For non-clinical roles, why is it not enough to be able just “do the job”?

For non-clinical jobs, you’ll be compared to non-clinical candidates

Jon Ide-Don is a digital health leader and physical therapist. He is currently a Director at MedBridge, having previously been an early hire at Hinge Health, building and scaling their clinical organization into a multi-billion dollar HealthTech unicorn. He is passionate about inspiring clinicians to reach for their dreams, while giving them boots-on-the-ground advice from someone who’s been in the weeds of hiring, promotion, layoffs, and clinical care. Below, he’s shared with us amazing insights into the challenges and solutions clinicians will face when exploring different atypical career paths.

Getting that non-clinical job is not climbing the mountain — it’s a moment to catch your breath and prove yourself again.

When I’ve talked to clinicians looking to break into a non-clinical job, there’s two different flavors of conversations I’ve had:

1. The type of job where they are hiring specifically for a clinician, but applying their knowledge and skill set in a non-clinical way (ie. not treating patients)
2. The the type of job where they are hiring for a non-clinical job in a health tech company (ie. a company focused on MSK conditions, hiring for a Product Manager, Designer, CS, or Operations type of role).

Each scenario has it’s own nuances, but safe to say — they are totally different. I’ve met several clinicians who failed to see this distinction before starting the job search or transition process, and it’s a huge misstep.

Why?

Let’s dive in.

Question 1: What advice to I have for the first scenario — hiring for clinical knowledge in a non-clinical role?
Question 2: What advice do I have for the second scenario — hiring for a non-clinical job where clinical knowledge isn’t a prerequisite?
Question 3: Am I out of luck if I don’t have the knowledge/experience you’re talking about?
Question 4: Looking back 5 years ago, what advice would I give to myself in that same position?
Question 5: What are some resources I’ve found that have helped me along my journey through non-traditional clinical career paths?

Question 1: What advice to I have for the first scenario — hiring for clinical knowledge in a non-clinical role?

In the first scenario, what I’ll say is that the biggest piece of advice I have is that you have to be able to tell a great story to the hiring manager about how you’re going to be able to go way above and beyond just the basics of the job.

Being a great clinician with expertise, experience, and a pretty good depth of continuing education is table stakes. If you don’t have that, you’re likely not even making it past the resume screening round. There’s literally tens of thousands of clinicians out there with the same level of experience and expertise as you, and you’re probably competing against a lot of them for that specific job.

What will really differentiate you from other candidates the hiring manager is looking for at that round is more the other qualities and experiences listed on the job description. It’s things like direct experience working with a product team, collaborating with a cross-functional group, solving a really ambiguous problem, and communicating with leaders at all levels of the company.

Question 2: What advice do I have for the second scenario — hiring for a non-clinical job where clinical knowledge isn’t a prerequisite?

In the second scenario, a big piece of advice is to look at the size and maturity of the company you’re applying to.

If you don’t have any experience in health tech, there’s more potential to break into a non-clinical job in a really, early stage small start up. The hiring manager is often hiring for potential and they’re willing to take risks with bringing someone aboard who doesn’t have much (or any) experience. Those early stage start ups don’t have the reputation or financial resources to hire a candidate with a crazy pedigree (ex-FAANG) (editor’s note: FAANG is an acronym for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google — the biggest, most competitive tech companies around), and they’re looking for someone who’s scrappy, entrepreneurial, learn-it-all, and willing to take a risk.

They’re also looking for a type of person who can be a generalist, doing anything that’s needed and dive into a bunch of stuff that they’ve never done before. That’s just the nature of an early stage start up, you’ve got to wear a bunch of different hats to help the company get off the ground so that skill and attitude of “I’ll do anything” is really important.

But once a company starts to scale, it’s a lot harder to just drop an application to a growth stage health tech start up and say “hire me because I’ve treated a lot of patients and I’m a fellowship trained PT / baller clinician.” You need to really show that you’ve done the most important work that is listed in the job description. You’re competing directly against a lot of other candidates who’ve held that exact job at another company and have done the exact work listed in the JD. You’ve got to build up your resume with something to show that you can do the job, you’ve done the job in some capacity, and that your clinical background is a key differentiator. You’ve got to show that you have the table stakes skills, that you’ve applied those skills and created something concrete and real, and then layer on your clinical expertise as the icing on the cake.

For example, if you’re a clinician and see a product manager or designer role open at a growth stage health tech start up, it’s important to understand that the hiring manager is comparing your resume side by side with probably dozens of applications from experienced PMs or designers. If you’ve never done any work that can be clearly connected to the JD, then you’re at a really big disadvantage. However, if you’ve done work and you’ve got clinical subject matter expertise in that start up’s target market, then you’ve turned your clinical experience into a positive differentiator.

Question 3: Am I out of luck if I don’t have the knowledge/experience you’re talking about?

This doesn’t mean that you’re totally out of luck if your current role isn’t that dynamic or is very limited. There’s other paths to get there and you can absolutely get that experience.

Three important high level pieces of advice: do the work, show your work, and learn how to tell your story.

Doing the work:

Let’s say you’re a clinician working for a practice in a health system or private practice. One option is to look for opportunities within your current company that are outside of your current role. A few examples I’ve seen this done:

1. Pitch a new idea for a business line at the clinic you work at, and learn how to develop the idea, business case, value proposition, and project manage it end to end. Get buy-in from leadership and build a project team. Then get it launched. Do ALL OF IT. And then sit down and reflect on your experience doing it. What went well, what didn’t go well, what did you learn, what would you have done differently, what was the outcome. You’re basically bringing a product from zero to one in a pretty low-risk situation.
2. Ask your boss and your boss’s boss if there’s any opportunities to be a part of a cross-functional task force working on a larger project or initiative. This could be things like rolling out a new EMR or working on a process improvement project. These are great opportunities to work with people who are not just your day-to-day coworkers and to get direct experience working on something that is more like working at a health tech company.

The other option is to look outside of your current role and do work that’s on your own time. This is essentially what I did in my career, and gave me a bunch of really important opportunities that I never would have had otherwise.

1. Volunteer at a local innovative small business that is doing cool stuff. This is a great chance to show your value and gain a lot of great experience without any risk on the small business owner’s side. For example, I spent over 2 years at a CrossFit gym starting from being a member to being a coaching intern to being a coach before I finally got the opportunity to create content for a world renowned thought leader in the PT / CrossFit space. I also saw 5 other coaches at the same gym literally build businesses from scratch, it was eye opening from an entrepreneurial perspective. It was a long journey, but it was one of the key experiences that changed the trajectory of my career.
2. Start a small business or side gig. When you’re literally building your own business from scratch, you have to do everything and you gain exposure to all sides of what it means to run a company on a really small scale. Marketing, business development, product development, service design, website design, customer service, SEO optimization, social media content generation… it’s all a part of running your own business. In my own career, I started a concierge practice with my wife and we ran it for 6 years. Ultimately I learned I wasn’t very good at it, but it gave me the chance to do a lot of stuff that, down the road, helped launch my career in health tech.

Showing your work:

One interesting tidbit I learned from being a part of dozens of interview panels over the years is that it’s pretty much standard practice for UX / UI + product designers to have their own websites where they show off their portfolio of work. (Editor’s note: more on “portfolios” here). This was such an eye-opener and made a ton of sense once I looked at a couple of them.

As a clinician you can absolutely do the same thing in a creative way. You can write a case study of a project you ran at your local clinic, you can write a blog to share your experience starting your own business, you can create a compelling website with a narrative on it that goes above and beyond what you write in your resume or cover letter.

Once you’ve done the work, make sure you show your work in a public space. It’s a great way to build a portfolio and make it easier for a hiring manager to actually see that you can not only do the basics of the job, you can excel at the job.

Telling your story:

Many health tech companies do what’s called “behavioral interviewing” and they’re basically asking you questions like “tell me about a time…”

The basic assumption here is that the best predictor of future performance is a candidate’s past performance. And one of the most important ways to succeed in this interview format is to learn how to tell your own personal story in a way that matches and exceeds the job description. Take all that great work and experience you’ve built up, and tailor it into a story that fits the job and competencies they’re hiring for. One common example is questions around “innovation.” Innovation is a really fuzzy thing, but a great story teller can take their personal work history and paint a picture about how they took a different approach or came up with an unexpected solution from any point in their career.

Question 4: Looking back 5 years ago, what advice would I give to myself in that same position?

1. Reach out to and talk to as many people in the digital health space as possible, both clinicians and non-clinicians, and do informational interviews to really understand the space.
2. Put yourself into companies where you see innovation and intrapreneurship happenibng, and learn from within.
3. Create and put out my ideas and thoughts, document my learnings.
4. Create a website or blog or something, and share my work.

Question 5: What are some resources I’ve found that have helped me along my journey through non-traditional clinical career paths?

Building a Clinical Team in a Large Technology Company | NEJM Catalyst This article has been pivotal in developing my perspective on what it means to build a clinical team at a tech company. Not just taking on a traditionally non-clinical role, but actually being a multi-dimensional clinical consultant embedded within the company responsible for the clinical rigor of the product and selling the product to buyers who often include chief medical officers and medical directors on the other side of the table.

https://seths.blog/: I got turned on to Seth Godin back when I was starting my own concierge PT practice. His ideas and concepts actually have become more relevant as I’ve shifted into digital health. Especially his books and blogs about shipping stuff quickly, and becoming a linchpin.

Harvard Business Review; this article about how to succeed and build a network within a new role was particularly helpful for me. HBR has good content in general, and you can very much take a “just-in-time” learning approach to business concepts, strategy frameworks, and other ideas by just searching within their archives. You can access a lot of their stuff for free.

https://www.outofpocket.health: This blog & newsletter about health tech is really funny, and really educational, about all the stuff with health tech & health economics that is usually incredibly boring to read about. Highly recommended to start to understand how money flows in healthcare.

Take it from me — I know what it’s like to go from a clinical career, to a non-clinical career, to managing and leading those who are looking to do the same. It is a lot of hard work, and you’ve never really “made it” — the bar just keeps getting pushed higher and higher. But, this isn’t a bad thing — it’s an opportunity for you to keep growing and learning. But, just remember — you’re never done proving yourself.

And that will to keep improving is what will set you apart. You got this.

Interested in meeting other clinicians (and scientists!) who share your same interests, as well as learning more about startups in the healthcare space? Check out the “Careers in clinic (and beyond)” group as well as Next Degree — the next-gen healthcare job search designed to help you build a career you love, whether that’s in clinic — or beyond.