6 practical tips for hiring staff at your accredited general practice

If you own or manage an accredited general practice, you know the challenges of hiring quality staff.  

The healthcare job market is fiercely competitive. According to Australian government statistics, 82% of healthcare occupations faced shortages in 2023. 

The stakes are high. Hiring the wrong person can lead to repeated recruitment efforts, operational disruptions and a negative impact on team morale. 

So, how can you attract the best talent and streamline your hiring process within your practice? 

Here are five actionable tips to help your accredited general practice hire quality staff, along with practical ways medical practice software like PracticeHub can help simplify the process. 

Start by pinpointing where your accredited general practice is falling short. Understanding capacity gaps can help to ensure you recruit for the right reasons and focus on areas that truly need support. 

To identify capacity gaps, you could: 

• List unmet tasks: Highlight tasks that aren’t being completed effectively or processes that are underperforming. For example, are incidents not being followed up, or is a lack of admin support causing delays for patients? 
• Ask your team: Your staff can provide invaluable insights into where help is needed most. Ask questions like, “What tasks take up the most time?” or “Where do you think additional support would make the biggest impact?” 
• Evaluate systems: Review whether certain tasks can be automated using medical practice software, reassigned to existing staff or outsourced. 

Once you’ve identified capacity gaps, determine what skills, qualifications or traits you would like your new hire to have. 

Creating a skills matrix can help you assess your team’s strengths and where they need support. Here’s how to create one: 

• List your employees: Create a table or spreadsheet with each staff member’s name. 
• Record current skills: Note their competencies and qualifications. 
• Compare against needs: Write down the skills your practice needs, such as experience in appointment scheduling, risk management or RACGP compliance. 
• Identify gaps: Highlight missing skills that the new hire should bring to the team. 

It might also be beneficial to consider if your practice needs other skills that may not have been explicitly identified. For example: 

• Could a tech-savvy hire streamline how your team uses practice software? 
• Do you need someone with strong interpersonal skills to manage patient relations? 
• Is there an opportunity to free up senior staff by delegating routine tasks? 
  

Attracting top talent goes beyond listing job requirements – it’s also about showing candidates why they should choose your practice. 

Make a list of things to entice candidates during the recruitment phase. For instance, you could highlight your practice’s: 

• Mission and vision – Many candidates, particularly younger ones, want to be part a team that’s fulfilling a bigger purpose. 
• Culture – What are the values and behaviours your team embodies daily that can resonate with candidates? 
• Benefits – If you offer regular social events, flexible work arrangements or career development opportunities, make sure you tell candidates about them.
  

Your job ad should be more than a list of requirements – it’s an opportunity to sell your practice and the role. 

Tips for writing a great job ad include: 

• Use a friendly, professional tone. 
• Clearly outline the role’s responsibilities, skills, qualifications and experience required. 
• Include details on working hours, conditions and salary range. 
• Highlight your mission, values and any benefits. 
• Ensure compliance by avoiding discriminatory language and stating requirements like police checks or vaccination status. 
• Make sure everything is accurate, as there are penalties for misleading ads. 

Medical practice software like PracticeHub can help make creating a job ad easier. 

It comes with expertly written position description templates for key practice roles including medical practice assistant, office manager, reception and general practitioner, to name a few. 

These descriptions detail many of the requirements of a job ad, including the purpose of the role and responsibilities, required qualifications and experience, desirable qualities, expected behaviours and hours of work. 

Creating your job ad could be as simple as copying and pasting the position description and making minor tweaks. 

If you received many applications, try to shortlist five to ten candidates. Make a list of deal breakers to rule people out such as a minimum amount of prior industry-related experience.  

Think of the job interview as a two-way conversation where candidates sell their skills, and you sell the role and the benefits of working for your accredited general practice. 

Practical tips for interviewing include: 

• Delve into their relevant skills and experience. Ask for examples of how they’ve solved problems or managed stressful situations. 
• Get a sense of their attitude and work ethic – while skills can always be taught, personality traits usually remain a constant. 
• Be mindful of asking discriminatory questions about religion, race, political views or pregnancy status. 
• Keep a record of your questions, the candidate’s answers and how you responded. 
• Consider follow-up interviews with other team members to assess cultural fit. 
  

Effective onboarding ensures your new team member feels prepared and valued from day one.  

In a busy accredited general practice, it’s often hard to organise all the policies, procedures, registers and other critical documents they’ll need – not to mention find time to organise and deliver mandatory training.  
 
One way you can simplify HR processes is with medical practice software like PracticeHub. It can help you create a digital onboarding process that allows you to: 

• Provide new hires with access to all critical registers, policies and procedures in one place. 
• Assign policies for digital signoff and track compliance through instant alerts. 
• Offer 8 e-learning courses on key topics like work health and safety, privacy and risk management. 
  

Book a 30-minute demo to see how PracticeHub can help simplify your HR processes, risk management, incident reporting and more in one intuitive platform.