When we began our Toms River pet sitting company in 2007, Megan and I knew we wanted to be able to help many families find the solution to their pet care problem. We also recognized that because we are only 2 people, the number of families we would be able to help ourselves would be limited. We knew early on that we would want to hire staff to help us reach that goal someday.
Karen Loving Hunter
That “someday” came within the first year of us opening our business! We were so happy to know that we were going to be able to create jobs for others and be able to provide pet care to more families.
The Hiring Journey
Hiring someone to our team isn’t something we take lightly. It’s a process that we’ve been constantly working on and perfecting. It is so important to us to hire the best of the best, that we will wait months for the RIGHT person.
First and foremost, we decided that having employees was better for our company and our clients that if we utilized independent contractors. The main benefits are that we can train each employee about how our company works, tell them exactly how to do a pet visit, keep them accountable and have more direct influence on their work.
We look for individuals who live in our service area, have reliable transportation and smartphones. That all may sound trivial, but it’s super important. Our sitters can travel hundreds of miles each month caring for our client’s pets within our service area. We need to know they have reliable transportation, so they can dependably do their job.
We also look for individuals who are detail conscious, service oriented and pet lovers. We need to know that the instructions our clients provide for the care of their pets are going to be followed and that’s where the detail conscious person succeeds. We want people who understand the importance of their role with our company and want to make sure our 2 legged clients are just as happy as our 4 legged clients.
We’ve been fortunate enough to hire sitters who have been with us for 3 to 5 years and counting! They have become more than just team members, they have become family.
In this 3 minute video, I explain more about our interview process, orientation, and new pet sitter training. It will give you insight into just how seriously we take hiring a new team member.
Video Transcription:
Hi everyone, I’m Tori Lattig with Endless Pawsibilities and today we’re going to talk about how we find our pet sitters. A lot of the time people have emailed us and asked us how we find our sitters and how they can start working with our company.
First, our applicants send us their resume and their applications. We review those and look for the qualities that we know are needed in a pet sitter. For those that make it through that first cut, we’ll schedule an interview and so either Megan or myself does the first interview.
You know interviews are interviews so they go through a normal process for that. We then review again, what we liked and how we think those sitters will do with our company.
If we feel that they would do well then we call them back for a second interview and we ask them a different set of questions and they go through a whole another set of an interview process.
From those candidates, it’s narrowed down and for the ones that we want to offer a position to, we then call them back in and we have them take a drug test and submit for a background check and once those come back as clear then we would offer the position and we would start training.
The orientation is about two hours and they sit with me and they learn all about our company and how things work on the back end as well as how to utilize our software and what they need to do during each pet visit.
Then they go out and shadow the sitters for a period of time. They don’t any of the hands on, they really just watch what our sitters do and learn the processes and how everything is done so that we can provide the same standard of care to everyone.
Then the primary sitter steps back and the new hire steps in and so the primary sitter watches and makes sure that they are doing everything the way that they need to and that they understand everything that they were taught.
Once they’ve gotten to a place where we’re comfortable and the sitter’s comfortable then they would be permitted to do pet visits without supervision.
We really take the time to make sure that everyone is on the same page and that all questions are asked and they understand what’s expected of them.
The sitters always have access to me so if there’s ever any questions or any emergencies while they’re on a pet visit, they know that they can contact me and we’ll get everything taken care of.
We’re always thinking ahead and what if and making sure that we’ve got policies and things in place for those kinds of things.
That’s the pretty much how it all works and thanks for watching.
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