Why Seek and LinkedIn doesn't work for hiring GPs
It isn't that you're posting the wrong ad. Job boards are built to catch people who are looking, and the GPs worth hiring usually aren't. Here's the structural reason a listing underperforms, and what reaches the doctors who never apply.
Every clinic owner has done it: written the role up, paid for the Seek listing, shared it on LinkedIn, and waited. A trickle of applications arrives, most of them wrong, and the room stays empty. The instinct is to blame the ad. The real problem is the channel.
The active vs. passive doctor split
At any moment, only a small fraction of qualified GPs are actively job-hunting, under 10% of the market. Job boards are designed to reach exactly that group: people typing "GP jobs" into a search bar. The doctors you actually want, experienced, fellowship-qualified, settled in a practice, are not browsing ads. They'd consider a genuinely better role, location or lifestyle, but they aren't applying to anything.
Currently applying. The only group a job board can reach, and the group every other clinic is also fishing in.
Not looking, but movable for the right opportunity. Invisible to job boards, and where the best hires actually come from.
So a job ad doesn't fail because it's badly written. It fails because it can only ever speak to the smallest, most contested slice of the market.
The overseas-applicant problem: DPA & MM1
Because so few local GPs are applying, open ads are disproportionately answered by internationally trained doctors seeking sponsorship. There's nothing wrong with that, many are excellent, but whether they can actually work at your clinic depends on Distribution Priority Area (DPA) and Modified Monash (MM1) rules, which govern where overseas-trained doctors are allowed to practise. For a metro or well-serviced practice, those rules frequently rule the applicant out before the conversation even starts. The result: an inbox full of applications you can't convert, and the local doctor you need still hasn't seen the role.
The real cost of relisting
The most expensive part of a job ad isn't the listing fee, it's time. Weeks pass screening applicants who don't fit, the ad expires, you relist, and the cycle repeats while the chair sits empty. Vacancies that lean on job boards routinely stay open 60 days to well over a year. Every one of those weeks is lost billings from an empty room, a cost that dwarfs the recruiter invoice or the Seek subscription many times over.
See the number behind the open chair.
What reaching the passive 90% actually takes
If the doctors worth hiring won't come to a job board, you have to go to them, directly and on purpose. Done properly, that means:
- Targeted sourcing by specialty, geography and seniority, cross-referenced against AHPRA for VR and fellowship status, from publicly available information.
- Doctor-to-doctor outreach that reads as a real peer reaching out, never a recruiter and never a faceless brand, across email, SMS and voicemail.
- Multi-touch, respectful sequencing over about ten days, so a busy doctor sees the opportunity more than once without feeling spammed.
- Same-day reply handling, because once a passive doctor raises their hand, speed is the single biggest factor in whether they convert.
That's a different motion from posting and praying, and it's why it works: it reaches the 90% the job boards never touch, the kind of reach a Seek listing almost never delivers.
Job boards find the doctors who are leaving. Outreach finds the doctors worth keeping.
Next: read how to hire a GP in Australia, compare recruitment agency alternatives, or book a call.