How to recruit clinicians for your allied health practice without a recruiter

In short

• Physiotherapists, OTs, speech pathologists, psychologists, podiatrists, chiropractors and osteopaths are all in national shortage. Clinicians are choosing employers, not the other way round.
• A recruiter charges 12% to 25% of first-year salary. A careers page, a specific job ad and a place to post it cost a weekend and do the job for years.
• Retention is the cheaper half. Supervision, flexibility and a visible career path decide whether the clinician you hired this year is still there next year.

Why can’t you find a clinician to hire?

Because there are more jobs than clinicians, and the clinicians can see every job at once.

The 2025 Occupation Shortage List rates physiotherapist, occupational therapist, speech pathologist, clinical psychologist, podiatrist, chiropractor and osteopath as in shortage nationally and in every state. Dietitian is the one allied health profession rated no shortage. (Jobs and Skills Australia, 2025 Occupation Shortage List, October 2025) Jobs and Skills Australia names “insufficient qualified applicants” as the leading driver, and health as one of the three sectors where it bites hardest.

Supply is growing, just not fast enough. Ahpra registered 47,761 physiotherapists at 30 June 2025, up 6.4% on the year, and 34,423 occupational therapists, up 7.4%, of whom 2,789 registered for the first time that year. (Physiotherapy Board of Australia and Occupational Therapy Board of Australia, annual report summaries 2024/25) Speech Pathology Australia’s workforce analysis found employers reporting unfilled positions, vacancies open longer than twelve months and year-on-year drops in applicants, with about 40% of the profession working part-time and most not intending to return to full-time hours. (Speech Pathology Australia, Workforce Analysis, March 2023)

The practical effect: a new graduate OT with a Seek alert has 40 open roles in front of her and can compare pay, caseload and supervision across all of them in an evening. Your ad is competing with 39 others for the same person. Most of those ads say “friendly team, supportive environment, competitive salary”. That is the opening.

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What does a recruiter cost, and what do you get?

Between $11,000 and $22,000 for a $90,000 clinician, for a shortlist you could have built yourself.

Australian permanent placement fees run 15% to 20% of first-year salary for junior roles, 18% to 25% for mid-level and 20% to 30% or more for senior. (ManpowerGroup Australia, April 2026) Healthcare-specific agencies quote 12% to 20%. (MedHireHub, June 2026) On a physiotherapist at $90,000, that is $10,800 to $22,500 per hire, and most agreements only guarantee the placement for three to six months.

What you get for it is reach and screening: the recruiter has a database and rings people who are not looking. That is worth paying for once, for a senior or specialist role in a thin market. It is not worth paying for every year, for every graduate, because the reach comes from three places you can own yourself: a careers page, a job ad that says something, and a profile the graduates already follow.

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What does a careers page need?

The same things a patient landing page needs: the offer in specifics, faces, a story, and a form that takes two minutes.

A careers page is a landing page where the visitor is a clinician instead of a patient. Most practices have one paragraph under “Join us” and a PDF. Here is what fills a role.

1. The offer, in numbers. Pay band. Expected billable hours a day (say five if it is five; the profession already knows what six means). Caseload mix by funding stream. Supervision: how many hours a fortnight, with whom. Professional development budget. Flexibility: four-day weeks, school hours, telehealth days. A clinician comparing 40 roles is looking for the one that publishes these. Be that one.
2. Faces and names. Photos of the actual team in the actual rooms, with first names and how long each has been there. Stock images say the team is hypothetical.
3. The owner’s one-paragraph story. Why you started the practice and what you refuse to do (discharge at six sessions because the funding ran out, roster back-to-backs with no notes time). This is the same paragraph from your personal brand, doing a second job.
4. A 60-second video. The owner or a recent hire, phone camera, in the clinic, answering “what is a Tuesday like here?”. Nothing else on the page does what this does.
5. Day one to day 90. What the first week looks like, when the caseload ramps, when the first review happens. Graduates are frightened of being handed a full diary on day two. Say you will not.
6. A form, not a PDF. Name, email, phone, upload a resume, one question: “What would make this the right role for you?”. Reply within one working day, from the owner, by phone. Speed is a signal the good ones read.

Keep the page live when you are not hiring. A clinician who lands there in March and sees “no roles open, tell us who you are” is a shortlist in September. Every profession page on your site links to it in the footer.

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How do you write a job ad people reply to?

Lead with the four things the reader is weighing. Cut everything they have read a hundred times.

The reader is weighing pay, caseload, supervision and hours. Put those in the first five lines. “Physiotherapist, Level 2 to 3, $85,000 to $98,000 plus super. Five billable hours a day, 30 minutes for notes built into every session. Fortnightly one-hour supervision with a titled musculoskeletal physio. Four-day week available.” That paragraph gets replies. “We are seeking a motivated physiotherapist to join our friendly team in a supportive, growing practice” gets scrolled past.

The law on the pay line

You must not advertise pay below the minimum for the role under the Fair Work Act or the applicable award, which for most practices is the Health Professionals and Support Services Award 2020. (Fair Work Ombudsman, Job ads; MA000027 summary) Pay secrecy clauses have had no effect since December 2022 and attract penalties, so your current staff can, and do, compare notes with applicants. (Fair Work Ombudsman, Pay secrecy) Publish the band. An ad without pay reads as an ad with low pay.

Where to post it

Seek first, because that is where the alerts are set. Then the profession boards: the APA’s Jobs4Physios, the OTA, Speech Pathology Australia and APS job boards, and the university careers pages for every allied health course within an hour of you. Then LinkedIn, where 18 million Australians hold an account, for experienced clinicians and for the referrers who know someone looking. (DataReportal, Digital 2026: Australia, February 2026) Every post links to the careers page, not to Seek. The careers page is yours; Seek is rented.

If you want the careers page, the form and the reply flow built so an application reaches your phone in a minute and the applicant gets a human reply the same day, tell us what you need. It is a week’s work on most sites.

Tell us what you need

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Where do new graduates look?

At the clinicians they already follow, and at the practices where they did placement.

No Australian survey pins down where allied health graduates look for their first job, but two sources are visible from any practice that has hired one. Placement students go back to the practices that treated them well, and they tell their cohort. Graduates follow clinicians on Instagram and LinkedIn through their final year and apply to the ones whose approach they already agree with. A practice owner who posts one 45-second video a week explaining how the practice thinks about rehab, or discharge, or NDIS reports, is running a recruitment channel whether or not that was the intent.

Two moves follow. Take placement students every year, even when it costs supervision time, and name the ones who came back on the careers page. And treat the owner’s social presence as part of hiring: the same content that brings patients brings applicants, and the applicants arrive having already decided they like how you work. We cover the how in personal branding for allied health professionals.

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How do you keep them?

Supervision they can feel, hours they can shape, a next step they can see, and pay that tracks the market.

Occupational Therapy Australia surveyed 2,145 OTs for its 2024 workforce project. The profession is losing experienced clinicians, and the reasons named were an absence of advanced clinical roles, remuneration that did not match the work, and inflexible conditions; satisfaction was much lower where OTs felt poorly paid, and retention tracked the quality of supervision, flexibility and career advancement. (Occupational Therapy Australia, December 2024) Speech pathology shows the same pattern, with more than 10% intending to change jobs inside twelve months. (Speech Pathology Australia, March 2023)

Replacing an employee typically costs 50% to 150% of their annual salary once you count the gap, the hire and the ramp. (Great Place To Work Australia citing AHRI, August 2026) For a $90,000 clinician that is $45,000 to $135,000, before the patients who leave with them. A fortnightly hour of supervision, a four-day-week option and a written path from graduate to senior cost a fraction of that. Retention is the recruitment strategy with the highest return, and it is the one owners skip because it does not feel like marketing.

The cheapest clinician to recruit is the one who never left.

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Where does AI fit in hiring?

Drafting the ad and the careers page from your own bullet points. Never screening people with it.

Give ChatGPT or Claude your pay band, your caseload numbers, your supervision cadence and three sentences about why you started the practice, and ask for a job ad in plain Australian English with no adjectives. It will produce a first draft in a minute that beats most ads on Seek, because most ads on Seek were written without those inputs. Then rewrite the first paragraph in your own voice, because applicants can tell.

Do not paste applicants’ resumes into a consumer AI tool to rank them. It is personal information under the Privacy Act, the OAIC advises against entering personal information into public generative AI tools, and an automated shortlist you cannot explain is a discrimination claim waiting for a lawyer. (OAIC, Guidance on privacy and the use of commercially available AI products, updated January 2025) Read the resumes yourself. There will not be that many.

If hiring is the ceiling on your practice this year, tell us what you need. A careers page, an ad that publishes the numbers, and the owner on camera once a week is a system we can build in a month.

Tell us what you need

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