Physiotherapist Job Description

Key skills

Responsibilities

• • Assess new referrals and agree functional goals with the person in front of you
• • Design, deliver, and progress individualised treatment and exercise programmes
• • Reassess against standardised outcome measures and change the plan when progress stalls
• • Educate people about their condition, expected recovery, and self-management at home
• • Identify presentations outside your scope and refer onward without delay
• • Manage a caseload, including waiting list flow, appointment frequency, and discharge
• • Document assessment, consent, treatment, and outcomes to professional standards
• • Liaise with referrers, employers, or the wider team where the person's recovery depends on it

Requirements

• • Current registration or licensure with the physiotherapy regulator for the jurisdiction where the post sits - the protected title, register, and renewal rules differ by country and often by state, so confirm the current requirement with that regulator
• • A physiotherapy qualification that the same regulator recognises
• • Demonstrated assessment and clinical reasoning with the patient group you serve
• • Ability to manage a caseload independently, including deciding when treatment should end
• • Skill in explaining a condition and a home programme in language people actually follow
• • Completion of whichever background and health checks apply to hands-on clinical roles in your setting

Nice to have

• • Postgraduate training or a speciality interest matching your case mix
• • Experience with the specific population you serve, such as post-surgical, neurological, paediatric, older adult, or sporting
• • Competence in additional modalities your service offers, where locally permitted
• • Experience running group rehabilitation or classes as well as individual appointments
• • Familiarity with the clinical record and outcome-measure tools you already use
• • Experience supervising assistants, rehabilitation support workers, or students

Assess reasoning with a case, not a technique list

Techniques are easy to claim and hard to differentiate on a resume. Give the candidate a short case typical of your service, with the presenting complaint and a little history, and let them ask you questions as they would in a first appointment. Listen for whether they form a hypothesis and test it, whether they screen for the serious presentations that must not be missed, and how they would explain the plan to the person. Then ask what would make them change the plan at week three. Therapists who cannot answer that tend to deliver the same programme regardless of response.

Ask about discharge, because it is the commercial test

A physiotherapy service is limited by throughput, not just by hours worked. Ask directly how the candidate decides someone is ready for discharge, how they handle a person who wants to keep coming when the objective measures have plateaued, and what proportion of their caseload turns over in a typical month. The strongest answers describe goals agreed at the outset and outcome measures reviewed against them, which makes discharge a shared conclusion rather than a confrontation. Vague answers here predict a clogged waiting list and, eventually, a referral source that stops sending people.

Where to source Physiotherapists

New graduates are plentiful in many markets and are worth hiring where you can offer structured supervision, since they arrive current and form habits around your standards. Experienced therapists usually move for scope, autonomy, or caseload variety rather than for a marginal pay difference, so lead the advert with what the work is actually like. Clinics losing therapists to burnout typically have back-to-back scheduling with no admin time, so protecting that time is itself a recruitment argument. Professional bodies, university clinical networks, and speciality interest groups reach passive candidates.

Be explicit about scope in your jurisdiction

What a physiotherapist may do independently varies widely. Direct or first-contact access without a physician referral, authority to order imaging, and the use of particular modalities such as needling are permitted in some places, restricted in others, and revised periodically. Confirm the current position with the relevant regulator and any funder or insurer that pays for the treatment, then state clearly in the advert what this post is authorised to do. Candidates evaluate autonomy closely, and getting this wrong either deters good applicants or creates a compliance problem after the start date.

Run a practical stage and structure the panel

Where your setting allows, a supervised practical component tells you more than any interview question: how they greet someone, how they explain a finding, whether their hands-on work is confident and comfortable. If a real patient encounter is not possible, use a role-played assessment with a colleague. Score every candidate against the same criteria covering reasoning, communication, caseload judgement, and safety. Pitch N Hire's ATS keeps those scorecards and the practical-stage notes on one record, which makes the comparison honest when interviews run across several weeks.