GP recruitment agency alternatives: what each leaves you with

By Sam Gillette, Founder of Taro

Practice owners go looking for agency alternatives for one of two reasons: the percentage fee, typically 15–25% of the candidate's annual salary, charged again on every hire (Manpower Australia), or the experience of paying it and still interviewing the same shortlist every other clinic saw. This guide lays out the real alternatives, what each costs structurally, and what each one leaves the clinic holding once the hire is done.

What does a recruitment agency actually do for you?

An agency does four jobs: finds candidates, approaches them, filters interest, and manages the process to a start date. Any alternative has to cover those four jobs somehow: with your time, your tools, or a system. The honest comparison is who does each job and what's left in your clinic afterwards, not just the invoice.

The full process, from defining the role to the first day, is mapped in how to hire a GP in Australia, worth reading first if the role itself isn't settled yet.

What are the alternatives to a GP recruitment agency?

There are five: job boards, DIY outreach under your own name, flat-fee recruitment services, locum agencies, and an owned recruitment system. Each covers a different share of the four agency jobs, with a different cost structure and a different answer to what you keep afterwards.

1. Job boards and medical listing sites

Covers: advertising the role. You do the filtering, chasing and closing. Structure: per-listing fees, ongoing until filled. Fits when: your offer is strong, your location is desirable, and your ideal hire happens to be actively looking this month. The catch: ads only reach the active minority: around 70% of professionals aren't job-hunting at any given moment (LinkedIn Talent Solutions), and the proportion is likely higher for GPs in demand. For most clinics the board is the slowest channel dressed up as the cheapest. Full arithmetic in the cost guide.

2. DIY outreach under your own name

Covers: everything. You're the recruiter now. Structure: near-zero cash, heavy owner time. Fits when: small catchment, one vacancy, an owner with hours to spend and patience to sequence follow-ups. Why it works when it works: doctors ignore recruiters and answer practice owners: a specific, personal approach about a real role outperforms any listing (why). The catch: it's a genuine part-time job (list building, contact details, follow-up sequencing, Spam Act compliance, record keeping), and the machinery usually dies the day the vacancy fills. The next vacancy starts from zero.

3. Flat-fee recruitment services

Covers: the agency jobs, at a fixed price per hire instead of a percentage. Structure: cheaper per hire than percentage agencies; still pay-per-hire. Fits when: you want one hire handled and price certainty, and accept owning nothing afterwards. The catch: the model is the agency model with a smaller invoice. Candidate pool, relationships and market knowledge still leave when the engagement ends: hire number two is another fee. How the fee structures compare is broken down in what GP recruitment costs in Australia.

4. Locum agencies

Covers: keeping the doors open. Not a hire. Structure: published day rates, billed weekly, ongoing. Fits when: bridging a sudden departure, parental leave, protecting a stretched team while a real search runs. The catch: as a strategy it's the most expensive way to stand still: the vacancy is intact when the locum leaves, and long dependence quietly becomes the biggest line in the recruitment bill.

5. An owned recruitment system

Covers: the finding and approaching, industrialised; you keep the deciding and the relationships, the parts that win doctors anyway. Structure: one-time build. The map of practitioners in your catchment, the outreach infrastructure running under your clinic's name, and every conversation stay with the clinic, so the second hire, and the tenth, cost nothing more. Fits when: you expect to hire more than once, which, in a market projected to be short one in three GPs by 2032 (Deloitte Access Economics × Cornerstone Health), is nearly every growing practice. The catch, honestly: it front-loads commitment (the build happens before the hire) and you answer interested doctors yourself. That last part is a feature (practitioners respond to the person who can say yes) but it does mean same-day replies are your job. (Why reply speed decides hires.)

How do the alternatives compare?

Only DIY outreach and an owned system leave the clinic holding anything once the hire is made, and only an owned system does that without the recruiter's workload landing on the owner. Every other option charges again, in fees or in time, when the next vacancy opens.

What do you still own once the hire is done?

With an agency, a job board, a flat-fee service or a locum arrangement, the clinic finishes the hire holding nothing it did not hold at the start. With a system the clinic owns, the search assets (the practitioner map, the outreach infrastructure, the conversation history) stay with the practice.

The structure is the same across the paid channels. An agency's candidate list, relationships and market knowledge are the agency's working capital: they arrive with the engagement and leave with it, and the next vacancy is a new engagement at the full fee. A job board listing expires with the campaign: the responses belonged to that ad, and a new vacancy means a new listing. A flat-fee service changes the size of the invoice, not the structure of it. A locum arrangement never produces a hire at all: it covers sessions for as long as the day rates are paid, and stops covering them when the payments stop.

DIY outreach is the partial exception: the notes, contact details and replies belong to the clinic. What it lacks is machinery: everything was done by hand, so the next search is done by hand too, from whatever records survived the last one. An owned system keeps the same assets and keeps them running, so the second search starts from where the first one finished rather than from a blank page.

Which structure is the right one depends on three things only you know: how often you expect to hire, how long you can afford to leave the vacancy open, and whether you want to be holding anything once the hire is done. That is the trade-off. Weigh it against your own hiring horizon.

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