Why GP candidates go quiet, and how reply speed fixes it

By Sam Gillette, Founder of Taro

Reply speed is the one recruitment lever you control completely, and it is almost always the one clinics use least. A GP replies to say they're interested, and four days later your practice manager writes back. By then the conversation you thought you were starting is already happening somewhere else. Where it sits in the wider process is covered in how to hire a GP in Australia.

How long is the window when a GP is open to moving?

Days, not months, and you are rarely the only conversation in it. When something tips a settled practitioner into being open to a move, they answer the two or three approaches already sitting in their inbox, and the clinic that responds the same day is the one having a conversation.

A settled practitioner doesn't spend months browsing. They spend months not thinking about it, and then something tips them (a roster change, a new principal, a partner's job moving interstate) and suddenly they're open. When that happens, they rarely talk to one clinic. They answer the approaches in front of them and mention it to a colleague.

So when a doctor replies to you, you're not at the start of their process. You're in the middle of it, alongside other people, and the window where they're actively weighing options is short. The clinic that responds Thursday is a footnote in someone else's decision.

This is the honest answer to "why did the candidate go quiet?" Most of the time they didn't go quiet. They went somewhere. The silence is usually the sound of a decision being made without you.

What does a slow reply signal to a candidate?

That this is how the practice runs. Before a candidate ever visits, how you treat them is their only data point about how the clinic operates, and a doctor weighing the difference between a same-day reply and a four-day silence reads it as a preview of what the practice will be like when they need something.

There's a second cost to slowness, and it's worse than the timing.

A candidate can't see inside your clinic: the culture, how the roster really works, whether the principals are reasonable. Before they visit, they have exactly one data point about how your practice operates: how it treats them.

A same-day reply from a named person says: this place is run by someone. Decisions get made. Questions get answered. A four-day silence followed by "sorry for the delay, we've been flat out" says something too. A doctor deciding whether to move their family doesn't read it as busy. They read it as: this is what it will be like when I need something.

You are being interviewed from the first reply. Slow answers fail that interview before anyone has discussed a start date.

Why do clinics reply slowly even when they care?

If you've lost candidates this way, it wasn't because anyone didn't care. It's because nobody decided, in advance, who owns the reply. The candidate's message sits where three people can see it and nobody is authorised to answer it. The pattern in a small practice looks like this:

• The candidate's reply lands in a shared inbox: reception@, admin@, or the practice's general address. Three people can see it. Nobody owns it.
• The owner is the only person who can actually answer the questions the candidate will ask (billing arrangements, roster, start date), and the owner is consulting all day. The email waits for the evening. Then the evening gets eaten.
• The practice manager sees it, wants to respond, but doesn't feel authorised to talk about money or sessions. So they hold it for the weekly catch-up with the owner. The catch-up gets bumped. The reply is now nine days old.

Every step is reasonable. The system produces silence anyway. That's the important part: you can't fix this by asking people to try harder. You fix it by making the decisions before the next reply arrives, so no reply ever has to wait for a meeting.

How do you set up same-day replies?

Four decisions, made once, before any outreach goes out: name one owner of the reply, authorise them properly, set a same-day standard, and keep it moving after first contact. It takes an hour, and the outreach itself is covered in recruiting under your clinic’s own name.

Name one owner of the reply

One person (by name, not by role description) is responsible for answering candidate replies. Everything to do with candidates routes to them. If replies come to a shared inbox, they're forwarded within the hour and the named person takes it from there. The test is simple: if a GP replies at 10am on a Tuesday, everyone in the practice should be able to say who answers, without asking.

Authorise them properly

The reason the practice manager sits on replies is that they don't know what they're allowed to say. So decide it, explicitly, before you need it:

• Roster: what sessions are available, what flexibility exists, what's fixed.
• Billing arrangements: the structure and the range you'd consider, enough to answer "how does the split work?" without a callback.
• Start dates: what's realistic, what's negotiable, whether you'd wait for the right person.
• What needs the owner: anything outside those ranges gets escalated the same day, not held for a weekly meeting.

Write these down in half a page. The point isn't the document. The point is that the person answering replies can answer, in the first exchange, the three questions every candidate asks, instead of promising to find out.

Set a same-day standard, even when you don't have the answer

The standard is: every candidate reply gets a response the same working day. Not a full answer, a response.

This is the piece owners resist: the feeling that you can't reply until you've worked out what to say. You can. "Good to hear from you. I'd rather talk properly than do this over email. Can we speak Thursday at 7pm after my last patient?" is a complete same-day reply. It answers nothing and commits to everything that matters.

Candidates accept scheduling. Every doctor understands that a practice owner consults all day; nobody is offended by "Thursday evening." What they don't accept is silence, because silence is the one response that carries no information except indifference. A fast reply that books a slow conversation beats a slow reply every time.

Keep it moving after first contact

The standard doesn't end after the first exchange. The candidate who visited Saturday should hear from you Monday. The one who asked about the billing arrangement should get an answer inside a day, even if it's "I'll come back to you Wednesday." Momentum is the message. Every dead-air gap invites the other clinic back into their head.

Why does reply speed matter beyond this hire?

Because the practitioners who don't move now become next year's pipeline, if the conversation was fast and human. Here's the part that compounds: not every interested practitioner will move now. Some are testing the water; some get a counter-offer; some have a lease, a school year, a visa timeline. You will have good conversations that end with "not this year."

If those conversations were fast and human, they're not losses. They're pipeline. A GP who was answered promptly, given straight answers, and treated with respect will remember your clinic when their situation changes, and situations always change. When your next vacancy opens, that person is a warm phone call, not a cold start.

A candidate who replied with interest and got ignored is the opposite. They didn't just choose another clinic this time. They filed yours under "doesn't have it together," and that file rarely gets reopened. Slow replies don't cost you one candidate. They quietly cost you every future version of that candidate too.

This is why the reply belongs with the clinic, not routed through an intermediary. Taro is built that way deliberately: outreach goes out under your clinic's name, and when a practitioner replies, it comes straight to you: the shortest possible path between an interested doctor and the person who can actually say yes. The system finds and reaches practitioners; the conversation, from the first reply, is yours.

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