How to hire a GP in Australia
Filling a GP vacancy has quietly become one of the hardest jobs in Australian primary care. This is where the candidates actually are, why the usual channels underperform, and a faster, cheaper way to get a doctor into the chair.
If you own or manage a clinic, you already know the maths: every week a room sits empty, you lose the billings that room would have generated, and you may still be facing a five-figure recruiter fee to fill it. The good news is that the hardest part of GP hiring isn't a shortage of doctors. It's reaching the right ones.
Why hiring a GP got so hard
Demand for GPs has outpaced the supply of doctors willing to switch roles through public job ads. Clinics routinely report vacancies open for 60 days to 18 months. A regional practice looking for a female GP for women's health, or a specific sub-specialty, can wait even longer. Meanwhile job boards surface a narrow, over-contacted slice of the market, and recruiters charge per placement without leaving you anything you can reuse.
Where GP candidates actually are
This is the single most important idea in GP recruitment: fewer than 10% of suitable doctors are actively job hunting at any moment. Those are the doctors on Seek and LinkedIn, and they're often overseas-trained applicants seeking sponsorship, not the established domestic GPs most clinics want.
The other 90% are passive candidates: settled, registered, fellowship-qualified GPs who would consider a better role, closer to home, better hours, a higher private-billing mix, a partnership path, but who are not applying anywhere because nobody has put the right opportunity in front of them. Reach those doctors and the equation changes completely.
Most clinics underestimate the cost by six figures.
The five ways clinics try to hire a GP
Each channel has a place, but it pays to know what each one is really good (and bad) at.
1. Job boards (Seek, RACGP, LinkedIn)
Cheap to post, but you're fishing in the small active pool and competing with every other clinic in your area. Expect a high share of unsuitable or visa-dependent applicants and a lot of screening for a thin result.
2. Recruitment agencies
They can deliver, but at $25,000–$40,000 per placement, contingent and repeated on every hire. You don't keep the candidate relationships or the search, so the next vacancy starts from zero, and another invoice.
3. Locum agencies
Useful to plug an immediate gap, but expensive per day and rarely a path to a permanent, invested doctor. A locum keeps the lights on; it doesn't solve the vacancy.
4. Referrals & word of mouth
The best-quality channel when it works, but unpredictable and impossible to scale to a deadline. Worth cultivating; not something to rely on.
5. Direct outreach to passive doctors
Contacting suitable GPs directly, by email, SMS and phone, is how you reach the 90% the other channels miss. Done properly it's the highest-leverage channel, and it's the one this guide is really about.
What to check before you hire: AHPRA, VR & location rules
Before you invest in a candidate, confirm the essentials:
- AHPRA registration, the national register of practitioners. Confirms the doctor is registered and in good standing.
- Vocational registration / fellowship, a vocationally registered GP (e.g. FRACGP) attracts higher Medicare rebates and is what most clinics mean by a "real" GP.
- DPA & MM classification, Distribution Priority Area and the Modified Monash Model govern where overseas-trained doctors can work and whether your location qualifies. They directly shape who can practise at your clinic.
- Billing fit, be clear on bulk-billing vs private-billing expectations up front; it's one of the biggest sources of mismatch later.
A faster approach: build your own pipeline
Instead of renting a recruiter for each hire, a growing number of clinics build a headhunting system they own: a verified list of suitable GPs in their catchment, a respectful multi-touch outreach sequence that reads doctor-to-doctor, and a fast way to respond the moment a doctor shows interest, because reply speed is the number-one lever in converting interest into a hire.
The payoff is twofold. You reach doctors no job board shows you, and you keep the system for the next vacancy, across every site you run.
The hardest part of GP hiring isn't finding doctors. It's reaching the right ones before someone else does, and being quick enough to win them.
Your GP hiring checklist
- Define the role precisely: hours, billing mix, special interests, partnership path.
- Quantify the cost of the vacancy so you can size the effort correctly.
- Build a list of suitable, AHPRA-verified GPs in your catchment, not just active applicants.
- Reach them directly with a respectful, compliant, doctor-to-doctor sequence.
- Respond the same day to any positive reply.
- Keep the system so the next hire is a campaign, not a crisis.
Reyah builds and runs exactly this system for Australian clinics, then hands it to you. See how it works, or book a call to talk through your hiring.