Applicationss, Tools & Strategies

Honestly, the most effective thing I found to work is networking - speaking to your peers in your program, your professors, your co-workers, your friends at different companies who may have visibility of opportunities that you don't, and more. Getting any sort of referral sometimes allows you to jump past that initial barrier of recruiting and will almost always get your application reviewed. When you just cold apply, you’re sending your application into a dark void. This advice isn’t extremely helpful for current students, because they don’t necessarily have a professional network yet to truly leverage this. I have been told by other people to use LinkedIn to find alumni of your school and send them connection requests and messages asking about their company or their professional experiences. They don’t tell you that in engineering. I was actually first exposed to that method from business school students. That may be partially because engineering as an industry is more streamlined, where if you get a mechanical engineering degree, there’s a good chance that you will find a mechanical engineering job right out of college. It’s not as complicated. But in UX, every single person is different. Everyone’s story, projects, perspective… it’s all different. This is why you can’t take any UX designer and swap them with another one in a company and expect similar results.

Applicationss, Tools & Strategies

I'm pulling from a document that I wrote, so go check that out to read more. The things that helped the most in my job search were job alerts and cold emailing. I didn’t have many connections at companies, so I couldn’t just get referrals from people. I would send out my application for a position as soon as I got the job alert email. I did this because I rarely got responses from applications to job postings that had been out for multiple weeks. With cold emailing, I would still send emails to companies that didn’t even have new-grad job postings at the time because sometimes companies may be impressed enough with your work to consider you for other positions or upcoming positions that they haven’t released yet. I also talk about how to find emails of recruiters and hiring managers in the document. With that being said, don’t limit your job search to just positions that say ‘new-grad’ or ‘entry-level’ because you can easily be considered for any position that requires 2-3 years of experience or less.

Tools & Strategies, General Advice

I reached out to a LinkedIn superstar UX person and asked to have a conversation and they were extremely friendly and very helpful in giving me advice on how to approach my job search and things that they have seen work for other people in my position. If you can have a conversation with someone like that, do it.

Tools & Strategies, General Advice

I found networking to be important, especially during 2020 where job postings were scarce and a lot were being redacted. I tried to reach out to alumni from my school and to people who do UX in the city that I wanted to be in. I also joined a slack group for UX people in the city. It's an open group that anyone can join where you talk with a bunch of other UX'ers and can ask questions about anything from learning UX to questions about recruiting or job postings. I joined a bunch of these groups and made some great connections from them. I saw someone talking about an interesting project they were working on, so I messaged them and explained that I was new to the space and wanted to chat about their project and they agreed to it and were very helpful.

Tools & Strategies, Portfolioss

I share this to everyone I meet who wants to break into UX, and that’s cofolios.com. It’s a great resource that I hear a lot of people talk about. It’s the best way to get an idea of who is getting the jobs that I want and what they’re doing right. You can get an idea of their process, the work they're doing, and how they got to be where they are, just by taking five minutes to scroll through some of their profiles. That's where I've gotten a lot of inspiration for the structure and design of my portfolio. If you’re new to the portfolio world and don’t know what to do, it can be intimidating, unclear, and very confusing. But a resource like Cofolios can help you get a sense of how to start.

Tools & Strategies, While In School

I hate to say this, but networking is important. A lot of the opportunities that I've had have come from in-person interactions. A face-to-face conversation goes a long way. They will remember you and respond to your email if you’ve met them in person. It’s crazy how much that changes the game. I spent months applying online, but as soon as I got in front of a recruiter and talked to them at the career fair, my job search was completed.

Tools & Strategies

LinkedIn was my best friend when it came to my job search. I would find positions there and then apply directly on the company websites. I would also search on Google for software companies in the areas that I wanted to work in and then see if any of them were hiring for UX. Some smaller companies don’t have their job postings show up on LinkedIn, and if they do then they’re far back in the search results, so it’s good to search for those companies and find their job openings on their company website. I would also reach out directly to some companies. If I found a recruiter’s information on LinkedIn or I had a previous interaction with them, I would reach out and try to keep in contact with them. I know a lot of people get jobs just by the people that they know. The larger you grow your network and create genuine connections, the higher your chances are of that happening.

Tools & Strategies, While In School

One thing that helped me in my job search was having a support system. I was part of a group chat with my degree cohort and we were all very supportive of each other during the time where so many of us were unemployed and searching. Although it didn’t help me find a job, it was really helpful in my process as just acting as a support system.

Key Skills To Have

Generally, the teams that I work with have settled on the role of ‘product designer’ as the primary generalist design role. These companies embrace a form of user-centered and research-informed design, where the process starts with an understanding of the problem from research to understand customer needs, wants, and desires, then moves into designing the workflows, testing those workflows, and then visual and UI design all the way to shipping the product. Entry-level candidates are expected to have some competency in these aspects.

Key Skills To Have

For entry-level product designer roles, there is a big focus on interaction design, which can include aspects of what you can call visual design, UX design, and UI design. This requires an understanding of structure, user flows, and wireframes. There is some expectation of understanding an appreciation of user engagement as part of the process. Those are the big craft skills, but there are equally important interpersonal skills. Communication is probably the single most important one. Over someone's career, as they become a better communicator, they do a better job of articulating the rationale behind their design decisions. Coming out of school, you don't need someone to be a master at that, but you can expect some comfort in talking about their design decisions and can walk someone through their work in a design critique. This can be fairly rudimentary, but some basic understanding of that type of communication is important.

Key Skills To Have, Interviewingg

I think that the most important skill, particularly when you’re interviewing and trying to move up, is the ability to be clear with your thoughts and listen to the people that you’re speaking with. This certainly goes for your clients or internal customers too, depending on the type of company and role you have. Being able to understand what the client needs and then to communicate what types of solutions might help them is very crucial.

Key Skills To Have

I have seen lots of candidates over the years. It’s pretty easy to show some wireframes and mockups, but the portfolios that I see like that all blend together. The people who are really good at articulating a well-crafted story of what they went through in a project, understanding customer needs and delivering a polished product with a description of the decisions that they made - those are the candidates that are more difficult to find, and they always stand out to me.

Key Skills To Have, General Advice

You have to be humble and you have to be curious. The moment you come into a client's office, thinking that you know best about everything is the moment that you're going to lose any sort of credibility that you had in that room. You have to be willing to go in and be humble, take notes, and work as part of a larger team. If you're not going in with a desire to learn, you're going to miss things and you're going to screw it up. You have to be willing to admit when you're wrong. You have to be willing to take those lumps. At the end of the day, you are trying to meet the needs of the user and the needs of the user are always going to be icky, gross, weird, and bigger than you could ever hope to understand, especially when you're working in something like enterprise software.

Key Skills To Have, On The Jobb

At my current job I've been mocking up and prototyping designs, and because of limitations and how much time we have to actually work with engineers, maybe a tenth of it gets implemented. A lot of it may feel like throwaway, but at the same time that’s the whole point of what I do; to go in there and say "here’s what we could do, and here’s some ideas." I bring some stuff to the table and then we have a back and forth and whittle down the list to something that we’re actually going to be able to deliver.

Key Skills To Have, On The Jobb

It seems very cliche, but it has to be the willingness to learn new skills and ability to adapt.

Key Skills To Have, On The Jobb

It depends on the environment. I’ve worked as a product designer on teams in different spaces - enterprise, consumer, and growth. If you're working at an enterprise company, visual chops are not that important. It's primarily about system thinking. Are you thinking about edge cases? Does the product function well? It also has a lot to do with understanding the engineering complexities of the system. Users are important but not as much as the system. Learning about all those technical details is what is important in enterprise jobs. In a new and growing company, my job was extremely visual design focused. We would have meetings where the conversation was about pushing pixels. That's not happening in enterprise environments. Motion design begins to become important, or at least an eye for it. Users, flows, and system thinking help you differentiate from the existing design out there, but to survive in start-up environments you really need good visual chops.

Key Skills To Have, On The Jobb

You need to know how to communicate between different groups of people. I know they always tell you that in school but when you're out there at a company, a lot of times you're gathering and synthesizing information from people outside the UX team, and then translating that to give to the business side, engineering, management, etc. Being able to communicate well and pitch your ideas is very important.

Key Skills To Have, On The Jobb

I think the most important capability is the capability to be exceedingly uncomfortable. The students who have the strongest initial success coming out of their degree programs have found a way to analogize their ability to do hard things and to be uncomfortable. The nature of this discomfort is particular with the absence of a correct answer because the problem space may be a wicked problem space where fair-minded people operating in good faith cannot use all the available information, even if they had all of the information that they need, which you often don’t. There's no way to add it up to say A plus B equals C. So, therefore, the nature of the design solution ought to be D. There is no right way, but there are good ways.

Key Skills To Have, On The Jobb

“Projecting into the void” - students who can do that will succeed. It’s not based on knowledge or skill, because students often don’t have enough of either of those yet. Not having fight-or-flight instinctual responses to the discomfort, which causes you to prematurely start solving a problem that you don't know enough about yet or start drawing conclusions from research that isn't quite there yet, is key.

Key Skills To Have

There is this tendency to want to fix everything and find the answers as quickly as possible and to always be problem-solving. The good and bad news is, with the maturing field of UX, young professionals fresh out of school increasingly do not have access to the world's where they are able to go back to go backwards from a problem statement into the discomfort and the uncertainty.

Key Skills To Have, Portfolioss

I have found that the most important thing to have is a clear understanding of your process and a strong ability to articulate your process. You need to have a good process; you need to be able to know how to develop a user goal into a high fidelity wireframe. But, you need to be able to explain, to anyone who you are presenting your work, why you made the decisions that you did. It's one thing to just have a process, but if you can't articulate what you're doing, step by step, then you're missing that critical second half.

Key Skills To Have, On The Jobb

A big one is communication. I wish that my undergraduate degree program taught us more about how to communicate with different types of stakeholders. In an industry UX position, you’re going to be collaborating with software developers, project managers, product owners, and a lot more. It’s hard to get that kind of experience in college, which is unfortunate because it’s such a huge part of a UX job. The other big skill is curiosity and an openness to learning new things. Working in tech, things change all of the time; there’s new software and updates coming out all of the time, and you need to be agile in your day to day. But I love that; I love that I’m doing something different everyday. If you also like that, then this is the field for you.

Key Skills To Have, Portfolioss

Of course, you can expect some degree of professionalism, clarity, and communication in a job interview. But frankly, I don’t think a whole lot is expected of entry-level candidates beyond having a good portfolio and being able to talk about how they made design decisions. We also look for and recognize how much they will need to be led and the amount of guidance and mentorship they will need. No one is expecting them to forge out on their own and make sense of everything, but we can expect them to be productively engaged with others.

Key Skills To Have, Portfolioss, General Advice

A big part of your application and interviewing process is soft skills. I think I got both of my full-time roles because of my soft skills. Also, I've had interviewers mention that they like my portfolio because I have multiple different kinds of products and experiences. For example, I was the UX lead on a project relating to COVID-19 which allowed me to showcase my time and goal management as a leader, as well as skills relating to UX. Also, If a company decides to interview you, they know you can probably do the job, but it all comes down to if you fit the company culture. If you don't fit, they're not going to hire you. This is really tricky and something that a lot of young designers don't hear a lot. If you don't get an offer, it's not because you're not a good designer; it's usually because you don’t fit well with what they're searching for in a candidate.

Key Skills To Have

The most important thing is to show that you’re a team player. Talk about any mentors that you've had or if you've acted as a mentor and helped people on your team. You need to show that you're able to receive design feedback and that you're willing to learn on the job.

Applicationss

You don't need to have every skill listed on a job application. If you are missing something, have an open mindset and show that you're willing to try your best to learn it. I didn’t pretend like I knew something when I didn’t know it and I wasn’t close-minded about it. I acknowledged it and showed that I wanted to learn.

Portfolioss

When you're making your portfolio and writing out your case studies, you need to describe your role on the team. You don’t want to take credit for someone else’s work. It will be clear that you didn't actually do it if someone brings it up in an interview or portfolio review. You need a 'next steps' section that is about future iteration and improvements. You also need a bio or 'about me' section explaining who you are, not as a designer, but as a person. Companies want to see who you are and understand a bit about your interests.

Key Skills To Have, On The Jobb

The most important thing is communication. I’ve noticed that sometimes when people transition from academia to industry, they are so focused on their methods and processes, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in job applications they should focus more on the impact of their work rather than the methodology. Many of the researchers that we interview like to focus on methodology and their academic background, but that stuff is maybe 10% of the actual job. The majority of it is about communication. It’s also important to have a business mindset, which can be difficult as a researcher because oftentimes I know researchers who have had arguments with business where they present something and are very insistent that it’s the right thing for the user, but it just doesn’t make sense for the product from a business perspective.

Key Skills To Have

To be a researcher, naturally you need to have research skills, but having great research skills alone won't get you hired at many places; they're essentially just table stakes. You need to show that you have good communication and presentation skills.

Key Skills To Have, Portfolioss

This was the best piece of advice that I got from a friend when I was trying to go from contract to full-time with my current company - he told me that I talked a lot about what went into my projects and the work that was done, but I talked very little about why the project happened and the outcome of it. He told me that I should be able to take everything that I did on the project and fit it into a single sentence. ‘I did X because of Y and Z was the outcome’ and focus on that Z outcome. This really hit me when I got feedback from some companies that I had final round interviews with and got rejected. They told me that they wish that I communicated better in describing and showcasing my past work. This surprised me because I believe one of my top skills is my communication because I’m good at storytelling and I can put together an engaging presentation that people will remember, but I didn’t fully realize that storytelling about my past work is a very different skill than storytelling on the job.

Interviewingg, Portfolioss

What was most valuable in an interview for a position that I got was simply sharing my screen and taking the interviewer through a design project that I had done. That's the really difficult part about applying for design positions, because you can't capture the quality of your design work in a resume. It's also really difficult to capture the quality of design work in a portfolio, because it doesn't come with the full narrative and context that you can provide when you're actually speaking to a person 1-on-1. The difficulty of conveying the whole story is a big shortcoming of portfolios. But sadly, in application processes, there is such emphasis placed on portfolios.

Interviewingg, Portfolioss

When you’re coming out of school, your design skills definitely matter, but they might matter less than you think they do. What I have found to be the most important is professionalism and good presentation skills. In my experiences, it has been a lot more about how I presented my work than the actual work itself. This might not be great advice for anyone who has multiple years into the industry full-time, but I’ve found it to be good advice when it comes to interviews for internships and junior positions. As long as you have a portfolio that demonstrates your process and has a lot of examples of research, wireframes, and visuals/UIs - basically the same stuff that you see on any good portfolio - it’s then about how you tell the story and present the work that will be the deciding factor.

Key Skills To Have

I was surprised to see how desired it is to have experience using Webflow. I used Webflow to make my portfolio site just by chance. It’s highly desired, especially in startups. Those smaller companies and startups want to see that you’re sort of a jack of all trades where you can code and design.

Key Skills To Have

I’ve thought about this a lot, and I actually wrote a document that I never ended up sending to anyone so it’s just sitting in my Google Drive. Here’s a link to that document.

Applicationss

I started branding myself as a more fun and creative candidate by not having a traditional resume and application. I looked at a lot of UX resumes before making mine, and you could just tell that a designer made them. I wanted mine to feel like that. I made the content of the resume less a reflection of my experiences, but more of the skills of someone who would fit the bill for the role. I tried to play as much as I could with common buzzwords for design positions like wireframe, prototyping, agile, and anything else that would scream ‘I’m a product designer.’ I also made it very outcome focused rather than responsibility focused. People in UX like to see the results rather than just your responsibilities, so I always included some sort of accomplishment with each experience.

Applicationss, While In School

It can be feast or famine on applications sometimes. We tend to get more applications for junior roles than for senior roles. I may have 6 applications for a senior role that I can individually look through but a junior role probably has 200 or more applications. For the junior roles, if I see you’re coming out of a design or information science/human-computer interaction degree program, I know that you’re probably qualified for the role just based on that. But out of all of the applications, there will be too many qualified people. At that point, I usually look for something else in the resume that tells a bit of their story. For example, while they were in school they volunteered to redesign an authentication experience or did some kind of work outside of the classroom that can speak to their skills and character.

Applicationss

Sometimes giant companies will use algorithms to sort candidates, which can disadvantage those who don’t list their skills or use keywords from the job description in their resume. I’ve been in situations where I’ve looked through the approved and rejected candidate lists and have found more qualified candidates in the rejected list than ones who somehow made it through the magic gates to end up in the qualified stack.

Applicationss, General Advice

People who are hiring look for alignment. So if you've worked on something similar, you're just more interesting to interview. So at that point, skill doesn't matter as much. That’s why it's always difficult to get a job starting out, especially in design - because you don't have a lot of projects, depth-wise, to get those fits. You need at least a minimum of competency in basic UX skill-sets like user research, visual design, system thinking, etc., but it’s really about alignment. You may be a great candidate for a position, but because you don't align perfectly with the team’s needs, it just might not work out.

Applicationss, General Advice

You can always ask recruiters what they are specifically looking for, and a lot of them will be up front about this. Sometimes teams are looking for someone with a specific skill set which their team may be lacking in. I've been turned down on certain jobs, just because I was not a good fit. I was good enough to get the job, but they were looking for something specific and they already had someone with my skill set on their team.

Applicationss, Portfolioss

When I was applying for UX jobs, everybody who interviewed me wanted to see my portfolio and talk to me about it. I would always be asked to walk them through one of my projects and explain the design decisions I made.

Portfolioss

You’re going to need a strong portfolio for entry-level positions. In terms of communicating your work and role in your projects, it’s important to show how you collaborated and communicated with stakeholders outside of UX. Since I did my undergrad in engineering, I emphasize how I can communicate with engineering teams in my work. Draw from your past experiences to show off your communication skills.

Applicationss, Tools & Strategies

Each company or organization is going to have a different set of UX needs. To approach this, you can try to put the burden on yourself, the applicant, to do the research and context priming that you need to understand who is going to be on the other side of the desk and make educated guesses on how to prioritize your skills to look more appealing as a candidate. Alternatively, the conversation can be not as much about what the organization needs out of the applicant, but the story of how the applicant's development as a human being has unfolded up until that point. Tell your own story and frame it in such a way that the organization you’re talking with wants to be a part of this story. Telling your story about your development de-emphasizes any particular skill. By doing this, you’re not going to be looking at your transcripts to confirm that you’ve done contextual inquiry or interaction design… Even if you could prove that you’ve done those things, the way that they manifest in any organization is different. I impugn the idea that you can just line up a set of skills. I have such a huge belief in graduates that if they get out of their own way and find a way to tell their compelling stories, and how they have put themselves in a position to do something that they may not know how to do, that the organization that they’re talking to is going to be very excited to be part of their story. But that point of view depends a lot on the hubris or the confidence of the applicant. Not everybody is comfortable with doing that, but it’s my preferred way.

Applicationss, General Advice

Don’t play the game as stated. I’ll even take this as far as to say don't apply for jobs that are listed as jobs. Find the organizations you want and try to have conversations about your development as a human. Much like a show that I’m watching on Netflix, the ending could go so many different ways, but it’s been such a good story up until now that I want to be part of it no matter where it goes. That is often the truth for many students, and finding a way to tell that story is key.

Key Skills To Have, Interviewingg

I would say the most important skill is 100% design thinking. It’s about how you think and why you make the decisions that you do. One thing that stuck out to me when I was interviewing at companies and presenting my work was that they picked apart my decision making. For every decision that I made, they asked why, and I had to have an answer. That answer couldn’t be just because it looked good or simply because I thought it was the best thing to do.

Key Skills To Have, Portfolioss

Design thinking was definitely the skill that I had to improve on because I didn’t have it in the beginning when I first made my portfolio. I looked at other people’s portfolios and modeled mine off of theirs, and it looked nice until a team of 3 designers and researchers in an interview started asking me why I made all of these design decisions. That’s where it becomes real and you have to be able to articulate your thought process and decision making, ideally made with design thinking principles. That takes a lot of the scariness out of it because you know that you’ll have the answers to a lot of their questions.

Applicationss

It’s important to highlight your communication skills and desire to learn, but it’s difficult to truly capture those in a job application or a resume. If there’s an opportunity to write a cover letter, you could talk about it there. However, on applications I feel like it’s best to focus on your impact on the project, whether that’s shown in metrics or something else. I just try to highlight what I did, how it helped the team, and then how we helped the company as a whole.

Applicationss, Interviewingg, Portfolioss

I recently evaluated undergraduate students for a UX design and user testing internship-type position for a professor’s research project. The issue that we ran into was that a lot of candidates just didn’t have the experience that we wanted. I would be able to tease out certain things from their applications by their use of keywords that are related to UX design and research and some transferable skills from other areas. For instance, one candidate had experience doing literature reviews and qualitative analysis, so I picked out those experiences and thought that they could possibly be useful in doing user testing. But what I commonly saw that made me quickly turn applicants away was some of their inability to describe their work using common language of the industry. If I get a candidate’s portfolio that looks really nice visually, but they're not able to communicate how their work achieved the design goals or why they made certain design decisions, then I’m less inclined to want that person on my team. A lot of design work is collaborative, so you need people who are able to communicate their ideas and their choices to others.

Portfolioss

This may be more of a portfolio construction aspect, but the people who are able to craft and tell a complete story are generally more interesting to me than those candidates who just show wireframes or animations. I want to see what you learned from the customers, how you translated something into a user flow, the technical challenges you faced, how you negotiated with developers, what you learned from user testing, what may have surprised you from the analytics when the product went live, some sort of quantitative delivery, and even more. I want to see that story and gain insight from it.

Applicationss

I look at the design of the presented materials - I'm talking about resume, cover letter and portfolio. If their work is not laid out nicely and the work doesn't hold together as a system... if it doesn't hang together as related pieces... if there's not a cohesive look and feel to the whole package, that’s a big ding for me. The presentation of your work speaks to your ability to work consistently across multiple mediums. A lot of what I do in my work depends on being able to have consistency within a system. So if you can't do it on your application materials, that's not good.

Portfolioss

I look at how they organize the information in their work; how they are able to build a hierarchy of information and importance; how they’re able to bring things together within their work.

Applicationss

I look for a certain amount of tailoring to the job. You can always tell when somebody has sent out the exact same resume and cover letter to multiple employers. They will use generic language. It’s a pain in the ass, I will admit that, but tailoring your materials to the job that you’re applying for pays off. I do look for cover letters but they aren't necessary. I appreciate them, especially if they are well crafted.

Portfolioss

In a portfolio, it’s important to show what you did and describe the role you played, whether it's work that you've done in a professional or classroom setting. Being able to highlight specifically what you did is going to give me a much better idea of your actual work.

Interviewingg

It’s useful when you get into the interview to be able to demonstrate that you have read the job description and you know it inside and out. The good candidates I’ve seen have been able to address specific points in there.

Applicationss

Tailor the way you present your work and talk about your experiences to the job. Even if you don't have a lot of relevant professional experience in the field, you do have a lot of project experience from classes or internships. Draw from those projects and relate them to the job description to show that you have relevant experience. In some cases you can talk about how some experiences didn’t go well, but you learned valuable lessons from them. Take those negatives and turn them into positives. There’s a certain amount of salesmanship you need to have, truthfully.

Applicationss, Interviewingg

Here’s what I look for, and good candidates can do all of these. Can you rationally put together thoughts? When I ask you a question, I'm completely fine if you don't know the answer, but can you work with me to get the answer? If you have gaping flaws in your design I'm fine with that as long as you're willing to have the conversation with me to get an answer that we both find acceptable. Do you think about edge cases? These are important questions for me.

Applicationss

I'm looking for a strong resume, strong portfolio, and how they act in the interview. When looking at the resume, I want to see the correct experience for the position. Because I'm a step past the recruiter, even if they don't necessarily have the correct degree, I look at resumes as an example of the candidate’s ability to design. If I'm hiring for a UX design position, a resume is a good way to understand how a person is at designing a very specific kind of document. Beyond that, I'm looking at work experience, the kind of software that they know how to use, and the kinds of research tools they have used in the past.

Portfolioss

It doesn't matter much to me if someone coded their portfolio from scratch; what I care about is the relevant work of the portfolio and how they present it. Do they know how to talk about their work and show their process? Do they show an understanding of UX and visual design principles? Do they show examples of research? What kinds of technology are they working with - desktop, mobile, some other emerging technology?

Portfolioss

I don't need to see a ton of projects - it's more about the quality rather than the quantity. I want to see a good ‘about me’ page with a picture of them and a description of their personal interests outside of work. Also, if your portfolio site isn’t user-friendly, that’s a huge red flag for me. If you’re going to be paid to be a designer on a team and you can’t do good design for yourself, that’s not a good sign.

Portfolioss

A co-worker of mine recently talked to me about a UX candidate who presented a project that was entirely stylistic and visual design changes in a website redesign with no justifications or research. It was a UX nightmare.

Key Skills To Have, Portfolioss

I want a UX candidate to show me that they have technical skills and that they can collaborate well with other people. I also want to see that they’re curious and have an open mind in regards to feedback and iterating on their designs. Some designers are very protective of their work and feel that criticism isn’t valid because someone else might not be as qualified as them. Don’t be that designer.

Key Skills To Have, Interviewingg

Make sure to show that you have a solid work ethic. It’s hard to judge how hard of a worker someone is just by conversation, but it becomes easier when you give them a design exercise or assignment and can assess their skills in real-time. Make sure to be prepared for those.

Applicationss

Entry-level jobs are very competitive, so there's a lot of people applying for a few positions. When I’m going through a stack of 100 resumes, portfolios, and cover letters, I’m looking for anything I can to disqualify somebody. If I get halfway through their application and things are written poorly or there’s spelling errors, I'm going to toss it. Putting the care into the materials is worth it.

Interviewingg, Portfolioss

I evaluated this person last week and just extended them an offer. What stood out about them is they didn’t have any professional UX experience or any university education related to UX. However, they had started a website with some friends and ran a pretty successful Instagram page to go along with it. They also recently completed a UX bootcamp, so I understood the position that they were in. What I liked about them is that they had demonstrated a real interest in the space, even if their work wasn’t perfect. Creating their brand’s website and investing money in UX bootcamp told me that they were really interested in this field. When I pressed in and drilled on the design decision they made in their case studies, they had answers. That combination of being able to answer questions with design thinking methods and showing a real interest, passion, and willingness to take a risk to spend money on a bootcamp made me feel like this candidate would be a good fit.

Interviewingg

When I’m interviewing someone, I’m rooting for them. I don’t want them to fail. I have a template from my company that I fill out to evaluate them where I take a bunch of notes then use it to compare candidates. I look for their impact in their past work and their communication skills. This is probably very similar at a lot of other companies. I recently interviewed someone who got an offer. They came in extremely prepared with responses which made me check off all of the boxes and convinced me that they were a good candidate. It’s a very political kind of framing.

Interviewingg

When I started off interviewing for UX research roles, I wish I got more feedback on the interviews that didn’t turn into an offer. In the interviews, you present one or two case study presentations, and I didn’t know that the way I was talking about them wasn’t what companies wanted to hear. In the actual work, you spend the majority of the time on your process and the work itself. In the interview, it’s reversed. You want to spend the majority of the time talking about why you did the project, how you coordinated the work, how you convinced stakeholders, and then what happened after you convinced those stakeholders. Knowing how to do the work really well is one thing, but knowing how to present that work in a job interview is an entirely different skill.

Interviewingg

The quality of their work and their technical abilities are important, but their overall professionalism and promptness of responses really show you their level of preparedness coming into the interview. Whenever I help people prepare for interviews, I tell them to come in with a ton of questions and research about the company. Whenever I talk to someone who has done their research and I can tell that they didn’t just pull the first few things they read off of Indeed, I’m impressed.

Interviewingg

Following up with people makes an impact. After an interview, send a thank you note where you can further express your interest in the company and the position.

Applicationss

You have to be patient with people, especially recruiters. Also, don’t get your hopes up. I’ve gotten really optimistic and excited about positions before and then I either get rejected or ghosted.

Interviewingg

You can tell a decent story in a sentence or two. The STAR acronym (situation, task, action, result) is really helpful in writing statements regarding your projects and experiences.

Portfolioss, While In School

I look for 2 main things from an entry-level designer portfolio. The first one is internship work. I want to see that they had the opportunity to work on something real in an industry setting. Even if it’s not the sexiest work, just seeing that they functioned in a capable manner within a legitimate work context is important. The second thing I look for is school project work. Usually degree programs have some kind of thesis or capstone project, particularly in grad school programs. I want to see who they were working with, what the roles were, what process you took, what methods you used to move through the process, and how you evolved your thinking.

Portfolioss, While In School

I’ve done some work with universities as a jury on panels for student projects back when I was actively recruiting out of those programs and attending career fairs. There’s a very important thing to remember when it comes to school projects - a lot of student projects are just bullshit. They can be bullshit in 2 ways. The first is a project that is extremely formalistic, where a student shows me how they dug into the idiosyncrasies of feedback in mobile design in a really detailed and overly zealous way. I don’t care about those projects because they’re so divorced from actual use. The second type of bullshit project is a project that doesn’t solve any unmet need. I don’t want to see another social app designed for young people based around campus experiences. It’s not hard to find real problems to solve, and too often students don’t take even the barest amount of effort to do that. The best student project that I’ve ever seen came from a graduate student who redesigned the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system interface. They took the hardware as a given, as they knew they couldn’t mess with the tons of capital costs and whatever else was already sunk into that, so they looked specifically at how to make the interface better. They built a far better user experience than the one that existed. I don’t recall how much verification and validation he did with people of BART, but what they designed felt extremely doable, as it wasn’t a stretch technologically. It was simply a smart application of a design process to a problem that hundreds of thousands of people in the Bay Area have with using these machines. I love that it was rooted in practicality and embraced the limitations. It demonstrated that if you use user-centered design practices of ideation and iteration, you can always work towards a better solution. It was awesome.

Portfolioss

It's easy to pick out candidates which are a definite yes when you’re at smaller companies. It's a no brainer; you just look at one of their projects for 10 seconds and you will know that you want to interview this person. But those are going to be far and few. But when it comes to the portfolio, I think a lot of times what is missing is the “why.” A lot of students say “I went from A to B to C,” but I need to know why they went from A to B to C. If you can briefly explain why, then I’m good. I’m looking for you to have cogency in your thoughts.

Portfolioss

I looked at sample portfolios when I was building mine. I wanted someone to come to the page and feel like everything made sense. If you're in UX, you should know how to present your work in a way that feels and looks clean. Ask yourself, does it convey what I want it to? Does it show some of my character? When companies are hiring for UX roles, they look for a personality from candidates. They want to see that you're able to contribute and communicate ideas. If you can showcase that in your portfolio, you're in a pretty good spot.

Portfolioss

It's good to have a wide breadth of projects, especially when you're just starting out. No one is going to expect you to have a specialization in the field yet, so it's good to have projects that focus on different aspects of design like UX research, visual design, prototyping, and others.

Portfolioss

If your portfolio isn't easily accessible, a recruiter isn't going to waste their time with it.

Interviewingg, Portfolioss

It’s hard to evaluate someone from a portfolio alone. The only real way to tell whether or not somebody will succeed is what happens when you drill them about their work. I know that sounds tough, but like that's how I learned that I need to brush up on my understanding of things. I’ve been in interviews where people asked me so many questions that I started to run out of answers and then realized I hadn’t thought through some things.

Portfolioss

I want to see a nicely built portfolio. I need to look at the process. Sure, visuals are nice and having 10 projects is fine, but nothing matters as much as having 2 or 3 really solid projects where you can walk me through from start to finish, start being the context of the problem space and an understanding of your users, and the finish being high-fidelity mockups, interactions, and visuals. Show me every step and explain it to me so that in the five minutes it takes me to gloss over this project, I can understand everything you did and why you did it. Explain it to me in a concise and narrative-driven way. The obvious portfolio red flag is having visuals without wireframes and then just jumping to the end of project and high-fidelity mockups without discussing any research or design decisions.

Portfolioss

At the beginning of a case study, I want to see that the designer has thought about the users in the problem space and has not just designed what they were told to design by their manager or professor. I want to see that the designer looked for the true needs of the user.

Applicationss, Interviewingg

Part of it is how you showcase your story and your narrative of who you are and your experiences. If you're not confident about your experience level, they're not going to be confident about you as a candidate. I always talk about the impact that I had in my roles, for example, I worked on a platform that had 60,000 users per month. I made sure to showcase that the product had a high volume of users and how I made an impact on that. It's also important to be upfront about your role on the team. I've talked to recruiters and hiring managers who strongly dislike when they can't tell what your direct contribution was. Specify the number of people on the team and what your role was; it makes you look fake if you don't do that. We can be really hard on ourselves, but if you're honest and confident in your experiences, you're going to be in a better position than someone who isn't confident.

Applicationss, General Advice

Having research under my belt has helped me because a lot of people are strictly UX/product designers and not researchers. Since I've done a lot of both design and research, it helps me stand out and show that I'm well versed in different aspects of UX. It's a tricky situation if you are interested in both design and research roles, because you don't want to present yourself as if you don't have a goal or a focus. I've demonstrated that I wanted to do more research in the past by explaining how my current role was more design heavy, but I was well-versed in research and I wanted to do more of it in the future.

General Advice

This was hard for me. I think partly why I ended up in a consulting role out of school was because consultancies will often take fresh grads. It depends on the consultancy, but the amount of travel can be brutal sometimes. There’s a lot of benefits to working at a consultancy - you get a variety of work in different industries and you get a lot of exposure to related fields that will help you later on in your career. I got product development exposure and I learned how to have more of a business mindset which I may not have had otherwise. I also think that companies are realizing that people want the pros of consulting without all of the traveling, so now you have consulting companies that focus on more local projects and don't have you travel more than half an hour outside of the home base. My consulting experience helped me get other jobs later in my career. That’s one route you can go after you get out of school.

General Advice

In contractor roles, it's often assumed that you're not going to be as independent or as senior as someone who is at the company full-time, which can be nice when you're out of school. Also, some companies have direct lines to full-time roles from the contractor position. Even if there isn't that direct line and you have to apply for a position, you can say that you've done work at the company, you know what goes into the work, and you can talk about the projects that you've done there.

Portfolioss

You can work on little projects too and include them in your portfolio. There's so many startups that need a little help, and it’s often such low hanging fruit. I’ve done calls with friends of friends who have had a startup and needed research help. They were paying thousands of dollars for some usability software, and what I told them to do is to just go to Starbucks and buy people coffee and watch them use your product for 10 minutes. If I needed work at the time, that would have been a great opportunity for me to offer to help them with their research. You can do that and then use it in your portfolio; say that you made some discoveries that helped the founders pivot. Getting any kind of work with nonprofits, startups, or other types of organizations, even if it has to be pro bono in some cases, can be great for the both of you.

Applicationss

I reviewed an applicant for a UX design internship position who was a psychology major. However, on their resume they had listed multiple experiences where they did some kind of product design or product management work. They were able to explain things that were relevant to design, which told me that they might be trying to start their career in a product design or somewhat related field, although their degree isn’t explicitly in design. But I was just one person reviewing applications, we weren’t a big company with an HR team. Are recruiters going to be able to pick up on those types of nuances? I don’t know. I'm sure that a senior designer or someone with a UX professional history would be able to pick up on those nuances and understand how those experiences are relevant. But of course, if the application doesn’t get past the first line of review, those people will get filtered out at these big companies.

Applicationss, Portfolioss

It’s all about the portfolio. I want to see documented processes. I need to understand when I stuate you within a design context that you have the basic understanding of how things work. I’m not necessarily looking for extracurriculars. I usually don’t care if you were the president of a club or if you wrote a brilliant cover letter. I don’t have time for that. However, if I saw that you have experience organizing an event, that’s interesting to me because it shows that you have the ability to put on a show and coordinate all kinds of different efforts to put on an event. It makes you a more intriguing candidate and I’m more likely to want to have a conversation with you about that.

Applicationss

I am relatively interested in hiring less traditional candidates. The more diversity in background and experience is a positive. For example, we recently hired someone who has a lot of strong professional and academic background in museum management and exhibit design. They went to a UX bootcamp after deciding that UX is something that they want to do in their career. That type of candidate was able to present similar challenges when laying out museum exhibits in understanding customer needs and delivering experiences. The palette on which they created experiences was different, but the principles are similar. This goes for student projects too, it’s all about how you can create those stories based on the project.

Applicationss

I fully acknowledge this is my bias but, when I see a degree, it usually doesn’t matter much to me. I look more at the work presented than at what school someone went to, what their GPA was, what their class rank was… I don't care about that; it doesn't tell me anything about their work.

Applicationss

This is a very ethereal thing to try to describe, but there's an aura around somebody who wants to come in and is eager and open to learn. That is what I look for in a person. I’ve interviewed people who came in acting like they’re hot shots and gave me the idea that they think they’re the best and they know everything. That completely rubbed me the wrong way. Going in with a sense of humility and openness to learn... having a little bit of that wanting to prove themselves attitude - those are the entry-level candidates that do well.

General Advice

A lot of companies use design challenges. They make sense for this very reason. Realistically speaking, the projects you get even when you are experienced are outside your control. You could have had 3 or 4 jobs but there's no guarantee you're going to get an amazing project to work on. So if a company presents you a design challenge, it’s a pain and you have to spend more time working on it, but it’s helpful. Be prepared for them.

Applicationss, Portfolioss, General Advice

Your portfolio is one of the things that can be obviated by reframing the conversation in terms of your story of development and potential. This requires so much discomfort, but refuse to send someone a link to your portfolio, as they cannot make sense of any of it in a way that is going to do justice to your work. The students who have done a lot of internships and have that industry experience - those are the students whose online portfolios really shine, and they will have success using that method. There are other people in the competitive environment who are paying a graphic designer, content designer, or writer to try to win the game of somebody who has never talked to you, looking at a screen and trying to make the decision of who they are going to call and who they are not even going to contact.

Applicationss, Portfolioss, General Advice

This relates back to the idea of refraining from applying to jobs, if that's a step in the process. Then you either have to play this portfolio game or try to reframe the conversation. My advice for reframing it is in the application process where you’re asked for a URL or PDF of your portfolio, provide either a link to a page or it's a PDF that says something like, “I would enjoy taking you through some examples of my work and I can do it on your time.” This isn't establishing dominance, but it might look like it if you do it wrong. There's a way to do this that is joyful and is respectful of your own story, knowing that the typical impoverished view of allowing a self-serve click-through of your portfolio isn't going to do your work justice, so don't set yourself up for that. Have conversation to provoke real-time engagement to sidestep the automation and thoughtlessness, at least in the cursory perfunctory steps. I don't want any of you to get chewed up by those machines at enterprises.

Applicationss, Portfolioss, General Advice

For those who are still in their degree program - your professors, the guest lecturers who visit your courses, your mentors... developing relationships with these people may be how the gates open up for you. But for many students, there is a way to cruise through your schoolwork in a way where your touchpoints with faculty and guests who are brought in are perfunctory. Not everybody is equipped for this yet, but if you can pierce the fourth wall and form a relationship with a teacher or a guest lecturer, do it. If a guest is visiting your class to talk, make sure that you ask a question while they're there because you know a lot of your fellow classmates aren't going to do it. Surface in a way where you ask a question, then ask for follow-up by reaching out to your teacher and asking to be put in contact with that person. Lean into the humanity of your situation. The professors at your school and the people that they bring in to talk are extraordinarily well-connected; they are leaders in their fields. It's their obligation, and it should be a joyous one, to make those connections to ensure you will not have you rely on LinkedIn to make connections or apply to job postings that have a machine look at your resume and portfolio. If you're paying top dollar for a terrific university education, it’s only fair. Stay in touch with your professors after you graduate. Build good relationships with the ones that you connect with naturally. Go out of your way to make sure that they know who you are.

Applicationss, Portfolioss, General Advice

Emphasize your humanity in telling your story, not just listing skills, nouns, and adjectives. Maximize the human connections that you have in order to, at a minimum, build context. If you're not equipped or bold enough to reframe the conversation, there's still a way to apply the contextual awareness that people in your milieu can lend. Somebody that you know knows somebody, I guarantee it. I know that this is hard. It’s uncomfortable to ask somebody for help who initially doesn’t seem like they have any reason to help you. But they do have a reason to help you, because they were once like you and they can empathize and extrapolate from your experience. Take every opportunity you can to know more about somebody, to know about yourself, and to know more about the person who's interviewing you. Ask the questions about how your development as a young professional will be supported. Don’t make the conversation so much about how hard you work or your credentials, make it about how much you want something. Talking about needs is an impoverished level of discourse compared to talking about desire. For instance, if I was a young professional who wants to work at a specific company, I would try to find someone I know who works at this company or someone who could get me in touch with someone at this company in order to have a conversation with them about how I don’t know shit, but I have a desire to learn in a resource-rich environment with people who want to do good work.

Portfolioss

It’s all about the applicant's process. UX is basically creative problem-solving. It’s important that a person shows that they really understand the process and know how to approach a problem.

General Advice

It's not necessarily a bad thing if a candidate doesn’t know how to use a piece of software because there are tons of ways to learn on YouTube and ways to train yourself. I've learned so many things on the job, probably more than I should. So if I learned so many things that means somebody else is capable of doing it too.

General Advice

For a candidate with no real UX experience, it's hard to get your first job. In the case of a designer that we just hired who had no prior experience, they were a self-starter and created a company with their friends. They built the company website and are learning about the field. It was clear that they were a junior designer, but at the same time, she’s doing everything that you can do if you want to break into the UX field, which is starting real projects on your own, building full case studies, and learning how to talk about UX.

General Advice, Interviewingg

I was able to pull a lot from my internship projects that I did while I was in school. Those experiences and variety of projects allowed me to improve and showcase my leadership, communication, and collaboration skills. The internships were really important for me. In the interviews, I emphasized how I didn’t have experience in certain areas, but I was extremely curious and eager to learn those things. I’ve gotten feedback from people that have interviewed me commenting on how curious and enthusiastic I am, which is a positive.

Balancing Academics

When I chose to get a graduate degree, I knew that I was trying to get a job out of it. I started getting ready with all of the files that I needed before classes got really intense - my portfolio, resume, cover letters, email templates, and more. I also tried to figure out what type of story I wanted to craft for myself before classes started. I started reaching out to people to talk about companies and positions in my first month of school. Even with this, it's really tricky to balance everything. If you're a student, you will hopefully have a support system from your university in the form of a career development office or something similar. Check in with them to make sure you're on a good pace to get a job. Also, self-care is really important during your job search because you could be the perfect application on paper but still not get the role.

Balancing Academics

I started looking for jobs when classes went remote and everyone was getting used to online learning. I would lay in my bed with my camera off and pretend to be in class while I was scrolling on LinkedIn and applying for everything that I saw. That method was not working. I should have taken more time and really looked at the companies to see if I was even interested in them before applying. I got an interview at a company that I had absolutely no interest in, and that's when I said 'I can’t just apply to every job I see because that's not how I'm going to get a job that I love doing.’ I eventually found a company that I really liked and had positive experiences interacting with their recruiters in the past.

Balancing Academics

Throughout my grad school experience, I learned a lot about how to go about a job search in this field and how to find the kind of career that I want. However, what I didn't feel was sufficiently covered in there was how the hell you balance your job search alongside your actual academic work. This is a grievance that I've heard from a lot of different people. Grad school, by default, is incredibly busy academically. Almost everyone who is in grad school is there because they think it will help them get into the career that they want. You would think that the professors would understand this and make deadline extensions for students who have interviews, but not all do. This is going to cause you to miss some of your classes or be late on some of your assignments. You could get the degree and then spend a year doing a job search, but that’s not realistic; you have to do both at the same time. How do you figure out what to do when? If you just focus on school, you'll never have time to do your job search. If you just do the job search, then you waste your opportunity to get a good education. You can graduate with a degree, but if you haven't actually learned much or done any good design work, what’s the point?