If you have been applying for health tech roles on LinkedIn and hearing nothing back, you are not alone and you are probably not doing anything wrong.
The problem is not your CV, your cover letter, or your lack of industry experience. The problem is the route you are taking. And for most doctors, the public job board route is one of the least effective ways to break into health tech.
This is how the doctors who are actually making the transition are doing it and why it looks so different from what most people expect.
Why the Application Route Is So Hard for Doctors
When a health tech company posts a role on LinkedIn, they are typically looking for someone who already has industry experience. The job description will say things like “2-5 years of experience in a commercial health tech environment” or “proven track record in clinical product management.” You apply. You get a rejection, or nothing at all.
This is not because you are underqualified. It is because you are competing on a field that was not designed with your background in mind, against candidates who already have the specific job titles the algorithm is filtering for.
The application route assumes that the best way to get a job is to respond to a vacancy. But most of the best opportunities in health tech, especially at early-stage companies, which are where the most interesting and accessible roles are never posted publicly at all. They are filled through networks, through introductions, through founders hiring people they have already met and trust.
Doctors who try to break into industry through job boards are competing for the small fraction of roles that get posted, against candidates who have been building industry relationships for years. It is the most competitive route into the least representative set of opportunities.
The Route That Actually Works
The doctors who are successfully transitioning into health tech are almost uniformly doing it through relationships being known by the right people before a vacancy exists, so that when one does, they are already the obvious choice.
This sounds vague, so here is what it looks like in practice.
Priesh joined Doctors in Industry in November with no industry experience beyond a teaching fellowship. Two weeks later, he attended one of our in-person events at Healthhouse in London. By the end of that evening, he had been introduced directly to the UK operations manager of Tandem, a health tech company he had been interested in — by someone who could vouch for him personally. He kept showing up, kept building the relationship, and three weeks later was told about a role before it was posted anywhere. He applied before the job went live, got the interview, and got the role. By January he was talking about his onboarding process, not his job search.
Tasha landed her clinical lead role without a formal interview at all. She and Desaline were both in the community, both working in adjacent spaces. Desaline introduced her to someone she knew at a company that was looking for exactly what Tasha offered. The conversation happened over time, the trust built naturally, and the offer came without Tasha ever needing to submit a CV through a portal.
Gordon spent two years building his presence in the health tech community before signing his first paid consultancy contract with a music health tech company, his perfect client. He described the company as a unicorn, the kind of client that almost does not exist in the UK. He found it not by searching, but by being consistently visible in the right spaces over time.
Desaline is now speaking at HLTH Europe on a panel alongside Whoop, chaired by a BBC journalist, and has become the first woman of colour on the board of advisors of one of the world’s largest sleep technology companies. She started where most doctors start — wanting to leave clinical medicine, unsure exactly where she was going. The trajectory that followed came from relationships, visibility, and consistently showing up in the right rooms.
What “Being in the Right Rooms” Actually Means
The phrase sounds abstract, but in practice it is specific.
Health tech in the UK has a geography. A significant portion of activity happens in a small number of places — events, hubs, online communities, and networks where founders, investors, and clinicians who are already working in industry congregate. Healthhouse in London is one example. HLTH Europe is another. The informal WhatsApp groups, Slack channels, and Skool communities that surround the ecosystem are others.
Being visible in these spaces — not just attending once, but showing up consistently, contributing to conversations, being known by name is what creates the conditions for opportunities to find you rather than the other way around.
The doctors who make this transition fastest are not the ones with the most impressive CVs. They are the ones who are most consistently present in the places where opportunities are created.
The Role of Warm Introductions
In every single case study above, a warm introduction played a critical role. Not a cold LinkedIn message, not a speculative application — an introduction by someone who could say “this is a doctor I know, I trust their judgment, I think you should talk.”
This changes everything about how the subsequent conversation goes. Instead of being screened against a job description, you are being evaluated as a person. Instead of being one of two hundred applicants, you are the one person who was personally recommended. The dynamic is completely different.
Building the relationships that make warm introductions possible is not something that happens overnight. But it is also not as slow as most doctors think. In a tight, active community, it can happen within weeks particularly when someone with an established network is actively making introductions on your behalf.
Why Most Doctors Do Not Take This Route
If this route is so effective, why are so many doctors still applying on LinkedIn?
The honest answer is that it requires a different kind of action than most doctors are used to. Applying for jobs on LinkedIn is a task with a clear start and end point. You write a cover letter, you submit, you wait. It feels productive. It is familiar.
Showing up at events, building relationships, positioning yourself as someone with specific expertise, having conversations with no immediate outcome, this feels less defined, harder to measure, and more exposing. Many doctors feel they need to be further along, more credible, or better prepared before they can present themselves to the industry. So they do another course, update their CV again, and stay in the preparation loop.
This is one of the most common and most costly patterns we see in doctors trying to make this transition. The solution is not more preparation. It is a structure that gets you into action before you feel completely ready, with support to navigate the discomfort that comes with that.
What This Looks Like in Practice
For doctors who join Doctors in Industry, the process is systematic rather than accidental:
- In the first weeks, you get clear on exactly what you are offering, to whom, and why your clinical background is specifically valuable for that audience
- You are introduced to doctors who are already working in the spaces you want to work in, so you can understand what the landscape actually looks like from the inside
- You attend in-person events where health tech companies are present and introductions are made deliberately, not left to chance
- Your progress is tracked, not how many applications you have submitted, but how many real conversations you have had with decision-makers, and how those conversations are being moved forward
The goal throughout is not to make you more qualified. It is to make you more known, more trusted, and more present in the places where opportunities are actually created.
The Honest Timeline
This is not instant. Building relationships takes time, and the transition from clinical medicine to a nonclinical role is genuinely a significant change. But when it is approached systematically, it is also faster than most doctors expect.
The typical timeline for doctors in our community to reach their first concrete outcome — a contract, a role, a paid advisory engagement, is three to six months. Some move faster. Some take longer, particularly those building consulting businesses or pursuing more senior positions. But almost none of them get there through job applications alone.
If you have been applying for health tech roles for months without success, the answer is not to apply harder. It is to change the route entirely.
If you want to understand what that looks like in practice, book a call with our team.