← all questions · Jobs and campaigns
Apply into the central campaign and then work the phone. In Victoria the internal pre-match offers close before the PGY2 Match even opens, so the pool you compete in is smaller than the number of jobs 12. In NSW you apply position by position 3. Outer-metro and mid-year vacancies are where external applicants actually land.
Know what you are applying into. Victoria runs the PMCV PGY2 Match, 27 Jul – 21 Aug 2026 for the 2027 year, results 23 Sep — you preference up to 15 health services and apply directly to each one as well 1. But health services make "pre-match" offers to their own current interns first, and those close before the match opens, so the externally contestable pool is materially smaller than the advertised position count 2. NSW has no match for generic RMO jobs: you apply per position in the main round, 14 Jul – 4 Aug 2026, and each facility runs its own process 3.
The structural problem is internal preference, not your CV. Hospitals hire the interns they already have, and two-year prevocational contracts under the national framework lock more of those posts up front 24. The sub's blunt version is that most hospitals take their own people and you apply widely and hope 4. Applicants in Sydney report not getting an interview at RPA, RNS or POW not because they were outranked but because no role existed 5.
The counter-evidence is real too. People who have done it say Melbourne PGY2 was straightforward in the general, surgical and ED streams, and that the NSW big four are not especially hard for a generic RMO job 45. Which is true depends entirely on the stream — critical care and BPT are contested, general rotational is not.
What works. Preference the outer-metro and regional networks you would actually accept. Phone the JMO manager monthly rather than emailing the portal 5. Watch mid-year vacancies — people quit, particularly out of BPT2 posts 6. And treat PGY3 as the realistic entry year if PGY2 does not come off 6.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
Most hospitals take their own internal candidates exclusively.
Always worthwhile calling the JMO Manager every month to suss if any openings.
PGY2 roles aren't "competitive" per se, but they often simply aren't available.
yes it was easy to get a job in Melbourne as a pgy2, particularly in general/surgical streams or ED
in NSW getting PGY2 jobs at the Big 4 isn't particularly difficult
Asked 62 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in the 19,145-post r/ausjdocs dump (2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /(Sydney|Melbourne|Brisbane|Perth|Adelaide).{0,40}(job|position|PGY2|RMO|HMO)|(job|PGY2|RMO|HMO).{0,30}(Sydney|Melbourne|Brisbane)/i. Quotes were picked to hold the two contradictory community readings side by side — 'they only hire their own' against 'it wasn't hard' — rather than to settle them.