How far will practitioners actually travel to work at your clinic?

By Sam Gillette, Founder of Taro

Your vacancy is not competing for every GP in Australia. It is competing for the practitioners who can drive to your clinic in a time they consider acceptable. That pool is far smaller, and far more knowable, than most owners ever work out. Sizing it is one of the three things to settle before searching in how to hire a GP in Australia.

How big is your clinic's real candidate pool?

Two groups only: practitioners within an acceptable commute of your clinic, plus the much smaller number with a genuine reason to relocate. Everyone else is out of the pool, however good the practice. A practitioner does not choose from every clinic in the state, they choose from the clinics they could actually get to every working day.

When a vacancy has been open for months, it is natural to reason from the national picture: thousands of GPs in the country, hundreds in your state, surely a few would suit your practice.

That is why reasoning from the national picture fails. Your real candidate pool has two parts, and only two:

1. Practitioners within an acceptable commute of your clinic: people who could take the job without changing anything else about their life.
2. Practitioners willing to relocate: a much smaller group, reachable only with a different kind of offer, discussed further down.

Everyone else (every GP on the other side of the city, every doctor two regions over) is not in your pool, no matter how good your practice is. Most hiring effort ignores this entirely. Ads go out state-wide, agencies search nationally, and the owner ends up sifting people who were never realistically going to take the job.

How far will a GP actually travel to work?

There is no single figure: tolerance depends on life stage, role, and the direction of the drive. A registrar can move house and absorb a longer drive; a mid-career GP with a mortgage and kids settled in a school is bounded by school pick-up. That practitioner, the one most worth hiring, usually has the tightest radius.

This is the second thing most recruitment ignores: how far someone will travel depends on who they are, not just where they live.

Life stage moves the boundary. A registrar renting near a hospital can move house, change suburbs, and absorb a longer drive for the right training role. A mid-career GP with a mortgage, a partner's job, and kids settled in a school has none of that flexibility. Their commute tolerance is set by school pick-up, not by ambition. The practitioner most worth hiring (experienced, stable, established) usually has the tightest radius.

Role moves the boundary too. Practice nurses typically travel shorter distances than doctors, for a structural reason: nursing roles exist in more places. A nurse can usually find comparable work closer to home, so there is little reason to drive past several employers to reach yours. Doctors weigh more factors (billing arrangements, patient mix, autonomy), so a distinctive role can pull them a bit further. But only a bit.

The direction of the drive matters too. Twenty minutes with the traffic is a different proposition from twenty minutes against it.

The practical consequence: your clinic does not have one hiring radius. It has one per role, and the radius for the practitioner you most want is probably the smallest.

Why do job ads attract the wrong applicants?

Because job boards distribute by state and category while your vacancy is bounded by drive time, most of the people who see the ad could never commute to it, and the practitioners who are inside your radius are mostly employed and not searching job boards at all.

This is the answer to a question owners ask constantly: why do I advertise for months and get applicants who were never going to work out?

A job board distributes your ad by category and state, not by drive time. The listing reaches everyone searching "GP jobs" in your state, which means most people who see it live outside any commute you could reasonably ask of them. Some apply anyway. Others apply from overseas, needing sponsorship your practice may not be set up to provide. The ad is doing what ads do: reaching broadly. But your vacancy is drive-time bounded, and that mismatch is why the applications feel random.

It also explains the silence. The practitioners who are inside your radius are a small group, most of them currently employed and not searching job boards at all. The ad reaches thousands of wrong people and almost none of the right ones. That is not a failure of your listing copy. It is geography.

How do you work out your clinic's real hiring radius?

Three steps: sketch drive-time bands around the clinic, map where practitioners live rather than where they work, and count the competition inside each band. A rough version takes an afternoon, and it will change how you recruit.

Think in drive-time bands, not kilometres. Straight-line distance is close to meaningless: a river, a highway, or a rail line can make a near suburb slow and a far one quick. Sketch three bands around your clinic:

• Under 20 minutes: the no-friction zone. A practitioner here can take your job without renegotiating anything at home. This is your core pool.
• 20 to 40 minutes: the persuasion zone. People here will consider you, but the role has to beat whatever sits closer to them. Flexibility, session structure, and how the practice runs start to matter more than the ad copy.
• Over 40 minutes: the exception zone. A few people will do this drive for something specific: a procedural interest, a leadership role, an ownership pathway. Do not build a hiring plan on them.

The cut-offs are judgement, not science. Adjust them for your local traffic reality. The discipline of drawing bands at all is what matters.

Map where practitioners live, not where they work. This is the step nearly everyone skips. The question is not how many clinics are near you. It is which residential suburbs feed your area. Practitioners cluster in particular suburbs, often not the ones their clinics sit in. An outer-metro clinic can sit thirty minutes from the suburbs where most of the region's doctors actually live, and its owner would never know from looking at a map of clinics.

Count the competition inside your bands. If you are metro or outer-metro, your 20-minute band is also the 20-minute band of a dozen other practices, all drawing on the same people. Whatever your role offers has to be specific enough to win inside that shared pool, because "GP wanted, great team" does not separate you from the clinic one suburb over saying the same thing.

What if there aren't enough practitioners within range?

Then your vacancy is a relocation sale, not a commute sale: an entirely different recruitment problem, won on the life rather than the role. Run the exercise honestly and some clinics, especially regional ones, will find the number of practitioners within a plausible drive is very small and most of them settled where they are. That is not a dead end. It is a strategy decision:

• A commute sale is won on the role: sessions, billing arrangements, autonomy, the way the practice runs day to day.
• A relocation sale is won on the life: housing, schools, a partner's employment prospects, community, what a week actually looks like in your town. The role still matters, but it is the second conversation, not the first.

Clinics that fail at regional recruitment usually fail here: running commute-sale messaging at an audience that would have to move house to say yes. If your pool analysis says relocation, everything changes: who you approach, what you lead with, and how long the conversation takes. Knowing which sale you are making, before you start, is worth more than any amount of extra advertising budget. The relocation search itself is covered in regional clinic recruitment.

Know the number before you spend anything

Everything above can be estimated by hand. It can also be measured. When Taro takes on a clinic, the first step, before any outreach goes out, is mapping the practitioner population around that clinic, so the owner starts with the actual size of their realistic pool and knows whether they are making a commute sale or a relocation sale. The recruitment plan follows from that number, instead of guessing at it.

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