A Glimpse into the Booming Aged Care Industry: 4 Genuine Reasons it Could Be Your Ultimate Career Move

The aged care sector in Australia is facing mounting pressure from rising demand and complex care needs to regulatory reform and a tightening workforce. For providers, ensuring a consistent, qualified, and reliable workforce is not just a preference — it’s a necessity for compliance, care quality, and sustainability. Yet even the best internal HR teams can reach a point where they’re stretched thin. So, when is the right time to bring in a recruitment agency to support your aged care workforce strategy? 1. When You’re Facing Consistent Staff Shortages If your organisation is regularly struggling to fill shifts, experiencing last-minute cancellations, or seeing a spike in unplanned leave, it may be time to engage a recruitment partner. Aged care recruitment agencies specialise in maintaining a pool of pre-screened, compliant workers ready to deploy at short notice, ensuring your residents continue receiving quality care even during staffing gaps. 2. When You’re Entering a Growth or Transition Phase Opening a new facility, expanding services, or recovering from a period of high turnover all require a rapid scale-up of workforce capacity. Recruitment agencies can provide temporary staffing to ease the pressure while permanent roles are filled, and in many cases, assist with sourcing long-term candidates too. 3. When You Need Help Navigating Compliance With mandatory minimum care minutes, workforce accreditation requirements, and ongoing changes to the Aged Care Quality Standards, maintaining a compliant workforce is more complex than ever. Specialist recruitment agencies in aged care understand the regulatory landscape and ensure every candidate meets the requirements, from police checks to AHPRA registration, manual handling training, and up-to-date vaccination records. 4. When Internal Hiring Timelines Are Too Slow Internal recruitment processes often can’t keep pace with immediate workforce needs. Vacant shifts today can result in compliance risks and increased pressure on your existing team. A good agency can fill shifts within hours, not days or weeks, buying you time while still meeting care obligations. 5. When Workforce Quality Is Affecting Resident Outcomes Poor staff attitude, burnout, or skill mismatches can all contribute to a decline in care quality. Agencies that take a values-based and person-centred approach to recruitment can help lift the calibre of your workforce by matching not just for skill and availability, but also for cultural fit and empathy. 6. When You're Spending Too Much Time Managing Rosters and Not Enough on Strategy A quality agency can take the administrative burden off your team. Many also offer rostering integration, shift fulfilment tracking, and spend transparency reporting, freeing your leadership team to focus on bigger-picture workforce planning and quality improvement initiatives. 7. When Regional or Rural Location Is a Barrier For providers in remote or regional areas, accessing a skilled workforce can be even harder. Agencies with travel nursing capabilities or regional recruitment programs can bridge that gap by mobilising a broader pool of candidates, including those willing to travel or relocate temporarily. Final Thoughts Recruitment agencies shouldn’t be seen as a last resort. They are strategic partners in delivering high-quality, person-centred care. Whether you need short-term shift coverage, help with permanent hiring, or want to reduce the stress on your internal teams, the right time to engage a recruitment agency is before your workforce challenges start affecting your care standards. Partnering early allows for proactive planning, better staff continuity, and stronger outcomes for residents and teams alike.

As a recruitment professional deeply embedded in Australia’s aged care and health sectors, I’ve been watching the long-awaited Aged Care Act reform process closely. For years now, this legislation has been positioned as a pivotal reset for our industry , setting clearer expectations on care quality, safety, governance, and importantly, workforce capability. But with the Federal Government recently delaying the introduction of the Act, the sector now sits in an uncertain holding pattern. And for those of us tasked with sourcing, building and supporting the workforce that underpins care delivery, this delay presents both immediate challenges and longer-term concerns. The Workforce Was Already Under Pressure The aged care workforce has been under significant strain for years. Chronic staff shortages, growing demand for services, increasing complexity of care needs, and rising compliance obligations have all combined to make recruitment and retention more difficult. The promise of a clearer legislative framework through the Aged Care Act was expected to provide the sector with certainty: more defined role expectations, consistent training and credentialing standards, and hopefully a framework that recognised and valued the workforce for the skilled professionals they are. For recruiters like myself, this would have allowed us to better align candidate pipelines to consistent national expectations. Workforce planning would have become more structured, training pathways more standardised, and career development more transparent for staff entering or progressing through the sector. The Cost of Uncertainty This delay prolongs the uncertainty for providers, candidates, and recruiters alike. Many providers are unsure whether to make immediate changes to internal governance, care models, or training investments, knowing that legislative requirements could shift again once the Act is finally passed. For recruitment agencies, this creates a challenge in preparing candidates to meet future standards when those standards remain undefined. We also face the risk of workforce fatigue. After years of reform discussions, aged care workers on the floor, many of whom we recruit, place, and support have grown frustrated by the stop-start nature of reform. Promises of better wages, safer workloads, and clearer career paths have not yet materialised at the scale many expected. This affects morale, retention and in some cases, candidate supply. Provider Hesitation Slows Recruitment Pipelines Many providers are now adopting a “wait and see” approach, which affects recruitment activity. Larger capital decisions, workforce expansion plans, and investment in permanent headcount are in some cases being postponed. Instead, providers are relying on temporary staffing models to maintain flexibility until the new Act’s requirements become clearer. While this has kept agency models busy in the short term, it’s not a sustainable or strategic long-term workforce solution. From my perspective, the lack of legislative certainty delays providers’ ability to forecast their workforce needs with confidence. As recruiters, we are most effective when we can partner with providers to build tailored pipelines that address future skills gaps, design upskilling programs, and foster retention initiatives. Without clarity, these strategic conversations remain difficult to execute. Recruitment Is Evolving While We Wait Despite the delay, recruitment models in aged care are continuing to evolve. Providers are becoming more focused on candidate quality, cultural fit, and long-term engagement strategies rather than purely filling shifts. This shift while positive requires alignment with clear role definitions and sector-wide credentialing standards, which the Act was meant to help address. At Collarcare, we have continued to invest in candidate education, compliance, and ongoing professional development including the integration of programs like AusMed, Aged Care Passport credentials, and tailored onboarding pathways to prepare our workforce for the higher expectations the new Act will eventually formalise. We’re not waiting for legislation to lift the standard of care or candidate readiness. What We Need Moving Forward While delays are frustrating, this period can still be used constructively. Providers, workforce agencies, training organisations, and government bodies must stay proactive: Continue to lift standards voluntarily: We should not wait for the Act to tell us what good care looks like. Invest in training now: Build capability early, so your workforce is ready when reforms do arrive. Prioritise workforce wellbeing: The sector’s ongoing sustainability relies on attracting and retaining skilled, passionate care staff. Strengthen partnerships: Providers and recruiters must collaborate closely to manage fluctuating workforce demands while balancing compliance and care quality. The delay in the Aged Care Act is disappointing, but it does not mean the sector can afford to pause. As a recruitment professional my role remains to help providers navigate this uncertainty, continue building sustainable workforce models, and prepare for the inevitable reforms that will come, whether in six months or two years. Our sector deserves certainty, but more importantly, our residents deserve safe, consistent, and compassionate care delivered by a workforce that feels valued and supported. That responsibility cannot wait.