Hello dear reader,
Couple of weeks ago, I'd posted on LinkedIn asking if anyone was hiring therapists for their tech teams.
My DMs flooded with over 20 inquiries. Two weeks later, only 6 relevant leads remained.
All six were founders. Their asks ranged from recruiting therapists for PM and founders' office roles, to short-sprint product consulting user testing, and internships for fresh grads.
I read all 6 JDs in detail—a mix of paid and unpaid, established and bootstrapped startups, in-person and remote. I had a to-and-fro with the founders on crafting a better pitch that would be attractive to therapists.
Mental health innovation as a field within the tech industry is in it's early stages as well all know. I'm seeing tech gigs for therapists pop in my inbox and socials every other day, as I'm sure you are too.
This exercise brought to surface stark identifiers of a what I consider a compelling versus a lousy job description (JD) of tech gigs for therapists. Especially the unpaid ones. Those identifiers are what I share with you today.
3 Things Unpaid Gigs Offer That Make A Lousy Pitch
In tech, if a gig is unpaid, it's called a collaboration and both parties must stand to gain something tangible. Ask any engineers and designers you know—there’s enough demand for their roles and even more supply, and yet they don't do unpaid internships.
Either the gig is low-pay, a friendship favour, or comes with a founding position commitment. There’s no such thing as an unpaid internship or consulting in tech. Getting people to work with you when you don't have money to offer is basic entrepreneurial creativity.
Recruiting founders know this, but I doubt if therapists do. Which is how you'll find one or multiple of the following offered in lousy JDs of unpaid gigs.
You'll Get A Certificate
"We offer a customised participation certificate for your effort in this project"
Tech work in exchange for certificates is abnormal and unusual in the tech industry.
Nobody in my circles of design, engineering, product-management, marketing, customer-success, and sales—across 5 years of drawing a fancy tech salary and 3 more years as a founder—has ever been compensated with a certificate. If a startup tried to bring on a designer or engineer with a certificate as the deal, that founder would be called out and shamed on twitter.
I know the psychology community (especially in India) has a different relationship with certificates. Completely fine to get a certificate in exchange for your work but please know that no other product team-mate on the project with you will be accepting one. The product managers, engineers and designers you'd be working shoulder-to-shoulder with wouldn't.
This is because the decision-maker in your next gig wants a case study, a clear line from your contribution to a measurable outcome. A PDF of a colourful rectangle with a logo and your name written in a fancy font is nowhere close to it.
The only exception to this is if the company has an established strong brand and clout. But most startups don't even survive long enough to build that kind of clout. The proof is in VC math: investors expect roughly 9 out of 10 portfolio startups to fail. A bootstrapped startup barely a year old has no business convincing you that their name carries weight. It doesn't. And the argument "our certificate will mean something in the future" falls flat on its face when the future odds are stacked that hard against them.
You’ll Get Mentorship
"For your contribution, you'll be mentored by our clinical leader and will receive valuable feedback"
If the recruiter thought carefully enough about how many hours they need from you, they should also be specific about how many hours the supposed mentor will invest in you.
A step further, there must be specificity in the nature of this mentorship. Will they be your supervisor? Will they help you identify your aptitude or speciality area? What is this mentorship about? Skipping specificity here is just lazy.
More fundamentally, mentorship is a relationship. It requires mutual investment and genuine connection. Without that, it's just someone giving you occasional feedback. That's far from mentorship, that's commentary.
Have AI Project On Resume
"AI and psychology are at so nascent stage that anyone will be lucky to have our project on their resume"
This is a line from a real correspondence I had with a founder.
Yes, the field is young. Yes, those who start now will have a head-start. But that is not for the recruiting founder to decide. No startup is doing any therapist a favour by granting them the "opportunity" to touch product development. If anything, it's the other way around.
Ask yourself: what exactly is going on my resume? Because once you start, no project is under your full control. Say your task is to test a chatbot weekly and write evaluation reports. After a month, are you sure that you can articulate how those reports moved the needle? Did they affect user acquisition, retention or any other product metric? Which exact skill of yours was put to test?
Ultimately the job of the resume is to help you attract and land the next project. So make sure you have clarity on what that resume entry will be from this project. Don't be enamoured by the pitch "it's great for your portfolio." Push on what that portfolio entry will actually say in very specific, very concrete terms.
5 Things To Ask In Unpaid Gigs
Now we know things to watch for, lets move to what to seek and ask for instead. Here are five things that I believe constitute fair and valid compensation when money is not an option.
Their Time, In Hours
If they're not paying with money, are they paying with their time? How many hours is the founding team investing in you specifically? Get a number and a weekly cadence here. The actuals will end up being different but vagueness from the beginning is a no go.
Their Plan, In Writing
Who exactly will you report to? Ask for their credentials and here I’m not talking about their fancy school’s name or the brands they’ve worked for. What have they actually done? Is there a link to see, an article or a case-study to read? Look for proof of relevant projects or roles. Read their writing. Interview them. Ask how they intend to support your learning curve. An unpaid collaboration must leave both parties with tangible takeaways. Otherwise it’s simply a one-way favour.
Their Craft, By Proximity
Every team member you work with should bring a recognisable, defensible skill to the table that is distinct to you. In your next gig, the decision-maker will look for if you've done cross-functional collaboration, if you've worked in inter-disciplinary teams and know to speak a shared language.
"Stakeholder management" or “team coordination” and such don’t count as defensible skills.
You want to be around people who have sharpened their craft. Just being in their presence should bring learning by osmosis. Which means they themselves should be intentional and driven practitioners of their craft. If that's not the case, it's not worth your time.
Your Name On Their Work
Startups come and go. Products are built and killed. What you poured 100 hours into might never see the light of day. It’s a butterfly’s life. It happens all the time and builders have no control on it.
What founders do have control over is earning recognition for the effort. Earning and sharing credit.
If you aren't getting paid, can they mention your name on their website, credited under clinical contributors or design partners? Can it mentioned in a pitch deck or on the landing page as part of the product team, or in any of the public faces assets this startup creates? What is that one link you can share that says this is what I did here.
The AI x MH space is nascent and every startup is looking to build a brand. A brand is nothing but a story that builds trust. If you're not on the founding team, not standing to gain financially, don’t hold stakes, and are not entering a long term engagement, then seek to build your own brand as a clinical product consultant through the collaboration.
Your Name On Top Of Their Mind
Leverage is having cards in your hand that disproportionately increase your odds of winning. You have no control on your hand in a game of cards. But leverage in a tech gig? Now that can be designed.
Does the founder have a network you’d want access to? Can they make warm introductions, bring you into rooms you otherwise wouldn’t enter, recommend you to another founder? If you were applying to a prestigious graduate programme or needed a recommendation letter for a moon-shot job in your dream role, would a letter from them carry any weight? These are all legitimate forms of compensation. Of course, all of these are conditional to your performance at the gig. But it is possible to glean the recruiting founder’s ability to co-design leverage for you, with you.
The Bottom Line
Therapists, you are entering a game with rules very different from the one you already play.
In unpaid gigs, if a founder can’t clearly articulate what you’ll walk away with in hours, outcomes, or recognition, then you have some serious considerations to make about it. Learn to spot when a new game is played with old, unfair rules. Choose projects keeping your own growth at the highest priority.
A Note For Founders
There are a few handful MhTech founders reading this newsletter who most certainly will not be pleased with this piece. To them I have to say:
This is your reminder that functioning under constraint is entrepreneurship 101.
You find frugal, thrifty solutions for AI credits, for design tools, for everything else you need for building. Apply that same creativity to hire therapists and expand your clinical team. If you have a skill therapists would find useful, offer your service. Offer your time, your attention, any resource you have in abundance, trade it. Be creative in the value-tradeoff you offer.
Fair trade earns respect. Fair trade builds relationships. I've made some great friends and champions of TinT through fair trade collaborations. The key is generosity. Sure it might slow you down, but it builds you a village.
Don’t exploit those desperate for opportunities by offering them bare minimum and positioning it as a privilege. Don’t pour oil in the fire of AI hype. Don't borrow exploitative, performative norms from other fields (certificates, I'm looking at you). There's no place for that in startups.
Innovation is as much in how you water, nourish, and flourish relationships, as is in the products that you build.
In Closing
My editorial standards for this newsletter extend to the opportunities I choose to feature here. I go through 20 recruiting leads so you don't have to. A single therapist's time wasted has an unrecoverable cost. Me going through 20 leads and all those JDs leads to recruiting insights for all of you.
This is not to say any specific startup is bad or any founder incompetent. MhTech founders have immense stamina and intrinsic motivation. This sector is genuinely hard to survive in. People are not bad. Pitches are bad.
If any of this resonated with you or matched your experience- pls do this village a favour and talk about it online. People don’t know until they know.
Of those 20 inquires a slim few opportunities were indeed brilliant and well worth your time! So stay tuned. Next opportunity to be announced here soon :)
Take care and see you soon,
Harshali
Founder, TinT
