How to Recruit Successfully in Primary Care: A Practical Guide for GP Practices

Recruiting a permanent GP, ANP, or advanced practitioner in 2025 is genuinely difficult. The shortage of available candidates is real, competition between practices is intensifying, and the candidates worth hiring have options. But in our experience working with hundreds of GP practices across England, the difference between practices that successfully recruit and those that don't is rarely about luck or location. It is almost always about approach. This guide sets out the practical steps that make the difference.

Why Recruitment Is Getting Harder — and What You Can Actually Control

The factors most practice managers cite as barriers — a shrinking pool of available GPs, increasing numbers moving to locum work, national workforce shortages — are real but largely outside your control. What you can control is how attractive your practice looks to candidates, how efficient your process is, and how competitive your offer is once you find someone worth hiring.

Practices that recruit successfully share one characteristic: they treat recruitment as a strategic priority, not an administrative task delegated to whoever has time. Every week a vacancy remains unfilled has a cost — in locum spend, partner workload, patient access, and practice morale. Approaching recruitment with urgency and intentionality pays dividends quickly.

Eight Things Successful Practices Do Differently

1. They Don't Rely Solely on Job Adverts

   Adverts on NHS Jobs reach roughly 30% of the available candidate pool — those actively searching. The remaining 70%, including many of the strongest candidates, are either passively open to the right opportunity or completely off-board. Specialist recruiters actively work that 70%, which is why agency-sourced candidates are often higher quality and faster to place than advert-only searches.

2. They Know What the Market Is Paying

   Salaries vary significantly by region, but one thing is consistent: practices that haven't recruited for several years are almost always behind the market on pay. If your neighbouring practices have quietly increased their salary bands, your advert will be screened out before you even know it. Ask your recruitment consultant what the current benchmark is for your area before setting a salary range.

3. They Move Quickly

   Speed is the single most controllable factor in recruitment success. When a strong CV lands, the practices that succeed are those that book an interview within 24–48 hours. Candidates receiving multiple expressions of interest will make decisions fast. A delay of even a week to align partner diaries can cost you the hire entirely.

4. They Interview Like a Partner, Not an Interrogator

   A GP interview works both ways — the candidate is assessing you as much as you are assessing them. The practices that consistently make offers accepted are those where candidates leave the room feeling welcomed and excited. An informal walk-round, a genuine conversation about clinical philosophy, and a clear picture of what the role actually looks like day-to-day will take you much further than a 60-minute formal panel grilling.

5. They Offer Flexibility on Working Arrangements

   The majority of GPs prefer to work from a single base — cross-site working is a significant deterrent for most candidates. If your practice operates across multiple sites, offering a single-site commitment wherever possible — or being transparent about the genuine flexibility that exists — will materially improve your offer's attractiveness.

6. They Offer a Competitive Contract

   A BMA model contract is not always feasible, but the elements GPs value most — sick pay, maternity/paternity pay, continuity of service, and annual pay uplift in line with DDRB — are worth investing in where possible. Candidates who have been burned by substandard contracts before will ask specific questions. Having clear, fair answers to those questions moves the process forward significantly.

7. They Are Honest About Partnership

   Partnership is one of the most powerful draws for salaried GPs who are ambitious and settled. But it is also one of the most common sources of candidate cynicism — too many GPs have been promised a pathway that never materialised. If you are genuinely open to partnership, say so clearly and be specific about timelines, criteria, and indicative drawings. Vagueness signals that history is likely to repeat itself.

8. They Consider Tier 2 Sponsorship

   Practices holding Tier 2 sponsorship licences open themselves to a significant additional segment of the GP workforce — particularly newly qualified GPs who completed their CCT and require visa sponsorship. NHS data suggests roughly one in five newly qualified GPs needs a sponsoring practice. Becoming a sponsorship practice is a one-time administrative process that substantially widens your talent pool.

The Recruitment Process: Where Most Practices Lose Good Candidates

In our experience, the most common point at which a recruitment process breaks down is not the offer stage — it is the period between receiving a strong CV and actually getting the candidate in front of the practice. Delays caused by partner availability, slow internal communication, or waiting for a convenient moment to engage create a window during which the candidate accepts an offer elsewhere.

The practices that recruit most consistently have made a collective commitment, agreed at the outset, to prioritise the process when a suitable candidate is identified. This means:

• A named person responsible for scheduling and communication — not a shared inbox that nobody checks
• Interview slots agreed and held in diaries before recruitment begins — not scrambled for after a CV arrives
• A maximum of two stages in the process — an informal chat followed by a formal interview if needed
• A clear timeline communicated to the candidate at each stage, so they are not left wondering

Making an Offer That Gets Accepted

When you have found the right candidate, the offer stage requires the same urgency as the earlier process. Key principles:

• Make the offer promptly — within 24 hours of the final interview wherever possible. Deliberating for a week signals uncertainty and gives the candidate time to second-guess.
• Be specific — a verbal offer followed by a written summary of the key terms, not just "we'd like to offer you the role." Salary, sessions, notice period, and any agreed special terms should all be confirmed in writing quickly.
• Address the partnership question directly if it is relevant — vague implications are worse than an honest "not right now but here is what the pathway looks like."
• Give them space to consider — a reasonable decision window (48–72 hours for an initial acceptance) without pressure. Applying excessive urgency can backfire with candidates who have multiple options.

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