The Aesthetic Business Masters Awards are judged by people who know this industry from the inside. Not observers, but practitioners, founders, strategists, and educators who have built businesses, led teams, navigated regulation, and sat across the table from clinic owners working through the same challenges you are. This series introduces you to the people behind the scorecard, so you know exactly who’s reading your submission and what they’ll be looking for.
Meet: Jem Wade
Jem Wade has sat on both sides of the hiring equation in medical aesthetics, and that dual perspective is what makes her approach to recruitment different from most.
Jem is the Co-Founder and Director of The One Clinic Agency, a boutique recruitment firm specialising exclusively in the medical aesthetics, cosmetic medicine, skin health, and cosmetic surgery industries across Australia and New Zealand. She co-founded the agency alongside Dermal Clinician and aesthetic educator Amelia Cartmel, and together they’ve built the region’s only recruitment firm dedicated entirely to aesthetics, placing talent in roles spanning cosmetic nursing, dermal therapy, clinic management, device sales, clinical training, and operational leadership.
Jem and The One Clinic Agency want clinic owners to stop hiring based solely on skills. She’s placed talent across hundreds of aesthetic businesses, and the hires that stick long-term are rarely the ones with the most impressive CV. They’re the ones who align with the clinic’s values, leadership style, and growth trajectory. Clinical competence gets someone through the door. Cultural alignment is what keeps them there, performing well, contributing to the team, and staying long enough to become part of the business rather than passing through it.
Before moving into recruitment, Jem co-founded and served as Managing Director of Cutis Medical Laser Clinics, a medical aesthetics practice focused on FDA and CE-cleared non-surgical treatments. That experience gave her first-hand knowledge of what clinic ownership demands: hiring and managing teams, building patient trust, developing sales strategies, and making daily decisions that affect both clinical outcomes and the bottom line. She didn’t arrive at recruitment from the outside. She came from within the industry, with scars (and systems) to prove it.
Her career spans more than a decade across product management, sales, business operations, and recruitment. She has partnered with global device companies, dermatologists, vascular surgeons, cosmetic physicians, medi-spas, and skin clinics throughout Australia. Her expertise covers the full hiring lifecycle, from role design and candidate sourcing through to cultural fit assessment, onboarding support, and retention planning.
What sets Jem apart is her commitment to going deeper than the resume. She invests time in understanding each clinic’s structure, leadership style, patient demographic, and growth trajectory before presenting candidates. That consultative approach has earned The One Clinic Agency consistent recognition from clients who describe the team’s industry fluency and personalised service as rare in the recruitment space.
As a judge for the Aesthetic Business Masters Awards, Jem Wade brings the perspective of someone who has built a clinic, scaled a recruitment business, and worked intimately with the people side of hundreds of aesthetic operations. She understands that a clinic’s performance is inseparable from the quality of its team. Entrants who demonstrate strong hiring practices, a healthy team culture, and leadership that attracts and retains the right people will stand out in her assessment.
