Why Would Someone Want To Work For You?
Why would someone want to work for you? It’s never been more difficult to attract quality hires into your business. The bigger your business gets, the bigger the opportunity for staffing to become your bottleneck.
It’s critically important that we can positively answer the question: Why would someone want to work for you? Because if you don’t know, your potential team members surely don’t.
When it comes to growing a healthy pet care team, we need to start with the question: How am I measuring this?
There are three metrics that I think reflect the health of your team:
1. Employee Retention
How long do people stay with us?
2 Employee Happiness & Engagement
How happy do our people indicate to us that they are?
3. Hiring Pipeline & Leads
How many people are trying to work with us at any given time?
Once we know how we’re measuring, then we get to the bigger question: Why would someone want to work for you?
I wrestled with this for a long time. And ultimately, I came to the realization that I needed to build a vision bigger than myself, so that my team could see themselves as a part of it. They needed to feel connected to a bigger journey and to see the impact that they themselves were making for our clients in order to want to remain a member of the team.
Once I realized what needed to be a key focus for me, I did the following things:
1. Take A Stance
I started with defining the core values and mission of the company. I needed something real in order to bring others in.
2. Define Key Metrics
I started measuring key metrics about my staff. How many applications were we getting? How many people were in our hiring pipeline? How long did people stay once they were on the team? I needed something I could influence against.
3. Take Notes
I surveyed my team to get a much deeper understanding of what they wanted out of the job, what they liked about the job, and what they didn’t like.
4. Exit Interviews
I started doing exit interviews. Staff feedback is valuable data.
5. Build Culture
I started involving staff as problem solvers to help build the culture they wanted in the organization.
6. Put It In Writing
I started utilizing a leadership manifesto that I let guide how I and other leaders on my team treated staff members.
7. Stand By It
I started slowly solving key issues in our culture, the way the job itself was set up, and the business to make it a better place to work. (The goal: be the best part time work someone ever had.)
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Michelle Kline is the founder of DogCo Launch, and the host of the DogCo Secrets Podcast. Michelle spends her time helping pet care companies in the industry grow and scale their teams, increase their revenue, and increase personal profits - all while protecting their time. Learn more about Michelle here.
Do you want to scale your pet care business? Consider joining us at the DogCo Business Summit - the first pet care conference focused exclusively on business scaling in this industry - September 26 - 28, 2025.