5 Things Hired UX People Do That Work In Today’s UX Job Market

Intro: [00:00:00] Hey, I’m Sarah Doody, a user researcher and product designer with 20 years of experience. In 2017, I noticed something a little ironic. UX and product people, despite being great at designing experiences for other people, often struggle to design their own careers. That’s why I created Career Strategy Lab and this podcast to help you navigate your UX job search, grow in your current role, and avoid skill and salary plateaus all in a chill and BS free way.

So whether you’re. Stuck in your job search or wondering what’s next in your UX career. You are in the right place.

The UX candidate who gets the most interviews is not the one who applies to the most roles. Optimizing your UX job search for the number of jobs applied to is the wrong thing to focus on. All the time you spend applying to more jobs is actually distracting you from the root. Problem, which is you’re not positioning your [00:01:00] skills and experience correctly in your resume portfolio, LinkedIn screener calls, et cetera.

So if you’ve applied to 5100, 200 or more jobs and not had a single UX job interview, do not apply to another job until you learn and implement five things that I’m seeing working for people who are getting hired in UX right now. In the past 12 months, I’ve helped UX and product people get hired at companies, including Bank of America Whole Foods.

JetBlue, Liberty Mutual, fidelity and more, and all these people had five figure salary increases. And in case we haven’t met yet, I am Sarah Doody and I’m using my 22 years. Of experience in UX research and product design to help you UX your career and your job search so you can get hired or promoted with a five figure salary increase also.

So let’s take a look [00:02:00] at these five things that I’m seeing people who get hired doing in their job search right now.

Alright. Number one is that people who are getting hired in today’s UX job market are leveraging LinkedIn, so jobs come to them. This is not a dream. People are being found on LinkedIn getting interviews and getting hired because recruiters, VPs of product. Other people hiring managers are finding them on LinkedIn.

How do I know this? Because I have two people recently who got hired just because of this. Laura got hired because the VP of product found her. On LinkedIn and Tin ended up getting hired for a role in STEM because she was found on LinkedIn by a recruiter. So how did Tin and Laura get found on LinkedIn?[00:03:00]

Essentially, they treated their LinkedIn profile like a webpage they needed to SEO optimize, right? In the same way that if you want a page on your website to show up in Google search results. The same strategies apply to your LinkedIn profile. You need to optimize the content, both in terms of quantity and quality of content on your LinkedIn profile so that it increases the chances that the algorithm surfaces you in search results when a recruiter or hiring manager is searching for someone like you.

So if you go to your LinkedIn profile right now. And your about section is just a couple of sentences. You’ve not filled in the work history. You don’t take the bullet points from your resume and put them in your work history. If the headline, which is the text below your name, is just your current job title and company name, that is not optimized.

[00:04:00] So if you want to increase the chances that you’re gonna show up in search results on LinkedIn, when UX recruiters and hiring managers are searching for someone like you. You need to leverage LinkedIn and apply SEO to your LinkedIn profile.

Alright. Number two is that people who are getting interviews and offers are not undervaluing their skills and experience. By this I mean that sometimes candidates.

Sell themselves short because they’re only scratching the surface of what they did. This could be because sometimes when things come really naturally to you, you consider it almost second nature, right? And you don’t realize how awesome that specific skill that you have really is, and so you don’t even highlight it that much.

Or maybe, uh, you don’t even mention it on your resume portfolio, et cetera. On the flip side, sometimes you [00:05:00] might think that you’re great at something, but that last boss you had, former colleagues, et cetera, started to make you believe that you were not good at those things, right? And as a result, that lack of confidence in skills that you used to think you were great at, but your toxic boss and colleagues have now made you believe you’re not good at.

You’re now letting that come through on your resume portfolio, et cetera. I wanna take a moment though to read a quote from my community where someone did a great job at summarizing this idea of not undervaluing your skills and experience. So I’m gonna pull it up right now so I can read it to you.

I’m gonna leave their name off for privacy reasons, but they said I received an offer for a lead experience designer role on the digital team I’ve been wanting to join. I initially applied for a senior position at the company without any [00:06:00] referrals and didn’t know anyone on the team.

The interviews went very well, but I didn’t land the role. A week later, the hiring manager’s boss actually emailed me and referred me to her peer team for. Open lead position that I should be considered for. I interviewed with the team and it went very well. Two days ago, I got the offer. Remember guys, and then she put in capital.

Do not sell yourself short. I saw the lead role but didn’t apply because I didn’t think I was qualified enough to be a lead in a large design organization with so much expertise. I have been the sole designer at a large financial firm for a very long time. I forgot that I’ve been handling. All levels of work without any design support.

Therefore, I had to grow up on my own. I am excited to join a mature team where I can learn from talented designers and benefit from dedicated disciplines, such as accessibility, content, [00:07:00] and research. So I couldn’t have said this any better myself. Do not sell yourself short, right? If you read a job description and you think, I am totally not qualified for that.

Chances are you probably are, but you are undervaluing your skills and experience.

Alright. Number three is that you think you’re unhirable. Because you’ve had people tell you that your resume portfolio, et cetera is awesome, and you kind of default to this thinking of, well, if these people are telling me my resume portfolio, et cetera is awesome, then it’s not me. I’m not the problem.

The problem must be the job market because these people I’m asking for feedback from are telling me I’m amazing. Here’s the problem with this. Chances are those people that you’re asking for feedback about [00:08:00] your resume, portfolio, et cetera, they are giving you their opinions. They are not in the arena, meaning they are not actively involved in UX hiring, right?

If you’re not hiring, how do you know what recruiters and hiring managers really want? You don’t. Right? I know what recruiters and hiring managers want because every single week people in my UX job search program are applying. Going to interviews, et cetera. And so I have that feedback loop to tell me, did that resume work, did that portfolio work, et cetera.

And they come back and they tell me, right? Sometimes they provide feedback such as, and I’ll never forget this. One woman said in the interview, the people that were interviewing her were taking notes so they could improve their own portfolios. So I want you to ditch this [00:09:00] mindset that you are unhirable and that the problem is the job market because chances are if someone has told you that your resume portfolio LinkedIn is awesome.

It probably isn’t as good as it could be because that person that you asked for feedback from was probably not involved in hiring literally like just two weeks ago. This guy emailed us and he said, my wife says my portfolio is great, but I’m not getting interviews. And I thought to myself, is your wife a UX hiring manager?

Is your wife a recruiter? I’m pretty sure she wasn’t. So then. Why the heck are you asking your wife for feedback if she is not in the arena, if she is not actually in the trenches of hiring, right? So I want you to ditch that belief that you’re unhirable, especially if you are [00:10:00] attributing the fact that you’re not getting interviews or job offers to the job market, because chances are that person that told you your resume, portfolio, et cetera, is great.

doesn’t know what they’re talking about. And here’s the other thing. Oftentimes when I’m on calls with people, or Becca from my team is on calls with, with people and they say, yeah, like my two mentors or whoever told me everything’s good in terms of my resume portfolio, et cetera. And then we, for example, pull up their LinkedIn.

Literally in five seconds we can spot like at least three things that are giant red flags on their LinkedIn, not just their LinkedIn. When we pull up their resume. Same thing when we pull up their portfolio. Same thing.

. Alright, number four, let’s shift gears and talk about portfolios. What are people who are getting interviews and offers doing right now when it comes to their portfolio? Here’s what they’re not doing. They’re not making a [00:11:00] portfolio website.

This is your permission slip to not make a portfolio website. There is no rule, there is no law, there is no mandate. Your portfolio has to be a website. All of the people that I told you about who were found on LinkedIn and got hired, Laura Tin, they did not have a portfolio website. Everyone in my Career Strategy Lab program, they make a portfolio presentation, not a website. I have another episode which I’ll link you to all about the pros and cons of making a presentation versus a portfolio website, but I wanna just emphasize this point because. I try to think of myself as the product manager of your job search.

I wanna save you time and money, and if you go down the path of making a website, I guarantee you you’re gonna waste a lot of time, money, energy. What does that mean? [00:12:00] You are going to burn out. Your confidence is going to tank. You are going to lose energy, and then you’re gonna hit pause on your job search because you’re so burnt out from trying to make a portfolio website.

And I get it. There’s so many people that tell you that making a UX portfolio website is so easy, just get this software, use this, uh, like AI tool and it’s just going to make itself or something, right? Not true. And. I will say, I cannot tell you the number of times that people send me an email or a LinkedIn message and say something to the effect of, I’m gonna paraphrase, but essentially, thank you for telling me my portfolio could be a presentation.

I have been trying for months, sometimes years, to finish my portfolio website. No recruiter or hiring manager has told me that they will only consider candidates. With a portfolio website and [00:13:00] if I ever came across one that did, I would likely be able to change their mind, but I wouldn’t even wanna work with them to, in the first place.

Like if you cannot understand that a candidate does not need to make a portfolio website to demonstrate their skills, then I just think something is off there. So make a portfolio presentation versus a website. This is also important. Like I said, with that time factor and me trying to think of myself as the product manager of your job search, if you can finish your portfolio faster and not burn out doing it, what does that do?

It frees up time and energy to put that time and energy into other things in your job search, like tailoring your portfolio for every job you apply to. Tailoring your resume for every job you apply to reaching out to people, the hiring [00:14:00] managers, recruiters, people who work at companies where you want to work, right?

The job search becomes a lot less stressful when you are not already burnt out from trying to wrangle some portfolio website maker tool.

All right. Number five. I like to think I’ve saved the best for last, but people who are getting interviews and job offers right now, what are they doing? They are getting crystal clear about who they are, what they want, what they don’t want in the short and sometimes long term of their career so that they don’t waste time applying to jobs that are not a fit.

And so that they can use this clarity about their short and long-term career goals and criteria around what they want in their next job. When you identify these things. They all really serve as a [00:15:00] compass or a filter, so that then when you start to work on your resume, for example, it’s a lot easier to do your resume when you have this compass or this filter, and you could look at the decisions of, well, what should I talk about from my last job?

With the clarity of knowing what you want in the short and long term. You can easily look at your past job and be like, that project makes a lot of sense to talk about. That one doesn’t. This one does, and those are two other ones. Definitely don’t make sense to talk about. Same thing with your portfolio, right?

You could have a lot of projects that you could include in your portfolio and you probably wasted a lot of time agonizing over which projects to include in your portfolio. Guess what? Those decisions become a lot faster and easier when you can look at this compass or filter to then decide, does this project match what I wanna highlight [00:16:00] in terms of my skills, experience, and what I want in the future?

Yes or no. It becomes as simple as that. I will say that the first thing that we have people do inside my ux, job searching program, career strategy lab, is it’s called a design your career sprint. And similar to how products have roadmaps, I want you to have a roadmap for your career, a career roadmap, right, because.

Think about products that maybe you’ve worked on or you’ve heard about that no longer exist anymore, that ran into financial problems, maybe that had trouble acquiring users. Many of those companies. Did not have a clear product roadmap because if they had a product roadmap that was informed by research, they probably would’ve made better product decisions that would have led to users, for example.

So getting clear [00:17:00] on who you are, what you want in a short and sometimes long term, is so important. Sometimes I’m an analogy person. Another analogy, if if maybe you. This is gonna fit with you. Another, a analogy is like, think about writing an essay. It’s very hard to write an essay without a thesis, right?

Because you might pass time, right? You might spend hours writing the essay and you might feel productive. But if you didn’t have a clear thesis in the beginning, you’re gonna go back and read that essay and realize it’s all over the place, doesn’t make sense. Thoughts are incomplete, they’re meandering, et cetera.

Right? But with a strong thesis, it makes writing the essay and linking all those paragraphs together much, much easier because the thesis is there to serve as a compass, as a filter, right. Okay, so I wanna recap [00:18:00] the five things that are working for ux, people who are getting interviews and job offers right now.

Number one, they’re leveraging LinkedIn, so jobs come to them. Number two, they are not undervaluing their skills and experience number three. They are ditching this belief that they are unhirable and that the problem is the job market, and they are being very selective about who they take advice from because unless someone is working in hiring is in the trenches.

Their advice is just an opinion, right? Number four is they are making a UX portfolio presentation, not a website because it’s saving them time, energy, money, stress, et cetera, which frees up. Time and energy. Two, go work on other things, high value activities in their job search, such [00:19:00] as relationship building, for example.

Alright, and number five, they are getting crystal clear about what they want, what they don’t want in the short, in the long term, so that it can act as a compass or a filter, which then makes. Everything easier, writing your resume, writing your portfolio, deciding which jobs to apply to, et cetera.

Everything ease, easier when you have a compass.

All right. That is all for today. If you are stuck in your UX job search or. You wanna get your resume portfolio, LinkedIn, et cetera, ready to go in advance so they’re ready in case you need them. Then I wanna let you know a couple of things. Number one, I run a UX job search coaching program called Career Strategy Lab.

We have about five to eight spots open up every single month. They always sell out. So if you are interested in joining us. Go to career strategy [00:20:00] lab.com/apply, and that will direct you into the details of how to get on the wait list, et cetera. Number two is I teach a live workshop normally every month.

Sometimes it’s every six weeks or so, and it’s jam packed with. Practical, no BS tips that you can apply immediately to your job search, to your resume, to your portfolio, et cetera. It kind of changes the topic every time I teach it, but if you wanna join me for one of my live workshops. Number one, follow me on social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, and um, you can also visit careerstrategylab.com/events, plural, E-V-E-N-T-S, and that will take you to the page where you can find out when the next workshop is.

Alright, last thing I’m gonna mention. If you found this episode helpful, can you please do me a favor? [00:21:00] I am trying to get to a hundred star ratings and 50 reviews on my podcast. So before you go on to whatever you’re gonna listen to next. Do me a literally 22nd favor. Go give me a star rating. And if you’re on Apple Podcasts, I would really appreciate it if you write a little review, maybe even just a takeaway that you had from today’s episode.

Alright, that is all. I’ll talk to you later. See ya.

Outro: Thanks so much for listening to the Career Strategy Podcast. Now make sure to follow so you don’t miss an episode, and you can check out all of our episodes at careerstrategylab.com/podcasts now to learn more about how to apply UX and product strategy to advancing your career. Whether that means leveling up in your current role, getting a new role, getting freelance work, or just being ready for the unexpected, [00:22:00] then I invite you to watch my free UX job search workshop@careerstrategylab.com/hired.

And please feel free to send me a DM on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you.

Post Roll: Hey there. Before I go, I wanna speak to you specifically if you’ve applied to 50, 100, 200 or more jobs and you haven’t secured an offer or interviews yet. First of all, I want you to know it’s not your fault. It is challenging out there and learning how to navigate the job, search, interviews, negotiation, et cetera.

It is not something that we are taught. Your boss is too busy to help you. Your friends just give you vague advice. Your family doesn’t really know how hiring in UX works. This is why I created my career strategy lab, UX job search accelerator. If you are tired of your DIY [00:23:00] approach. Not leading to the results you want, then I challenge you to consider.

Maybe it is time for a pivot, just like products pivot. Maybe your job search needs a pivot too. So head over to careerstrategylab.com/apply to learn more or have a call with someone on my team or myself so we can answer all of your questions. Hope to talk to you soon.