CLINICAL SERVICES HUB

The go-to guide for employers looking to hire Allied Health staff into their clinical services company

CLINICAL SERVICES EMPLOYERS IN AUSTRALIA

Industry Overview

In this sector, we will focus on the OT, Physio and Exercise Physiologist clinical sectors as we’ve already covered Mental Health professionals under the Counselling section. 

This industry is suffering from an acute shortage of Allied Health Staff because we just don’t have the numbers of Allied Health professionals in Australia to meet the needs of our population. Not only that, employers in many industries such as Occupational Rehab, NDIS and the NFP sector are competing for that same pool of professionals. 

We find that most Clinical service providers are either part of Occ Rehab providers that have branched out into clinical or exclusive Clinical Service providers ranging in size from single site to small and medium enterprises as well as larger national providers. We’ve found the salaries, benefits packages & work arrangements have changed substantially over the years, especially post Covid. 

“PHYSIOTHERAPY – Today it hurts, tomorrow it works.” — Anon

Salary

Salaries in the industry for OT’s:

  • Graduates: $65,000 – $80,000 base + super
  • 1-2 years: $75,000 – $85,000 base + super
  • 3-5 years: 80,000 – $100,000 base + super
  • 5+ Years experience: $100,000 base + super and above. This is when Team Leader or Management level roles start to appear as well.

Salaries in the industry for Physiotherapists:

  •  Graduates: $70,000 – $80,000 base + super
  • 1-2 years: $75,000 – $90,000 base + super
  • 3-5 years: $90,000 – $120,000 base + super
  • 5+ years: $120,000 base + super and above. This is when Team Leader or Management level roles start to appear as well.

Salaries in the industry for Exercise Physiologists: 

  • Graduates: $65,000 – $75,000 base + super
  • 1-2 years’ experience: $75,000 – $85,000 base + super
  • 3-5 years: $85,000 – $100,000 base + super
  • 5+ Years experience: $100,000 base + super and above. This is when Team Leader or Management level roles start to appear as well.

Keep in mind that the above are general indicators. There are always exceptions to the rule and unique circumstances e.g. location, industry, role depth, employer salary band-widths, work arrangement etc that also determine the wages offered to job-seekers. 

“Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.” – Michael Jordan

Benefits

What’s the competition doing? Let’s find out!

“You never realize how long a minute is until you exercise.” -Anon

Financial:

  • Regular Salary Reviews
  • Performance Bonus
  • Extra Superannuation Contributions
  • Salary sacrifice or Salary Packaging arrangements
  • Corporate Discounts – one of our NFP clients gives their team discounted Medical and Health Insurance

Tools of Trade: Mobile | Laptop | Tablet  | Speech to Text Software

Admin & Reception Support: Free up time by dictating your reports and let the Admin team do the rest

Travel:

  • Pool Car Access
  • Novated Lease
  • Per km reimbursement
  • GoGet Car Access
  • Set amount per timeframe
  • Petrol Card (one of our clients gives their team members a petrol card for work and personal use – booya!)

Knowledge & Assessment Suitcase: Subscriptions, both hard-copy and soft-copy | Professional Development $’s, Comprehensive induction | On-going mentoring and in-services by Subject Matter Experts

Extra Leave: One of our clients is a School and they give their Staff 7 weeks leave. Other clients give their staff reservist leave, doona days, Volunteer, Pet and Birthday leave. 

Parental Leave: One of our clients gives their staff the difference between their wage and the government mandated parental leave subsidy for the full 16 weeks. The NDIS industry is heavily female dominated in terms of Allied Health professionals working in it. Now read that again.

Social and team building: Paid for by the company. One of our clients paid for their whole team to do axe-throwing and a cooking class – not on the same day…

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” – Henry Ford 

Health, Wellness & EAP: Pool, yoga  or gym access or contribution | Confidential EAP to assist when a hand is needed  

Career Mapping:  Client spend a lot of time and money training and supporting their teams. They would like to see mutual thriving. Your success and growth = their success and growth.

“I’m not the smartest fellow in the world, but I sure can pick smart colleagues.” – Franklin D Roosevelt

So if you’re wondering what other employers are doing to attract talent, it may be time to look at your benefits packages, job-structure or hiring, on-boarding and training protocol.

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” – Isaac Newton

Job Structure

  • Full-time
  • Part-time
  • WFH
  • Work from the office
  • Community-based
  • Mobile
  • Telehealth
  • Face-to-face
  • Contracting

Locations

Wherever there is a person needing assistance with their physical health, an OT, Physio or Exercise Physiologist professional will be required. This translates into a near constant demand for Physical Allied Health Staff. 

Hiring

“When someone says you can’t do it, do it twice and take pictures.” – Anon

Some employers have a 3 step recruitment process: First a Screening by internal HR. Then they do a 1st interview and then a 2nd interview and then there are reference checks. This is not to mention possible psych, probity or technical skills testing. For this to happen, the job-seekers and employers have to match diaries etc. 

Some employers still insist on a face to face meeting as a first port of call. Just keep in mind that in an exceptionally candidate short market space and where job-seekers are looking at multiple employers at the same time, it might help to reexamine your hiring process. Especially if you keep missing out on candidates as they’ve accepted other offers while you’re still going through the motions of your recruitment process.

The other thing candidates have told us is employers who get shirty if the job-seeker doesn’t accept their offer and then say things along the lines of, OK, you’ve got 24 hours to accept our offer or we will withdraw it. We don’t recommend this generally because it puts pressure on a candidate to make a decision. And once you’ve made that call, you can’t go back, ie say, OK fine, you’ve actually got 3 days to make a decision. It’s a fine balance we admit, but please reach out to your MediJobs Australia consultant if you’re wondering what candidates are saying about your recruitment process. We’ve been known to not mince words and give honest feedback. We’re also happy to work with you to let you know what’s working and what’s not in terms of best process hiring protocols. 

“It doesn’t get easier, you just get better.” – Jordan Hoechlin

Candidates Love

Salaries that reflect their skills and experience for the job that they are doing.

Benefits packages customised to their needs – for instance, they may prefer a novated lease option if they don’t own or have access to a car. 

Induction: A comprehensive on-boarding and induction process when they start as well as on-going mentoring, in-services, CPD contributions and shadowing of senior Consultants. 

KPIs: Graded introduction to KPIs so that the pressure to bill, bill, bill isn’t hanging over their heads from day dot.

Specialisations: The opportunity to really drill down into an area of practice and become a Subject Matter Expert themselves. VR Physio or Hand OT anyone? Try finding one and if you can’t find one, help develop one. You’ve got all the raw materials to work with.

“If something stands between you and your success, move it.” – Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson 

Career-mapping: A strategic approach to the next steps in their career as opposed to an ad hoc approach. It’s always good to know what you have to do to achieve your career goals.

Health & Wellness: Employer contributions towards health and wellness, including access to a confidential EAP service.

Admin & Reception support: Who doesn’t love the Admin team where you have access to voice to text services and the admin team takes care of the rest. Report writing becomes less of a chore then. A warm and welcoming reception environment is priceless too. Reception staff? Even better! 

Extra leave: Any extra leave that employers can offer is welcome. Be that “no reason needed days off”, reservist’s Leave, pet leave, volunteer leave. You can call it anything you like but what the job-seeker sees is that this employer is amazing as they recognise the need for a day off sometimes.

“I am on annual leave until [DD/MM/YYYY]. I will allow each sender one email and if you send me multiple emails, I will randomly delete your emails until there is only one remaining. Choose wisely. Please note that you already sent me one email.” – Futureofworking.com

Parental Leave and flexibility: Most job-seekers tend to eventually start a family at some stage of their working life. It helps if the employer can give additional benefits, eg  One of our key employer partners offers their staff the difference between their company wage and the government mandated parental leave payment – for the whole 16 weeks. And guess who gets the candidates when it comes down to that being the final difference if all the other benefits and salary between competing offers are the same. Bingo! And they also offer their staff the option of a combination of WFH and part-time hours when they return to work after their parental leave. Bingo squared! Or is that Bingo x 2?

“The successful warrior is the average person, with laser-like focus.” -Bruce Lee

Pool car access: We’ve found over 20 years of recruitment that job-seekers don’t want wear and tear on their personal vehicles for work purposes. So they LOOOOVE pool-car access as this means they can take public transport to work and still do their job.

AHAs: A lot of our Clinical Consultants greatly appreciate their AHAs. Their AHA’s are able to implement parts of the role that do not require the Consultants’ input in an ongoing manner. This frees up time for the consultant to work with even more clients. Win win for all: the clients, the employers, the consultant and the AHA. Did anyone else have an aha moment just then?

Candidates Hate

Over promise and under deliver: There is absolutely no percentage in over selling the role only for the job-seekers to start and find out that the reality on the ground floor is very different. If you have a high rate of candidates leaving your employ in a short space of time, then it is a good idea to conduct exit interviews to see where you are letting them and yourself as an employer down. 

“The f-ckening – noun. 

When your day is going too well and you don’t trust it and some sh-t finally goes down. 

Ah, there it is, the f-ckening.” – ItmustbeMonday.com

Lack of or no on-boarding and induction: Do this at your own peril. Enough said.

Travel: A lot of candidates don’t like to travel long distances if possible. Sometimes it can’t be helped. But then the employer needs to recognise that their billable targets might need adjusting to account for the time spent travelling. It’s important to put yourself in your employees shoes. Would you feel extra pressure if that was what you had to do? Then rest assured, they are too. Unrelenting pressure = a good reason to start looking for a new job. You do the maths. 

Lack of business structure: We could tell you many anecdotes of newly set up employers who call us and say, we’ve just set up a Clinical practice and we need an OT and a Physio. OK, say we. Could you please send us a job description? Don’t have one. Right, what kinds of clients are you working with? Don’t know yet – whatever walks in the door but there’s a lot of demand for our services. Ahem. Do tell us about your induction and training process. We’re working on that. At this point in time, we don’t even bother asking about their strategic growth plans or career-mapping for their staff.

See where we’re going with this? If you’re reading this and it even remotely sounds like you, then please address this situation. It’s tricky enough for job-seekers when they start a new job but if the workplace is a shemozzle from day dot, the chances of them staying for the long haul are low, really, really low … just saying. 

And if you can’t inspire any confidence in us as your Recruitment partner, how on earth are we expected to champion your sub-par offering to our job-seekers? For the record, we won’t and we don’t. 

Unrelenting Admin: A lot of our Clinical consultants have indicated that the amount of administrative and report-writing associated with their roles is something that they don’t enjoy. One of our employers has recognised this and so gives their team the option to conduct the assessment and make the relevant case notes and dicta their findings, then gets another Consultant who works from home to write the report within the next 24 hours. They don’t care if the report is written at midnight when you have just finished doing a night feed for your child or at 5:00 am in the morning because you’re an early bird. 

Show me the money: If you are not keeping up with the industry in terms of salaries and benefits to match what your competition is doing or what job-seeker expectations are, then please be prepared to lose staff or not be able to attract them to begin with. 

Job structure: Candidates have told us time and time again that as they progress through their career, the demands on their time change. They may have a family or want to work in a more flexible capacity for their own self actualisation. An employer who doesn’t work with their staff on this (only if the employer has the capacity to accommodate the employees demands of course) risks losing them to one who can offer them the flexibility that they seek.

“Don’t limit your challenges, challenge your limits.” – Technogym

Training

Onboarding: Are you ready for the candidate starts? Do they have all the paperwork that they need to fill out for you prior to starting on day dot? Please make sure they do. 

Induction: Do you have your poo in one pile with a structured induction process? A scatter gun approach at the start ensures that a new employee is not going to know if they’re Artha or Martha. The more you can support, train, mentor and assist them with settling into their role, the better. 

A comprehensive induction and training processes is a huge support that new starters really appreciate. 

Shadowing a senior: This is very popular with jobseekers. Being mentored by someone else in-house is a huge source of learning and reassurance.  

“Cooperation is the thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there.”- Virginia Burden

In-services: Subject matter experts, both internal and external, can be utilised to share their knowledge with your team members. These can be delivered remotely as well as face-to-face. Who doesn’t like the idea of learning as part of their work team or sharing their knowledge with their colleagues? As Abby Wambach said, “I’ve never scored a goal in my life without getting a pass from someone else.” 

CPD: All we can say is that the more generous you are here, the more likely you are to be able to support your staff through various stages of their career-map with you. 

“What seems impossible today will one day become your warm-up”- upperhand.com

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