Hire a practice manager by working through a short, structured checklist covering role scope, competencies, and a documented selection process. Follow it yourself if you have the time and internal capability, or outsource the search to a fixed-fee recruiter like The Recruitment Alternative when speed and reduced hiring risk matter more than doing it in-house. Either path works. The mistake is skipping the checklist altogether.
TL;DR:
- Ensuring clear decision rights and outcomes before advertising helps prevent mismatched roles and disengagement within months.
- Using structured screening, consistent interview questions, work sample tests, and reference checks significantly reduce hiring risks.
- Focusing on three to five capability areas based on practice-specific problems ensures your practice manager fulfills essential needs early on.
- Outsourcing recruitment to a fixed-fee agency can save time and secure a proper hire, especially when internal resources are limited.
- Verifying award classification and pay rates before making an offer avoids costly corrections and legal compliance issues later.
Table of Contents
- Practice manager hiring: your quick checklist to start today
- What does a practice manager actually need to cover?
- How do you run the selection process from advert to offer?
- What should you ask in a practice manager interview?
- How do you finalise the offer and set up onboarding?
- Employer perspective: where practice manager hiring goes wrong
- Hiring a practice manager without doing it all yourself
- Authoritative resources and templates to use now
- Sources
- FAQ
Practice manager hiring: your quick checklist to start today
Most practices lose weeks because they start advertising before deciding what the role actually needs to achieve. Fix that first.
- Set role outcomes and authority. Decide what success looks like in month six and month twelve, and how much decision-making power the manager will actually hold.
- Write the position description. Cover responsibilities, inherent requirements, and selection criteria rather than a vague list of duties borrowed from a generic template.
- Confirm the award and pay band. Check classification and rates against the Health Services Award before you publish a salary range.
- Pick your sourcing route. Decide whether you’re advertising directly, using your network, or briefing a recruiter, and build a screening scorecard before applications land.
- Prepare a realistic finalist task. A short scenario or 90-day plan exercise tells you far more than a generic interview ever will.
Get these five steps right and the rest of practice manager recruitment becomes far more predictable.
What does a practice manager actually need to cover?
The Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile describes health practice managers as organising resources and personnel across hiring, payroll, training, compliance, and records. That’s a genuine management function, not an extension of front-desk duties. The most common hiring error is writing a practice manager job description that’s really a senior receptionist role with a bigger title, an issue the Australian Association of Practice Management flags directly.
AAPM’s framework groups the role into eight capability areas: financial management, human resources, planning and marketing, information management, risk management, governance and organisational dynamics, business and clinical operations, and professional responsibility. No practice needs strength across all eight on day one.
- Identify your practice’s real problems over the next 12 to 24 months, then pick the three to five capability areas that solve them.
- A practice bleeding money on rostering inefficiencies needs financial management and operations strength first.
- A practice facing compliance exposure needs risk management and governance prioritised.
- Write a decision-rights checklist: rosters, purchasing, supplier contracts, and complaints escalation should each have a named owner before you interview anyone.
Pro Tip: Ask yourself what decisions you’re currently making that you resent having to make. Those are usually the ones the new manager should own from day one.
How do you run the selection process from advert to offer?
A structured process beats a gut-feel hire almost every time, because it forces consistent comparison rather than a series of separate impressions.
- Draft the role brief with essential and desirable criteria, plus any inherent requirements (on-site hours, travel between sites, after-hours availability).
- Choose your sourcing channels. Direct advertising suits a well-known local market; a recruiter suits a tight talent pool or a role you can’t afford to get wrong.
- Run an eligibility screen against essential criteria only, then score every remaining candidate on the same scoring matrix so shortlisting decisions are consistent.
- Conduct structured interviews using the same core questions for every candidate, and add a work sample or scenario task for finalists.
- Complete reference checks before any offer is confirmed, then issue a documented, written offer.
Combining defined competencies, consistent scoring, realistic work samples, and reference checks reduces hiring risk and gives a far better read on real-world performance than interview impressions alone. The steps that get skipped most often:
- Skipping the eligibility screen and interviewing everyone who applies.
- Using different interview questions for different candidates, which makes comparison impossible.
- Relying on a single referee contact instead of asking for specific, observable examples.
What should you ask in a practice manager interview?
Interviewing practice managers well means testing judgement, not just checking whether someone has done a similar job title before. Focus on five areas: leadership under pressure, conflict resolution, budget management, compliance awareness, and how quickly someone learns new systems and processes.
Useful behavioural prompts include:
- “Tell me about a time you improved a workflow that wasn’t working. What did you change and what was the result?”
- “Describe managing a budget that came under pressure. What did you cut, and why?”
- “Walk me through resolving a serious conflict between two staff members.”
- “How would you handle a patient complaint that’s escalated past reception?”
- “Give an example of using operational data to make a decision, not just a hunch.”
Score every answer against the same rubric rather than relying on overall impressions.
For finalists, run a 90-day plan exercise using anonymised operational data or a fictional scenario: ask for priorities, risks, stakeholders, and escalation paths. This reveals genuine planning ability without exposing real patient data, and it’s a far better predictor than a fourth round of generic questions.
Pro Tip: When checking references, ask for observable facts, not opinions: team size managed, staff turnover handled, budget responsibility, and any compliance incidents. “They were great” tells you nothing; “she reduced no-show rates by restructuring the booking system” tells you everything.
How do you finalise the offer and set up onboarding?
Before you set a salary, verify award coverage and classification against the Fair Work Pay and Conditions Tool. Getting this wrong at offer stage is expensive to unwind later, and any individual flexibility arrangement needs to be in writing and leave the employee genuinely better off.
- Issue a written offer stating decision rights, reporting lines, probation length, and any replacement or guarantee terms.
- Set 30/60/90 day milestones: system access and shadowing by day 30, ownership of one full process by day 60, and a documented improvement delivered by day 90.
- A formal qualification like the HLT57715 Diploma of Practice Management is worth listing as desirable, not essential, unless your practice genuinely needs that depth from day one.
- Use probation reviews or a replacement guarantee as a safety net, not a substitute for doing the selection process properly.
Employer perspective: where practice manager hiring goes wrong
The recurring mistake isn’t a bad candidate. It’s a role brief that never matched the authority the owner was actually willing to hand over. Practices advertise for a “manager” then keep every real decision for themselves, and wonder why the hire disengages within months.
Decision-rights clarity fixes this before it starts. Write down what the manager owns, test it with a realistic scenario rather than a resume-reading exercise, and you’ll filter out mismatches long before they cost you a replacement hire.
— Josh Townsend
Hiring a practice manager without doing it all yourself
Running the full checklist above properly takes real hours: writing the brief, screening applications, scoring interviews, chasing references. If your team has the capacity and the role isn’t urgent, doing it in-house is entirely sensible. If it isn’t, some agencies offer a transparent, fixed-fee alternative to commission-based agencies, built around a structured recruitment process.
Our Fixed Fee Recruitment service covers sourcing, structured assessment, and reference checks, with plan detail on the flat-fee pricing page. If a hire doesn’t work out early, a Replacement Campaign gives you a safety net rather than starting the whole search from scratch. It suits practices that need a practice manager filled properly without dedicating weeks of internal time to it, particularly when the role is business critical or the local talent pool is thin. Get a quote through the pricing page to see which tier fits your salary band.
Authoritative resources and templates to use now
- Health Practice Managers occupation profile, Jobs and Skills Australia
- AAPM capability framework
- Health Services Award summary, Fair Work Ombudsman
- Practice manager position description template, Practice Assist
Sources
- Health Practice Managers | Jobs and Skills Australia
- What is practice management? | Australian Association of Practice Management
- Health Services Award MA000027 – Fair Work Ombudsman
FAQ
What is the biggest mistake in practice manager hiring?
Writing a job description that’s really a senior receptionist role rather than a genuine management position, according to AAPM. Fix it by defining decision rights and outcomes before you advertise.
How long does hiring a practice manager typically take?
It varies with sourcing channel and role complexity, but a structured process, from advert to documented offer, generally runs several weeks when screening and interviews are scheduled promptly. Outsourcing to a fixed-fee recruiter like The Recruitment Alternative can shorten this by handling sourcing and screening in parallel.
What should be in a practice manager position description?
Responsibilities, selection criteria, inherent requirements, and decision rights, following the structure in the Practice Assist template. Avoid duty lists copied from generic templates that ignore your practice’s actual priorities.
How much does it cost to hire a practice manager through The Recruitment Alternative?
The Fixed Fee Recruitment service is $4,795 one off, with tiered Recruit and Recruit+ options detailed on the pricing page depending on the salary band and level of support required.
Do I need to check award classification before hiring?
Yes. Confirm pay rate and classification against the Health Services Award before advertising a salary range or issuing an offer, since getting this wrong is costly to correct later.
