How Former Clinicians Found Purpose in Healthcare Recruitment
By Monique Missak|Published 21 May 2026
Healthcare recruitment careers aren’t always the first pathway clinicians consider when thinking about their future. For many healthcare professionals, the traditional career path can seem clearly defined: gain experience, develop a specialty, move into leadership and continue caring for patients and communities.
But careers are rarely linear.
Across cmr, many of our recruiters began their careers on hospital wards, in operating theatres and private practices. They worked as nurses, midwives, and allied health professionals before discovering a different way to make an impact through healthcare recruitment.
While their roles look different today, the reason they chose healthcare in the first place remains remarkably similar: a desire to help people, solve problems and strengthen healthcare communities.
The Desire to Help People Never Really Leaves
For many healthcare professionals, the decision to work in healthcare begins with a desire to help others. Sometimes, it starts even earlier than that. For Senior Consultant Leigh, now part of our Theatre team, nursing was inspired by her own experiences as a patient.
“I was born with a birth defect that meant I had multiple operations from three months of age through to my mid twenties. I always enjoyed watching the nurses, especially in theatre, and seeing the work they did.”
Leigh, Senior Consultant
Growing up hearing stories of healthcare professionals travelling overseas to support children with similar conditions cemented her desire to one day do the same.
Others found their inspiration in different ways. Jess, a Senior Consultant in our Women & Children’s team, recalls being captivated by the nurses she met during work experience in a neonatal intensive care unit. Libby, now General Manager of Agency Nursing, was drawn to nursing because of the opportunity to support people through some of life’s most vulnerable moments. For cmr Founder and CEO Samantha Miklos, a fascination with healthcare professions eventually led her to a career in Occupational Therapy.
Despite their different paths, they were all motivated by the same thing: making a meaningful difference in people’s lives.
Finding a Different Way to Make an Impact
The move into recruitment wasn’t about leaving healthcare behind. If anything, it was driven by a desire to continue contributing to the profession in a different way.
For some, the transition came after years of shift work and leadership responsibilities. Leigh stepped away from a Perioperative Nurse Unit Manager role to create more balance for her young family. Emily, who previously worked as a surgical nurse, was also looking for greater consistency while remaining connected to healthcare.
What ultimately drew many of them to recruitment was the realisation that workforce decisions directly influence patient care, healthcare teams and entire communities. As Emily explains:
“My time in nursing really showed me how much the right staff impact everything, from patient care to how a team functions day to day.”
Emily, Recruitment Partner
Jess arrived at a similar conclusion after spending more than two years working as a travel midwife and experiencing firsthand the role recruiters play in supporting healthcare professionals throughout their careers.
For Sam, the transition happened unexpectedly while living in London. What began as an opportunity to recruit Occupational Therapists into the NHS quickly became a passion for helping healthcare professionals find roles where they could thrive.
Valentine, now a Senior Consultant in our Physiotherapy team, found that recruitment offered many of the same rewards as clinical practice: building relationships, solving problems and helping people achieve positive outcomes. As he explains:
“It is very rewarding – you can literally change a person’s life with a job, or a community that has been underserved.”
Valentine, Senior Consultant
For many clinicians, healthcare recruitment careers offer the opportunity to remain connected to the industry they love while creating impact in a completely different way.
Why Clinicians Thrive in Healthcare Recruitment Careers
One of the strongest themes shared by our team is that clinical experience doesn’t stay behind when you move into recruitment. The realities of shift work. Workforce shortages. Clinical pressures. Leadership challenges. Difficult conversations. Career uncertainty. These experiences create a level of understanding that can’t be learned from a job description alone.
After years working as a travel midwife, Jess understands the challenges candidates face when moving between contracts and healthcare settings. Leigh’s experience as a Perioperative Nurse Unit Manager during COVID means she understands the operational pressures healthcare leaders face when staffing shortages threaten service delivery.
Trish, an Agency Nursing Team Lead and former Registered Nurse, draws on her own experiences to help nurses navigate the transition into agency work and build confidence in their abilities.
“Being able to guide them through the process of doing agency shifts that may be vastly different from permanent hospital-based roles is important. It’s a big and exciting world out there and every day brings new experiences”
Trish, Agency Team Lead
For Sam, understanding both the clinical and recruitment perspectives became one of her greatest strengths.
“I understood what the client wanted and I understood the candidate’s experience. My customers always felt I understood their perspective and I was genuinely in their corner.”
Sam Miklos, cmr Founder & CEO
Whether it’s helping a new graduate navigate their first role, supporting an experienced clinician through a career change or partnering with healthcare organisations to solve workforce challenges, lived experience helps create stronger outcomes for everyone involved.
Could Healthcare Recruitment Be Your Next Chapter?
One message consistently emerged when speaking with our team: don’t underestimate the value of your clinical experience.
The communication skills, resilience, empathy, problem-solving ability and relationship-building developed throughout a healthcare career are highly transferable. In many cases, they’re exactly what make clinicians successful recruiters.
Healthcare recruitment remains a people-focused profession. It requires curiosity, resilience, commercial thinking and a genuine desire to help others succeed. While the environment may be different from a ward, clinic or theatre, many of the skills that make a great healthcare professional also contribute to success in recruitment. As Jess puts it:
“Don’t be afraid to make a change.”
Jess, Senior Consultant
Sam offers similar encouragement, with one practical piece of advice:
“If you are looking for a change but still want to use your clinical skills to make an impact in a different way, healthcare recruitment is a great place to move into.”
Libby, General Manager Agency Nursing
Like any career move, recruitment isn’t for everyone. But for clinicians looking for a new challenge while remaining connected to healthcare, it can be a rewarding and purposeful next step.
The Setting May Change, but the Purpose Remains
Whether they’re helping a graduate physiotherapist choose their first role, supporting a rural hospital through workforce shortages, or building long-term workforce solutions for healthcare providers, our recruiters continue to draw on the same qualities that first led them into healthcare.
Empathy. Problem-solving. Communication. A desire to help others.
The environment may have changed from wards and clinics to conversations and career pathways, but the purpose remains the same.
For those exploring healthcare recruitment careers, the opportunity isn’t about leaving healthcare behind. It’s about applying the skills, knowledge and passion developed through clinical practice in a different way.
They’re still making a difference, just from a different side of healthcare.
Interested in exploring healthcare recruitment careers? Our Talent team would love to share what a career in recruitment really looks like. Get in touch to learn more about current opportunities at cmr.
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