feeling confident we're getting there.

So this is one of those moments when I want to say a big thank you, again, to ALL of you. I have worked bloody hard, for a very long time, building these communities. But without all of you, I'd be nowhere. So thank you all, sincerely, whether you're a regular or an occasional visitor, a forum heavy-hitter, or a lurker.

Exciting time ahead. Lots of ideas for improvements and new features we can start to build into the site. At this rate, we'll be able to afford to pay for them!

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Arlo Guthrie — Wed, 04 May 2016 11:12:12 GMT

An update, as I don't want anyone to think I'm just sitting round on my backside now it's all up and running!

First stage was obviously to get payments working. The second stage is delivering the best response we can.

In the past, visits to the job adverts were largely from members (apart from anything else, they were password-protected). That seemed to generate a sufficient level of traffic that it was worth advertising free, because you might get a response.

Last year we installed the new system and did a lot of work to raise the online visibility of job adverts outside the site.

Page views alone are not always a good way to compare one site against another, because they are affected by things like the navigation on the site and the number of pages. However, they are an interesting measure of increased performance and by April, we were up 63% on last year's monthly average, to nearly 11,000 page views in that section.

Equally important was that the number of visitors that came to VetSurgeon Jobs directly has jumped from about 150 per month to over 1000.

Now that we're up and running, I'm reinvesting the money spent by advertisers with further online promotion of VetSurgeon Jobs, which is driving yet more visitors to the section.

One of the other consequences of charging (which benefits job advertisers) is the reduction in the volume of ads being posted. Less adverts = more people looking at each one.

There is a balance to be struck there, of course, and I'm paying very close attention to it. But meanwhile, the first four are performing very well (so far, looking like double the number of views that in the past would have been achieved over 60 days, and they've only been up for less than a week).

IMPORTANT. I know I am repeating myself here, but I hope all members of this community will rally round and be a part of the success of this project. Not for my benefit, but to help save yourselves money! There are four ways you can do that:

LINK TO VETSURGEON JOBS
Add a permanent link, like this one: Find our jobs for vets on VetSurgeon Jobs on your website (importantly, must link to http://www.vetsurgeon.org/jobs/).

Even if you are not currently advertising, it helps. Whilst I am here, THANK YOU to the practices that have already done this - I know who you are, and I'm very grateful!)

HELP SPREAD THE WORD
Email a link to VetSurgeon.org Jobs to everyone you know in the profession. Or alternatively just press the email share button at the foot of this story. Send it to your practice manager. Send it to any vets you know who work at other practices (after all, you won't want to be encouraging colleagues at your own practice to be browsing jobs, unless you particularly dislike them!).

SHARE JOB ADS
If you see a job advertised that you think someone else you know might be interested in, SHARE IT with them using the share buttons at the foot of the job. Part of the power of advertising on a social network like this one is how word spreads.

SUBSCRIBE
Even if you're not looking for a job now, subscribe to be alerted by email of jobs that come up in your area (under the search box on the search page). If you set the system to ONLY send you alerts of (for example) small animal vet jobs within 15 or 30 miles, you're only going to get very occasional emails.

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Arlo Guthrie — Tue, 03 May 2016 15:19:44 GMT

[quote user="Thomas Johnson"]

[quote user="Arlo Guthrie"]and to Lynton House for this full time sa position in Woking.[/quote]

Thanks for the plug, much appreciated![/quote]

Pleasure is all mine. I hadn't made the connection that it was your practice. But I thought Natalie Caamano would have been pleasantly surprised not to be asked for any money after submitting the ad (that was the one that slipped in whilst I had the payments switched off for a few hours on Friday).

Also mentioned in the newsletter that went out this morning, and I'm also advertising VetSurgeon Jobs elsewhere at the moment, so you should benefit from all the stuff going on in the background.

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Thomas Johnson — Tue, 03 May 2016 14:38:03 GMT

[quote user="Arlo Guthrie"]and to Lynton House for this full time sa position in Woking.[/quote]

Thanks for the plug, much appreciated!

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Arlo Guthrie — Mon, 02 May 2016 18:42:06 GMT

[quote user="Arlo Guthrie"]Yes, absolutely, and this has been (and is) very much at the forefront of my mind. Will reply in detail later, but just had long day in London, rushed back for godchild's christening, then alerted to the fact that our system refused my 4th customer's card (not through any fault of theirs)![/quote]

The rollercoaster continues ...

What I didn't mention earlier was that the 4th customer was Bradley Viner. How unlucky was that? I mean, in my shoes there are probably about 18,000 vets I would have preferred to have fallen on my face in front of than the President of the RCVS!

Then I get some advertiser feedback this morning, from someone whose advert expired recently, and they reported that they'd had no response.

Things looking a bit bleak by this stage.

Thank god, though, that was closely followed by another practice completing the satisfaction survey, and reporting that they'd had 4 applications, which I was pleased with. Not the best we've ever had, but not bad for £99 if you ask me.

And then, about half an hour ago, having overcome the irritation of our system failure, El Presidente returned, and became our very first paying advertiser.

This is the last advert I'm going to plug in the forums. But this is a pretty momentous moment for me, AND I suspect this really is a great job opportunity for someone: Permanent full time SA vet in Northwood, Herts.

If you know anyone who might be suitable, please spread the word by using the share buttons on the advert.

[quote user="Gareth C."]Have you got circulation figures to compare your prices alongside? There's no point being 10x cheaper if your adverts are seen by 50x less people. [/quote]

I've done a bit more on this, with the latest monthly figures for JUST the job section (full site stats are here). I think the point I'd really like to highlight is the remarkable growth in users (particularly new ones) which has only happened in the last couple of months, and after an awful lot of work (which is still ongoing, so these numbers are rising all the time).

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Arlo Guthrie — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 21:21:23 GMT

[quote user="Gareth C."]

Are you going to put an ad in veterinary practice magazine to direct print readers to the site?

[/quote]

Already done that . We've got a 3/4 page advert running. Quite an attention-grabbing one, I would like to think!

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Gareth C. — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 21:14:43 GMT

Are you going to put an ad in veterinary practice magazine to direct print readers to the site?

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Arlo Guthrie — Sat, 30 Apr 2016 08:56:44 GMT

Coming back to stats. I started writing something and it was turning into such an essay that I thought you might either a) never read it, or b) think I was obfuscating!

Here are the headline stats:

Last year, VetSurgeon.org had:

268,848 visits, from
50,159 visitors, who made
1.8 million page views, which works out as
7 pages per visit
8 minutes average per visit

Points:

After a period of strong growth between launch in 2008 and 2012, these figures have been remarkably stable.
Historically, we've had a relatively low number of unique visitors (largely because until relatively recently, all content was password-protected which significantly reduced lower-grade google traffic), but a remarkably high number of visits, page views and pages per visit. The average time spent per visit is high too.

Another background stat. CM research carried out some research released in 2015 in which 24% companion animal vets unprompted said they "follow" VetSurgeon.org, making us the most popular website by a mile, and putting us in 5th place out of ALL veterinary media outlets (including print). Top was Vet Times magazine at 84%.

Points

When someone says they "follow" something, I interpret it to mean something more than "have visited/read" (ie more than 24% of vets "have visited" VetSurgeon).
I think it requires a greater level of engagement to describe yourself as "following" a website than a trade magazine (need to make a conscious decision to sit down at computer, find the site etc., compared to a magazine that lands on the doormat every week).
The same research was carried out a year later, but with a much bigger sample size. We dropped back a bit to 20% (I think as a result of change in sample size; in the same period Vet Times online dropped from 5% to 2%), but retained 5th place. Next most popular websites were: VIN (4%), SPVS forum (3%) Webinarvet (2%) Vet Times online (2%).

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Arlo Guthrie — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 22:37:18 GMT

[quote user="Gareth C."]Have you got circulation figures to compare your prices alongside? There's no point being 10x cheaper if your adverts are seen by 50x less people.[/quote]

Yes, absolutely, and this has been (and is) very much at the forefront of my mind. Will reply in detail later, but just had long day in London, rushed back for godchild's christening, then alerted to the fact that our system refused my 4th customer's card (not through any fault of theirs)!

We've ironed out that error, and just about to redeploy another round of fixes and improvements. Then I think I'll go and pour myself a drink, and tell you more about stats in the morning.

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Gareth C. — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 17:41:11 GMT

Have you got circulation figures to compare your prices alongside? There's no point being 10x cheaper if your adverts are seen by 50x less people. If it's similar you should trumpet that! Local papers also very expensive. I have had good enquiries advertising with you before. Hope it works

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Arlo Guthrie — Fri, 29 Apr 2016 17:21:00 GMT

VetSurgeon Jobs update ... Switched on the payments system on Tuesday night, having done exhaustive testing on a test server and all found to be working well.

Then of course, nobody places an advert on Wednesday, so by the end of the day I was bit doom and gloom.

Thursday morning, the telephone rings and it's my first customer. They'd pressed pay and got an error message. Full panic stations here at VetSurgeon Towers. Flashing lights. Sirens. Distress flares. The lot.

Whole day spent trying to jump the Paypal technical support queue. Then whilst I was on the line to an engineer, customer no 2 rings up to say they'd pressed pay, and got the same error. By now I'm having arrhythmia.

Then customer no 1 rings back to say knocking off work and wanted the ad up before they went. Since we still didn't have an answer from Paypal, the only thing I could do was revert to free. And of course, the moment I did, customer number 3 arrived and must have been pleasantly surprised to press 'submit' and not be asked for any money!

Finally, we get an answer from Paypal - turns out that the instructions that accompany the code we have to integrate within VetSurgeon were missing one small, but essential detail. So finally we're back in business.

All quiet so far today, but really pleased to have my first three customers, and would like to say a special thanks to Broadway Vets for placing the first paid job ad for a full time sa vet in the Wirral. Also to Byre Veterinary Surgery for this full or part time sa vet position in Peterborough, and to Lynton House for this full time sa position in Woking.

I'm not going to be plugging every single job that ever gets posted, just wanted to say a special thanks to these guys for being my first customers. After all the work that's gone into this, they made my day!

If anyone knows anyone looking for a job in these areas, please do use the email share button to forward the details. In the background, my emphasis now is on building yet more visitors to their adverts, and everyone else's.

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Arlo Guthrie — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 12:19:50 GMT

[quote user="Clare Tapsfield-Wright"]Good luck Arlo, I'm not an employer any more but it would have appealed to me and sounds good value . [/quote]

Thanks Clare. Much appreciated. Must say, I'm dead proud of jobs section and all the feedback I've had from everyone says this should go down very well. But one never really knows until one presses the big red button and the first customer comes along, so it's an anxious time!

[quote user="Clare Tapsfield-Wright"]Notifications button on forum isn't working however , says "error contact administrator " [/quote]

That happens to me if I leave the page open for a long time without clicking on anything (like about 15 minutes or more). The actual red icon is in the pipeline for a fix this week.

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Clare Tapsfield-Wright — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 11:53:58 GMT

Good luck Arlo, I'm not an employer any more but it would have appealed to me and sounds good value . Hope the tight wads can see that

Notifications button on forum isn't working however , says "error contact administrator "

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Niall Taylor — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 07:30:03 GMT

[quote user="Michael Woodhouse"]have you got any plans to offer preferential rates to forum users[/quote]

Dearie me, you'll be asking if there are discounts for people on benefits and asking to pay 50p a week next!

"I've got two kids you know!"

Niall

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Arlo Guthrie — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 07:27:08 GMT

[quote user="Niall Taylor"]That sounds very reasonable[/quote]

Well, I know it sounds cheesy, but these sites have always been about supporting the profession, and I wanted the price to reflect that and represent good value, not just in the profession, but anywhere. When I did the most recent review of prices (which was yesterday), the rankings of the paid-for services were:

VetSurgeon.org £99 for 60 days
jobsite.co.uk £149 for 28 days
cv-library.co.uk £149 28 days
reed.co.uk £175 for six weeks
totaljobs.com £175 for 28 days
monster.co.uk £190 for 30 days
vet times £395 for 28 days (but that doesn't include logos and job emails, if you want that, it's £795)
vet record £770 for 4 weeks (which does include a 120 word ad for one week in the magazine).

So, we're something like 10x cheaper than the current industry alternatives, AND cheaper than all the really big players outside the profession.

And none of these alternatives offer all the extra stuff that we do to make your advert 'shine'.

[quote user="Niall Taylor"]Good luck with it all.[/quote]

Thank you

[quote user="Michael Woodhouse"]Firstly - good luck.[/quote]

Thank you too!

[quote user="Michael Woodhouse"]Secondly - have you got any plans to offer preferential rates to forum users?[/quote]

At the moment, the software has only been developed to the extent that I can offer a single price. I do plan to have it developed further so I can do things like this (also offer a dual charging structure of £99/£149 for multiple vs single ads). Meantime, another factor is that I've already priced it lower than the cheapest price I understand people are being offered for buying multiple ads elsewhere, so I think my room for a further discount may be limited. Have to see how it goes.

[quote user="Michael Woodhouse"]Thirdly - have you planned to market this directly to the universities?[/quote]

Yup! Like your idea, though, which I hadn't thought of. Thank you.

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Michael Woodhouse — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 22:21:46 GMT

[quote user="Arlo Guthrie"]If you've got a moment to have a glance at the updates I've added to the job section and give me any feedback about it, that would be much appreciated - though go easy on me. I've got the first night jitters![/quote]

Firstly - good luck.

Secondly - have you got any plans to offer preferential rates to forum users? My thoughts would be that you could use this to drive people towards the discussion forums and get more people contributing as well as selling more adverts? X number of points and 20 posts and X months of membership? I don't know but it could be win:win.

Thirdly - have you planned to market this directly to the universities? Could you create some kind of final year rep at each college? Offer some kind of new grad prize for those who found their first job via the site? That's got to be a clear route in to a lot of younger, tech savvy vets (and a way of getting them into the forum for much needed support in their early careers)?

RE: VetSurgeon Jobs - wish me luck!

Niall Taylor — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 22:00:21 GMT

That sounds very reasonable, it'll be good to have an alternative to the 'usual suspects'. Good luck with it all.

Niall