A month of maps, six recruiters, and a region we hadn't considered

Here is what we did, over and over.

A recruiter sends through a clinic. We find it on Google Maps. We look at the towns roughly 25 minutes from it in the direction of the city, because 25 minutes was what she was willing to drive. Then a second search on each of those towns, to see what it takes to get from there into the CBD. Under 75 minutes and the town stayed on the list. Over and the clinic was dead.

The clinic was usually dead.

We leaned on Claude a lot to narrow things down, and it was genuinely useful for getting from a blank map to a set of names worth checking. We stayed sceptical of it, because we kept getting false positives, and they all had the same cause.

North of Sydney the map is full of what look like lakes. A suburb can sit what looks like no distance from the city while the actual journey goes around all of it.

Woy Woy is the one we remember. It is about 43km from the CBD, which sounds like nothing. The train to Central is around an hour and fifteen. That's not a disaster. It was inside my 75 and outside my 65, which made it exactly the sort of borderline case that eats an evening.

On this coastline the straight line between two points tells you almost nothing. You can't skip the second lookup.

Doing that by hand, one clinic at a time, is the whole problem. Every recruiter email cost us half an hour of map work before we could even say no.

We dealt with six recruiters or so over about a month. Some in Sydney, some in the UK, some elsewhere in Australia. A few were big firms that specialise in placing medics.

The mismatches weren't subtle. Roles in Newcastle, which is DPA and fine for her and hopeless for me. Suggestions that we look at Perth, or at places remote enough that my job doesn't exist there. We had given people the commute constraint, and a lot of them were clearly working from a list of vacancies rather than from anything we had said. We rejected a lot of roles.

The big firms also pushed corporate clinics, which my wife had been told to avoid. That advice came from the Facebook groups rather than from experience, so take it as received wisdom rather than fact. The version you hear is that the rates are worse, the support is thinner, you are more of a number, and a high turnover of new doctors dilutes the patient list you might otherwise build. True or not, it shaped what we said yes to.

Somewhere in this we stopped thinking about the Sutherland Shire, which had been my early favourite, and started looking further south at the Illawarra. Coastal towns. Wollongong as a proper city rather than a commuter dormitory. On the face of it, a workable run into Sydney.

There was a money reason too. This is a hunch rather than a rule, because we only saw it happen once.

She came close to signing with a clinic much nearer the CBD that offered nothing at all for relocation. The nicer and more convenient the area, the less a clinic has to pay to get someone to come there. If that holds generally, the desirable postcode costs you twice. Once in rent, once in the package.

The recruiter who actually got us there lives in the Illawarra and runs a small, fairly new outfit.

The difference between him and the others is that he listened to my commute number and then went looking. He found a clinic down there, drove to it, and sent us videos of the place. He has since been to our house in the UK, because he was over here anyway. We have an ongoing relationship with him, I am not being paid to mention him, and you should read that paragraph knowing it.

That is the clinic she signed with. The Illawarra was on neither of our lists when we started.

I built something out of this, and the timing matters, because it would be easy to say it found us the clinic. It didn't. There was an overlap, but the region search was done by hand in Google Maps with a lot of tabs open.

What was obvious by the end was that the process had a shape. The same handful of inputs every time, and I was doing the joins in my head. That is the part that stuck.

A signed contract sounds more final than it is.

The visa isn't lodged. She has to get through AHPRA registration first, which is the medical register over there, and until that is done there is nothing to lodge. The house has to sell. Any one of those can stop the whole thing rather than just slow it down, and we have no date for anything.

So we have a region, a town where she will work, and a set of suburbs we like the look of. We haven't chosen where to live yet. That is a different search with different inputs, and I'll write about it once we have actually done it rather than before.

For now the map on my laptop still has the tabs open on it.