Physical therapists are among the hardest clinical roles to fill, and the rest of allied health is not far behind. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 283,700 physical therapist jobs in 2025 and projects about 13,400 openings a year through 2035, so in a typical year fewer than one PT in twenty changes jobs. Occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, respiratory therapists and imaging and laboratory staff show the same shape: small pools, fast projected growth, a license issued state by state and employers in every care setting competing for the same people. Recruiting them well means knowing where the licensed supply is, which compacts let a clinician practice across state lines, and how to reach a therapist who is not applying anywhere. This guide covers that in seven steps, with the numbers from primary sources and the lessons of a rehab provider that grew from seven states to 38.
The allied health market in numbers
The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook publishes employment, projected openings and median pay for each occupation. The seven allied roles hospitals, rehab groups and home health agencies recruit most look like this for the 2025 to 2035 decade:
| Occupation (BLS) | Jobs, 2025 | Openings per year, 2025 to 2035 | Growth, 2025 to 2035 | Median pay, 2025 | Typical entry education |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Physical therapists | 283,700 | About 13,400 | 12% ("much faster than average"), +33,800 jobs | $102,760 a year | Doctoral or professional degree |
| Occupational therapists | 169,600 | About 10,000 | 15% ("much faster than average"), +25,200 jobs | $100,330 a year | Master's degree |
| Speech-language pathologists | 193,400 | About 12,500 | 17% ("much faster than average"), +32,100 jobs | $97,870 a year | Master's degree |
| Respiratory therapists | 142,000 | About 8,600 | 9% ("much faster than average"), +12,100 jobs | $82,280 a year | Associate's degree |
| Radiologic and MRI technologists | 278,100 | About 15,300 | 5% ("faster than average"), +15,100 jobs | $81,390 a year | Associate's degree |
| Clinical laboratory technologists and technicians | 343,000 | About 20,800 | 3% ("as fast as average"), +9,400 jobs | $62,930 a year | Bachelor's degree |
| Physical therapist assistants and aides | 163,200 | About 24,900 | 17% ("much faster than average"), +28,200 jobs | $61,200 a year | Associate's degree (assistants) |
Three things stand out. First, the pools are small: there are roughly twelve registered nurses for every physical therapist, so a PT search in one metro area returns hundreds of people, not tens of thousands. Second, the openings are mostly replacement hires. For physical therapists, 13,400 openings a year against 33,800 net new jobs over ten years means about three in four hires replace someone who moved, retired or left the profession. Third, the BLS classes projected growth in every therapy role as much faster than average, so the same small pool is being asked to fill more positions every year. An inbound-only strategy competes for the few therapists who happen to be looking this month; the steps below are about reaching the rest.
Why allied roles are harder to recruit than they look
- A long, expensive entry path. A physical therapist holds a doctoral or professional degree, an occupational therapist or speech-language pathologist a master's. The supply cannot respond quickly to demand, and a new graduate has choices.
- A license per state. Every PT, PTA, OT, OTA, SLP and respiratory therapist is licensed by a state board, and a therapist in a non-compact state needs a new license to work in yours. Geography is a hard filter, not a preference.
- Every setting is competing. Outpatient clinics, acute hospitals, inpatient rehab, skilled nursing, home health, schools and early intervention programs all hire from the same roster. Your competitor for a home health PT is as likely to be a school district as another agency.
- The candidate cares about the work itself. Caseload, productivity expectations, patient population, documentation burden and mentorship decide whether a therapist replies. Those facts rarely appear in a job posting and almost never in a job board profile.
- Nobody is on the boards. A therapist with a full caseload and a license in good standing is not uploading a résumé. If your sourcing starts from job-board profiles, you are looking at the small share of the market that is already moving.
Step 1: Write the role the way a therapist would read it
Allied recruiting fails at the search before it fails at the send. A requisition title ("PT II, Outpatient Ortho") is not a search; a clinician's own description of the job is. Before building a list, write the role in plain language that names:
- License and level: PT or PTA, OT or OTA, SLP with a certificate of clinical competence, registered respiratory therapist, and whether a compact privilege or an in-state license is required on day one.
- Setting and population: outpatient orthopedics, acute care, geriatric home health, pediatrics, neuro rehab. A PT with eight years in a sports clinic is not a candidate for geriatric home visits, and the search should know that.
- The facts a therapist weighs: caseload size, productivity expectation, schedule, travel radius for home-based roles, mentorship and continuing-education support, and any loan-repayment or sign-on terms. Leaving them out of the search means leaving them out of the message.
- Geography: the commute radius around the clinic or the service territory for home health, plus the compact states you can hire from or relocate from (Step 3).
Written this way, the description doubles as the prompt for an AI search and as the first paragraph of the outreach. On Betterleap it is the input itself: describe the role as you would to a colleague ("physical therapists in California with geriatric experience") and the agent builds the search, or hand it instructions on specialty, license type and certifications and adjust them without starting over.
Step 2: Source from the license roster, not from job boards
Every physical therapist, occupational therapist, speech-language pathologist and respiratory therapist holds a license issued by a state board, and every board publishes whether that license is active. That public record is the only complete map of the allied workforce. Job boards and social profiles cover a fraction of it, skewed toward people already looking; licensing data covers everyone, including the therapist who has never posted a résumé. Starting from licensure gives you three things a job board cannot: the whole population, the status and expiry of each license, and the states where each person is allowed to practice.
This is the lesson FOX Rehabilitation learned expanding from seven states to 38. "We knew everyone we hired would be licensed," says Kristie McCaffery, its Director of Recruitment, "but there was no easy way to access all of that information." The team found that job boards lacked licensing data and returned outdated profiles, and its sourcers were spending hours finding names and emails before a conversation could start. Betterleap's database covers 35M+ healthcare professionals with confirmed licensing information from 25+ state board partnerships, so a search for "outpatient PTs licensed in Nevada within 40 miles of Reno" returns people the board says are licensed, not people who say so in a profile.
Step 3: Use the compacts to widen the pool
Allied health has its own interstate compacts, and they are at very different stages. Knowing which applies to your role changes how wide you can search:
| Profession | Compact | Status, read 6 October 2026 | What it means for sourcing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physical therapists and PTAs | PT Compact | 38 member states actively issuing and accepting compact privileges; Maine, Michigan and Rhode Island have enacted the legislation but are not yet issuing or accepting privileges. | A PT licensed in a member state can purchase a compact privilege to practice in any other member state without a new license. If your facility is in a member state, the sourcing pool for a PT role is the licensed PTs of 38 jurisdictions, not one. |
| Speech-language pathologists and audiologists | Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology Interstate Compact (ASLP-IC) | 37 jurisdictions (36 states and one territory) have enacted the compact. Privileges to practice are being issued in Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia, with other member states to follow. | Operational but early. An SLP in one of the four issuing states can obtain a privilege for another member state now; elsewhere, plan on licensure by endorsement. |
| Occupational therapists and OTAs | Occupational Therapy Licensure Compact | Enacted by member states but not yet operational: the process to apply for and receive compact privileges is still being built, and each member state will open applications at its own pace. | For now an OT needs a license in your state. Source for OTs who already hold it, or who are willing to apply by endorsement, and watch the compact's launch. |
| Respiratory therapists | None | No interstate compact. Licensure is state by state. | Search the in-state license roster, and treat out-of-state candidates as relocation hires with a board application ahead of them. |
For a physical therapist role in a PT Compact state, this is the single largest lever in the playbook. The pool is no longer the PTs who live within commuting distance; it is every licensed PT in the other 37 member states who would relocate or, for travel and home-based roles, work a territory across a state line. A licensure-based search that flags compact eligibility separately from a single-state license tells you which candidates can start without a new application.
Step 4: Build pipelines in markets where you have none
Growth into a new state is where allied recruiting gets hardest: no applicant history, no alumni, no referrals, and a CRM with nothing local in it. When FOX Rehabilitation entered California, Nevada, Washington and Arizona, its CRM had almost zero prospects in those states and the recruiting team had no rediscovery data or historical touchpoints to work from. The approach that worked was to start from the licensed population of each new market rather than wait for applicants: identify every licensed therapist in the state who matched the role, verify a working email address and phone number for each, and run outreach from day one. "In states where we had no CRM presence, Betterleap helped us reach licensed clinicians fast," McCaffery says. "We could filter by license, see real contact info, and every candidate we passed to our recruiters was sourced through the tool."
The results reported in the case study: 5+ new markets entered with no prior talent pipeline, 20% of new hires sourced through Betterleap, and an email open rate of 60% against under 10% with the old CRM data. Its lead sourcer, Kara Schymanski, puts the sourcing share at 15 to 20% of submittals. The same approach applies to any provider opening a clinic, adding a service line or taking on a home health territory in a county where it has never hired.
Step 5: Rediscover the therapists already in your ATS
The warmest passive candidates are the ones who raised a hand once: past applicants who were not selected, silver medalists from a closed requisition, former staff and per diem therapists, students who completed a clinical rotation with you, and applicants to a different clinic than the one now hiring. Two problems keep this pool idle. The first is stale data: therapists move states, renew licenses and change email addresses, and a record from three years ago reflects none of it. The second is effort: nobody has time to reread a thousand old applications against a new requisition. This is work an AI agent does well:
- Sync the ATS so past applicants are searchable alongside the outside market, not in a separate silo.
- Refresh contact data and re-verify the license for every past applicant who matches, so the outreach goes to an address that works and to someone who is still eligible to practice.
- Re-rank against the open role using the plain-language description from Step 1, not the title of the requisition they applied to originally.
- Send a specific message: "you interviewed for our outpatient clinic in 2024; we have a home health territory opening in the same county" outperforms "we have exciting opportunities".
Betterleap syncs with 25+ applicant tracking systems for this rediscovery loop and enriches every rediscovered candidate with validated contact data. At Beebe Healthcare the refreshed data produced a 91% contact match rate, the difference between a re-engagement campaign and a bounce report.
Step 6: Write outreach a working clinician will answer
A therapist reads your message between patients or at the end of a documentation day. The messages that get replies share five traits:
- Specific to their practice. Name the setting, the population and the city. Personalization is not a first-name merge field; it is evidence that someone read their license and their background.
- The facts first. Caseload, productivity expectation, schedule, travel radius, mentorship, continuing-education support, loan repayment. These are the questions a therapist would ask in the first reply, so answer them in the first message.
- Short. Four or five sentences. The full description can follow once they reply.
- From a real mailbox. Send from the recruiter's own account so replies land in a thread a human is reading and the message is not a no-reply blast.
- Followed up, then stopped. A three- or four-step sequence over two to three weeks, each step with a new reason to reply, that halts the moment they answer, with a working unsubscribe on every message.
Betterleap's agent drafts the multi-step sequence for each candidate from their background, sends it on the recruiter's behalf, follows up automatically and tracks opens, replies and engagement in real time; the recruiter steps in when someone replies. The open-rate jump FOX Rehabilitation reports (from under 10% to 50 to 60%) came less from better copy than from current contact data: the messages were finally reaching the right licensed clinicians.
Step 7: Measure the loop, and hand the repetitive parts to the agent
Of the seven steps, two need a recruiter: writing the role (Step 1) and talking to therapists who reply (Step 6). Building the list, checking licenses and compact eligibility, refreshing ATS records, drafting and sending sequences and following up do not. Track four numbers weekly so you can see the loop working:
- Reply rate per sequence and per role, split by outside sourcing and ATS rediscovery.
- Qualified-reply rate: replies from people who pass the license, setting and population check, which tells you whether Step 1 is right.
- Time to first qualified reply from requisition open, the earliest signal a role will be hard.
- Share of hires sourced outbound, the number that justifies the program. FOX Rehabilitation's is 20%.
For reference, Community Health Network reports a 35% increase in sourcing efficiency, a 20% increase in outbound outreach and about ten hours a week saved per recruiter after moving the repetitive steps to Betterleap's agent. The Insights dashboard compares agent and recruiter activity side by side so you can see which steps the agent now carries.
A note on assistants, aides and technologists
The fastest-growing line in the table is not the therapists but their assistants: the BLS projects about 24,900 openings a year for physical therapist assistants and aides, with 17% growth, on an associate's degree entry path. PTAs are covered by the PT Compact alongside physical therapists, and the same licensure-first sourcing applies to assistants as to the therapists they work with. Imaging and laboratory roles differ in one respect: certification registries (for radiologic technologists and laboratory scientists) and state licensure overlap unevenly by state, so the search should be written around the credential the job actually requires rather than a job title.
To see this run on your own open therapy, respiratory or imaging roles, request a demo.
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Physical Therapists, 2025 base year and 2025 to 2035 projections (page last modified 27 August 2026), read 6 October 2026.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Occupational Therapists, 2025 to 2035 (page last modified 27 August 2026), read 6 October 2026.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Speech-Language Pathologists, 2025 to 2035 (page last modified 27 August 2026), read 6 October 2026.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Respiratory Therapists, 2025 to 2035 (page last modified 27 August 2026), read 6 October 2026.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Radiologic and MRI Technologists, 2025 to 2035 (page last modified 27 August 2026), read 6 October 2026.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Clinical Laboratory Technologists and Technicians, 2025 to 2035 (page last modified 27 August 2026), read 6 October 2026.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Physical Therapist Assistants and Aides, 2025 to 2035 (page last modified 27 August 2026), read 6 October 2026.
- PT Compact Commission, Compact map, member states, read 6 October 2026.
- Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology Interstate Compact Commission, ASLP-IC, compact status, read 6 October 2026.
- Occupational Therapy Compact Commission, OT Compact, read 6 October 2026.
- Betterleap, betterleap.com and the case studies for FOX Rehabilitation, Beebe Healthcare and Community Health Network.
Frequently asked questions
Why are physical therapists so hard to recruit?
The pool is small and mostly employed. The BLS counts 283,700 physical therapist jobs in 2025 and projects about 13,400 openings a year through 2035, so fewer than one PT in twenty changes jobs in a typical year. Entry requires a doctoral or professional degree, every PT is licensed state by state, and outpatient clinics, hospitals, home health agencies, skilled nursing and schools all hire from the same roster.
Where do you find physical therapists and allied health candidates who are not applying?
Start from licensure, not job boards. Every PT, OT, SLP and respiratory therapist holds a public state-board license, which is the only complete map of the workforce. Search a licensure-backed database (Betterleap covers 35M+ healthcare professionals with licensing confirmed through 25+ state board partnerships), then add your own ATS: past applicants, former staff and clinical-rotation students.
Which allied health professions have an interstate compact?
As of 6 October 2026: the PT Compact has 38 member states actively issuing and accepting compact privileges for physical therapists and PTAs, with Maine, Michigan and Rhode Island enacted but not yet issuing. The ASLP-IC for speech-language pathologists and audiologists has been enacted by 37 jurisdictions and is issuing privileges in Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia. The Occupational Therapy Licensure Compact is enacted but not yet operational. Respiratory therapists have no compact.
How does the PT Compact change a sourcing search?
A physical therapist licensed in a PT Compact member state can purchase a compact privilege to practice in any other member state without applying for a new license. If your facility is in a member state, the sourcing pool for a PT role is the licensed PTs of all 38 member states who would relocate or work a territory across a state line, not just the ones within commuting distance.
How do you recruit therapists in a new state where you have never hired?
Start from the licensed population of the new market instead of waiting for applicants: identify every licensed therapist who matches the role, verify a current email address and phone number for each, and run personalized outreach from day one. FOX Rehabilitation used this approach to enter 5+ new markets with no prior pipeline, source 20% of its new hires through Betterleap and lift email open rates from under 10% to 60%.