GP recruitment agency vs Reyah: renting hires or owning the system
Both fill the chair, eventually. The difference is what you're left holding when the engagement ends: an invoice, or a machine. Here's the honest side-by-side, including where an agency still wins.
First, the framing that matters. A recruitment agency sells you an outcome: one hire, one fee. Reyah is not a recruitment agency. It builds your clinic its own headhunting system, runs the first campaign with you, then trains your team to run it forever. One is a service you rent per vacancy; the other is infrastructure you own. Everything else in this comparison flows from that.
How the agency model works
A specialist medical recruiter works on contingency: no hire, no fee, and typically $25,000–$40,000 per placement when a hire lands. The recruiter sources candidates from their existing database, from job-board advertising and from LinkedIn, which means the pool skews heavily towards the small minority of doctors actively looking. The agency owns the search, the shortlist and the candidate relationships; you receive introductions. When the placement is made, the engagement ends, and so does your access to everything the search produced.
How the Reyah model works
Reyah builds outbound headhunting infrastructure inside your clinic: dedicated sending domains, verified doctor databases sourced by specialty and location and cross-referenced against AHPRA for VR and fellowship status, and a multi-channel sequence across email, SMS and voicemail that reads doctor-to-doctor, never as a recruiter pitch. Reyah runs the first campaign, alerts you within a minute of a positive reply, and then hands the whole thing over with training so a practice manager can operate it. The fee is one-off and transparent in structure: 50% on signing, 50% on the first hire's start date, with no retainers, no per-placement fees and no lock-in. If a campaign yields nothing, Reyah keeps launching until a hire lands.
The side-by-side
The same vacancy, approached two ways.
| Recruitment agency | Reyah | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost model | $25k–$40k contingent fee, per hire | One-off build fee: 50% on signing, 50% on the first hire's start date |
| Every hire after | Another full fee | $0, re-run the system you own |
| What you keep | The hire only | The infrastructure, data and candidate relationships |
| Candidate reach | Active applicants, largely from the same job boards | The passive 90% who never apply |
| Speed incentive | Your role competes with every other mandate | Positive replies alerted in under 60 seconds; same-day response built in |
| Repeat vacancies | Back to the start, and the fee, each time | Relaunch in days at no extra cost |
| Guarantee | Replacement guarantee, usually time-limited | Campaigns keep launching until a hire lands |
Cost model: a fee every time vs a fee once
Contingency feels safe because you only pay on success. But the fee recurs on every success. Hire three GPs over five years through an agency and you've paid the placement fee three times, for three searches that each started from zero. Reyah inverts that curve: the first hire carries the build cost, and every hire after it costs nothing extra, because the sourcing, the domains, the sequences and the reply engine are already yours. If you run more than one site, or your clinic has a history of recurring vacancies, the maths diverges quickly. Put your own numbers on it with the cost-of-vacancy calculator, then look at what GP recruitment really costs across every channel.
Ownership: what's left when the engagement ends
This is the quietest difference and the biggest one. When an agency search ends, the shortlist, the market map and every "not right now, ask me next year" conversation belong to the agency. That knowledge is precisely what they'll resell to the next clinic, possibly your competitor down the road. With an owned system, every doctor contacted, every reply and every relationship stays in your clinic's CRM. A doctor who said no this year is a warm conversation next year, and it's your warm conversation.
Reach: the same shortlist vs the passive 90%
Fewer than 10% of suitable doctors are actively job hunting at any moment, and those are the ones agencies and job boards surface, often overseas-trained applicants seeking sponsorship rather than the settled, fellowship-qualified GPs most clinics want. The other 90% would move for the right opportunity but aren't applying anywhere. Reaching them takes direct, compliant, multi-channel outreach, which is what the system is built to do. If a recruiter and your job ad are fishing the same pond, someone has to fish the rest of the lake.
A clear figure in about 30 seconds.
Speed: who's actually incentivised to move fast
Reply speed is the single biggest conversion lever in doctor outreach; a same-day response massively outperforms one that takes three days. An agency recruiter juggles many mandates at once, and your vacancy competes for their attention with every other fee on their desk. An owned system removes the middle layer: a positive reply triggers an alert to your clinic in under 60 seconds, with re-alerts until someone responds, so the doctor hears back from you while the interest is still warm. Nobody is more motivated to fill your chair than you are, and the system finally makes that motivation count.
"But a recruiter does the work for me"
The fair objection to owning anything is that renting is easier, and for the build phase, that's true of headhunting infrastructure too. Dedicated sending domains with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, a warm-up period, verified contact data, sequence copy that reads like a colleague rather than a pitch, and Spam Act 2003 compliance with do-not-contact screening on every send: none of that is something a practice manager should be expected to stand up from scratch. That's why Reyah does the whole buildout, runs the first campaign end to end, and operates the compliance layer, our system, our liability, before handing anything over. What lands on your desk after training is deliberately small: a few minutes a week, one inbox where replies arrive, and alerts that tell you exactly when to pick up the phone. The interviews, the clinical assessment and the employment paperwork stay with you under either model; no recruiter ever did those for you anyway.
Repeat vacancies: where the difference compounds
A single, one-off vacancy narrows the gap between the two models. Recurring vacancies blow it open. GPs retire, relocate and reduce sessions; multi-site groups almost always have a chair open somewhere. Under the agency model, each of those events restarts the meter. Under the ownership model, each one is a relaunch: same database, same warmed domains, same proven sequence, tailored to the new vacancy, at no new cost. This is why the comparison isn't really agency vs Reyah for this hire; it's agency-per-hire vs system-for-every-hire.
When an agency still makes sense
Honesty cuts both ways. If you expect to hire exactly once in the next decade, want zero operational involvement, and are comfortable paying a five-figure contingent fee for that convenience, a good agency can be a rational choice. The same goes for highly specialised, one-off executive-style searches. But if you're a 2–10 doctor clinic with an empty room bleeding revenue, a history of vacancies, or plans to grow, paying rent on the same search over and over is the expensive path. For the wider landscape, including job boards and in-house hiring, see the full guide to GP recruitment agency alternatives.
An agency sells you a hire. A system makes every future hire cheaper than the last.
Want to see the mechanism itself? Read how the system works, or book a call and we'll map it to your vacancy.