International Recruitment Centre

Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora's International Recruitment Centre offers a streamlined, candidate-centred service which incorporates a specialised Health Immigration Service.

The aim of the Centre is to provide a service that will make a major life-changing decision as stress-free as possible for international health professionals moving to New Zealand to live and work.

We want to live up to our reputation as a friendly and welcoming country and demonstrate a centre of excellence approach in our international recruitment practices.

Our immediate goal is to attract and support the retention of internationally trained migrants and New Zealand trained ex-pats.

The Health Immigration Service will initially be available to support health workers looking to emigrate to New Zealand and existing staff of Health NZ, and offers:

• Free immigration advice provided by Licensed Immigration Advisors.
• Settlement services at the local level to welcome the candidate and their family to a new country and neighbourhood.
• A candidate guide/kaitiaki will be available to help eligible candidates plan their migration journey providing information and support as needed.

The Immigration New Zealand Green List is a list of occupations that qualify for a straight to residence or work to residence pathway.

48 health roles are on Tier 1 of the Green List allowing internationally-qualified workers and their immediate family to apply for New Zealand residency offshore and enter New Zealand as residents.

Health NZ’s first major International Recruitment Campaign launched on 21 November, 2022, targeting five countries where Responsible Authorities offer a faster registration pathway across a large portion of health roles – the UK, Ireland, USA, Canada and Singapore.

In general, these are also the countries from where a significant portion of our internationally qualified migrants come. Alongside the creative campaign, we have also worked with Immigration New Zealand to direct message health professionals who have showed an interest in coming to New Zealand via their email newsletters, and run a series of webinars alongside various Responsible Authorities and Immigration NZ to give health workers interested in coming to New Zealand a fuller picture of the emigration process from start to finish.

Since the announcement of the International Recruitment Centre and commencement of the international recruitment campaign, we have received enquiries from the wider health sector asking to make these resources available to them. New Zealand’s health system comprises of hundreds of employers of which Health NZ is only one, albeit the largest, and many health workers are employed by other organisations.

Health NZ has previously expanded the resources of our international Recruitment Centre to areas of the health system that we don’t directly employ, such as facilitating the hiring of GPs, and mental health and addiction workers by referring them to mental health and addiction NGOs and community providers. We are looking to expand this work further to include other areas of the health system that are in critical need of international staff.

Guiding Principles

We have developed some basic principles to guide our international recruitment activities.

• A core principle is the focus on supporting international health workers to be culturally prepared to live and work in Aotearoa New Zealand’s unique cultural context. This includes enabling international candidates and employers to access education regarding Te Tiriti o Waitangi and cultural competence and understanding the importance of contributing to improving Māori health outcomes
• We are committed to prioritising growing and recruiting from domestic workforce before recruiting internationally. This includes supporting our overseas-based New Zealand trained health professionals to come home.
  • Although the introduction of the green list means that we do not have to advertise green list roles before recruiting overseas we still have an obligation to prioritise our domestic workforce.
• When we do recruit internationally, we ensure our processes are conducted ethically in accordance with our global obligations. For example:
  • no active recruitment of health workers from developing countries facing critical shortages of health workers unless there is an explicit government-to-government agreement with New Zealand to support managed recruitment activities, as per the World Health Organisation Health Workforce Support and Safeguard List, 2020.
  • ensuring that migrant health workers are treated equitably with the domestically trained health workforce, that data on migrant health workers will be collected, analysed and translated into effective health workforce policies and plans, and we will not work with any agencies which charge their candidates any fees.
  • In addition to the countries listed by the World Health Organisation we will also not actively recruit from nations in the South Pacific. 

Sharing resources

As part of establishing the International Recruitment Centre, we developed a variety of tools and guidelines to support our international recruitment processes. We are sharing these resources to use as you need, to support your international recruitment processes.

Candidate resources and information

On the landing page for the international recruitment campaign, you will find a wealth of useful information that you can also provide to your candidates if you choose. Flip through the pages on somewheredifferent.nz and look for: 

• Job Title Glossary for the ANZSCO code and job title for specific health occupations 
• Getting Registered to Practise that describes New Zealand’s registration system and provides a list of registration bodies 
• Aotearoa’s Māori Culture where a variety of cultural competency resources can be found to support candidates’ understanding of Aotearoa New Zealand's Māori culture

Supporting accredited employers

Health NZ has worked closely with Immigration New Zealand who has developed a Visa Pathways Map for the health system. The map sets out the pathways to immigration for health professionals including those on the Green List, those included in the Care Sector Agreement, and those who are not covered by either of these. You can share this pathways map with a candidate without it being deemed as providing immigration advice as this type of advice can only be provided by Licensed Immigration Advisors. 

Other useful links to Immigration New Zealand information are: 

• How to apply for a job check  
• Job advertisement guide for accredited employers  
• Information regarding the Care Sector Agreement can be found on the Sector Agreements Factsheet page.

Becoming an Accredited employer

If you are not yet an accredited employer and are considering becoming one, Health NZ’s Health Immigration Service has created a summary of the process. 

What's happening next

We are not yet able to work with individual employers, however we are keen to hear from health organisations that are accredited employers and work regionally or nationally and see how we can work together to place international health workers into work. Contact us on InternationalRecruitmentCentre@health.govt.nz.

Get in touch by using this contact form. Using this will enable us to triage your queries and give more efficient responses. 

Alternatively, you can email us at: InternationalRecruitmentCentre@health.govt.nz.