Veterinary Technician Skills Include More Than Technical Expertise: 5 Soft Skills to Look For

Vet tech hiring can be tricky. These professionals require a lot of technical expertise, the ability to handle animals, and industry-specific knowledge. But what about other essential veterinary tech skills that are less concrete?

In this article, we’ll detail five soft skills to look for while seeking your next indispensable veterinary technician, as well as how to assess these skills on resumes and during interviews.

What Are Soft Skills?

Hard skills are generally those that a person can learn, like technical knowledge and specific job-related expertise. On the other hand, soft skills are attributes and abilities that influence how a person interacts with others, builds relationships, and fits into the workplace. These skills are harder to develop and quantify.

Top Five Veterinary Soft Skills

We’ve created a list of five soft skills to look for when hiring a new vet tech. They differ from but complement learned skills.

1. Empathy

Day in and day out, vet techs interact with the anxious parents of their furry, feathery, or scaly patients. Empathy – one of the most fundamental vet tech skills – is the ability to understand and even share another person’s emotions. It’s a critical skill for anyone to have, but in the veterinary profession, clients all too often experience stressful or heartbreaking situations, and they may need a shoulder to cry on or an ear to bend. That’s where empathy comes in.

Pets are family members – period. When pets need treatment, their human companions experience powerful emotions. Vet techs should be able to recognize, understand, and feel those emotions to provide support and comfort during difficult times.

Treating pets and their parents with empathy strengthens client relationships, builds trust in your clinic, and often convinces people to recommend your practice to others and return if they need veterinary services in the future.

Empathy goes hand in hand with emotional intelligence, which is the ability to understand and handle your own emotions as well as those of others.

2. Communication

Effective and clear communication is central to any veterinary clinic. Some of the many reasons vet techs need good communication skills include:

• Keeping everyone, from colleagues to clients, on the same page regarding patients and their care, observations during procedures, diagnoses, treatment options, and more
• Optimizing patient care and avoiding the misinterpretation of treatment information, overlooked concerns, and unnecessary worry
• Developing trust with other team members, pets, and their human parents
• Keeping errors to a minimum, improving workflow, and enhancing collaboration

3. Resilience

Not a day goes by in the veterinary field without challenges, setbacks, or stressors. Vet techs must be resilient to cope with these difficult situations. Resilience, or how well a person adapts to trauma, adversity, or stress, can make the difference between a healthy mind and burnout, which is unfortunately common in veterinary medicine.

Complex diagnoses, uncooperative clients, and pet deaths can be hard to deal with. Resilience allows vet techs to cope with and move past these situations instead of dwelling on them.

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4. Teamwork

Vet techs at most veterinary practices have to work with other personnel regularly, including other technicians, office staff, doctors, clients, and even vendors.

Individuals who don’t get along with their colleagues, insist on doing everything themselves, and want all the credit can lower morale and create a negative work environment. Cooperation and collaboration lead to increased efficiency, higher client satisfaction, better patient care, and improved morale.

5. Patience

A vet tech without patience is like a bus driver with carsickness. Sure, it could probably work, but it won’t be pleasant for anybody.

Vet techs interact with pet parents who are likely to be overwhelmed, upset, nervous, or stressed. At times like these, a tech needs patience to explain things and answer questions. Also, many pets are afraid of visits to the vet’s office. A vet tech with patience can handle animals more gently and build trust with them, making their visits less scary.

How to Assess Soft Skills

Even though soft skills are less quantifiable than technical skills, there are certainly ways to evaluate them before hiring a candidate.

On Resumes

Before meeting with a candidate, you can pick up on their soft skills by knowing what to look for while reading their resume. Pay attention to:

• Clarity and organization: This shows good communication skills, professionalism, and attention to detail.
• Keywords and phrases: Action verbs like “innovated,” “negotiated,” “managed,” “facilitated,” “collaborated,” and “resolved” may indicate problem-solving, leadership, communication, and teamwork skills. Words like “global,” “diverse,” and “cross-cultural” suggest adaptability and intercultural competence.
• Achievements and career highlights: These can demonstrate how candidates used their soft skills to create quantifiable improvements in past roles.

In Interviews

During candidate interviews, asking the right questions about past experiences and specific situations can help you evaluate their soft skills. Some examples include:

• Behavioral questions – “Tell me about a time when you disagreed with a team member.”
• Situational questions – “What would you do if your supervisor gave you a project with unclear instructions?”
• “Culture add” questions – “Tell me about a time when understanding someone else’s point of view helped resolve an issue at work.”

You can also use the STAR method to learn more about how candidates use their soft skills. This involves inquiring about:

• A specific Situation (such as “Tell me about a time you resolved a conflict between team members.”)
• The Task they faced
• The Actions they took
• The Results they achieved

Other ways to assess a candidate’s soft skills include role-playing, personality tests, and reference checks.

Find Your Perfect Vet Tech on iHireVeterinary

When hiring for veterinary technician skills, remember to look for hard (technical) and soft (people) skills to determine whether the candidate is a good fit. iHireVeterinary can help you get your job ads in front of qualified candidates and allows you to search millions of resumes across the iHire network.

For more veterinary hiring tips, explore iHireVeterinary’s Employer Resource Center.