How to get a healthcare administration job (when every posting wants experience)

Dr. Ashley Hussain-Okorafor, DBA
Former lecturer and hiring-side healthcare administrator

Six months of mass-applying got me zero interviews. Then my father asked two friends for favors, a hospital created an internship for me, and I spent that internship telling every supervisor, physician, and executive I met that I had applied to a corporate posting. That got me hired.

I finished my master's in healthcare administration in about a year and a half, and honestly thought I would walk in, announce that I had arrived, and be handed the executive job. The world was not impressed.

I spent at least six months applying and got nowhere. I applied to every hospital within a forty-mile radius of where I lived. When that failed, I widened it to anything I thought counted as a healthcare organization — insurance companies, anything with "health" in the title. I lived on Indeed and CareerBuilder, mass-applying, clicking through listings all day with the same resume and a very generic cover letter.

Why doesn't the degree get you interviews?

Because a degree gets you considered. It does not get you selected. Every applicant in that stack has the same letters after their name, and a hiring manager scanning forty resumes cannot tell you apart from the other thirty-nine. My resume was fine. My problem was that I was invisible.

The mass-apply strategy made it worse. A generic cover letter reads generic, and applying to everything says you want a job — any job — not that job. I was treating the application portal like a door when it is a wall with a slot in it.

What actually worked: an internship that didn't exist until someone asked

My father started calling his friends. One had an oncology clinic with its own MRI machine. My dad asked: can you let her intern for you? They said yes and created one for me. It was unpaid, of course.

I shadowed everyone: a day with the receptionist doing whatever she did, a day with a radiologist, then a nurse. It taught me how a clinic runs — but I knew pretty quickly that shadowing alone would not get me a job.

The second ask took longer. Another friend administered a much bigger hospital, and big organizations do not have internship slots lying around. They went through their auxiliary and created an internship title so I could be hired — then put me in medical records.

That is where it changed. I learned everything medical records does — organizing, the HIPAA side, how information moves. I was blown away. They still used faxes. They still had closets full of binders. But more important: I was now inside a hospital that was part of a chain.

How do you turn an internship into a job?

An internship gives you one thing no application can: proximity. You are in the building. You hear things. You see postings before the outside world does. What you do with that is on you.

I decided I wanted the chain's corporate office. So I built real relationships with everyone above me — which, as an intern, was basically everyone.

• I went where the connection already existed. One supervisor was Punjabi, like me, and invited me to a few Punjabi events. Indian and Pakistani Punjabi are not the same thing, but the connection was real. That turned a supervisor into someone who would go out of her way for me.
• I made myself a known face. A couple of executives knew my father. I said hello, stopped by, checked in — every day. Not to ask for anything. Just to be a person they recognized.
• I never acted like an intern who was leaving. I behaved like someone who already worked there and intended to stay.

Why you should tell everyone you applied

Then I saw it: an information management specialist posting, out of the corporate office. I applied immediately, and then I told everybody. I told my supervisor. I handed physicians my confirmation number. I told my father's friend who was connected to the CEO. Some of those conversations did nothing. I still do not know who pushed for me — but somebody did, because when I walked into that interview, the vibe was that I was already in and the interview was paperwork.

The application is the smallest action. Telling people is the campaign. You cannot know which relationship moves you, so you have to be visible to all of them.

What about the interview and the salary?

I was a nervous wreck — first real job, no idea whether they would like me. Then I got there and it was calm, because the work had been done before I walked in.

The salary was very low. They likely knew it was my first job and expected me to counter. I did not, because I was happy to be there. I do not fully regret it — I bought a title and a door, and it set everything off. But if you are in that chair, ask for more than I did. The first number anchors every number after it.

What if nobody you know works in healthcare?

I got in on my father's phone calls, and I will not pretend that is available to everyone. What you can copy is the ask, not the relationship.

Go small. An independent clinic, a surgery center, a home health agency, a single practice — somewhere the person making decisions answers their own phone. Ask for a shadowing week or a small unpaid project, in the words my father used: can you let me learn here? Small organizations say yes far more often than hospitals do.

And be honest with yourself about unpaid work. It is a privilege. If you cannot afford it, take a paid entry role instead — front desk, scheduling, patient access, medical records. Same proximity, same hallway, and a paycheck while you build it.

What I would do differently

I would not spend six months mass-applying. Two weeks was enough to prove it was not working. I would have spent the rest in rooms with people, because those six months produced zero interviews and one phone call produced a career.

What I would do again is take the job that did not pay what I wanted, because it was the title I needed — and tell every person I met that I had applied.

If you are in month four of applying and hearing nothing, it is not because you are unqualified. It is because nobody inside knows your name yet. If you want a clear read on where your resume and experience actually stand before you send one more application, start with the free scorecard at thehcadaily.com/scorecard.