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

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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