5 practical time-saving tips for your UX job search

Sarah Doody (00:00.014)

Today I have five really practical ways to save time in your job search and you can start using some of these tips literally today. Some of these tips are things that I see working for people in my career coaching program for UX and product professionals. Some of them I use in my own job to help me be more productive and work a little faster and they 100 % translate to a job search also.

Let’s dive in. Hey there, I’m Sarah Doody, host of the Career Strategy Podcast. right, tip number one is to develop plug and play scripts and templates for common job search scenarios. So what would this look like? Instead of starting from scratch, every time you send a thank you email or message a recruiter or a hiring manager or ask someone for a referral.

instead of starting from scratch every single time, create a document, a Google document, whatever you want, and put kind of a baseline version of each of those messages in that document. This is gonna save you tons of time. It’s gonna help you stop overthinking, and it’s gonna give you a way to maintain this little library essentially of plug and play scripts and templates.

that you know work because maybe the first few messages you send asking someone for a referral don’t lead to a referral. But then you kind of tweak the message and all of a sudden people start replying. Great, now you have a place where you have that version that you know seems to be working. So examples of plug and play scripts or in templates that maybe would be in this document.

You could have messages around after interview, sending a post interview thank you note, messages to recruiters or hiring managers, probably before you apply and or after you apply, depending on if you wanna message them at various points in your job search process. It could be rejection replies. It could be…

Sarah Doody (02:20.843)

emails that you’re sending as a part of your negotiation for salary or compensation. It could be emails you’re sending to get a referral from someone who works at the company. So many other scenarios. So invest the time to just create this little document because it’s going to save you time in the long run and it’s going to help you stop second guessing every single thing. You know what else I would add to this list though?

I would also include the email subject line for each of these messages. So many times people in my career coaching program have asked a question related to subject line. And on one hand, I get it. Like it’s a very high stakes couple of words, because people are going to pay attention to or not pay attention to your email often based on the subject line. Yet at the end of the day,

I think the time that you spend waffling on which subject line to use, you should have just gone with one and hit send and moved on to the next job you’re applying to. So number one, develop these plug and play scripts and templates for common job search scenarios. Now, number two is only going to be possible if you do number one, because here’s the thing. Number two,

is to use a tool that does text replacement to automate messages. There’s many different tools you could use. I use one called Text Expander. Essentially, text replacement tools work like this. They allow you to type in a couple of characters, like cover LTR, for example, and then it spits out the whole cover letter. So it’s like you’re putting in little snippets of text.

which then generate or display the whole version of, in that case, the cover letter, right? So these are gonna save you time because let’s say you’re doing a cover letter, instead of needing to go to Google Docs, find the document, cut and paste, go back to the email where you’re putting the cover letter, you could have just gone to your email, typed in,

Sarah Doody (04:46.762)

C-O-V-E-R-L-T-R, and then in two seconds, there’s your cover letter. So text replacement, it is so powerful. And the tool that I use called TextExpander, they actually send me a report every month and tell me how many hours I saved, and it’s so motivating for me. So I just love saving time. And TextExpander is the tool I use. Apple has a text replacement tool. There’s so many others.

That is another way to save a lot of time in your job search. Number three is to use some type of focus timer, like a Pomodoro timer. If you’re not familiar with the Pomodoro timer, essentially it’s the idea of getting very strict about doing a block of work for 20, 25 minutes, and then take a five minute break and do another 25 minute work break.

This is powerful because it helps you avoid distraction. It helps you benefit from the momentum that you get for making progress in those 25 minutes. And it also creates a little bit of accountability. So there’s many different timers. You could just use the timer on your phone or on a computer, but there are actual Pomodoro timer that you can get.

in the app store or on the Google Play store. You can actually buy like physical timers from Amazon. I don’t have one of those. I use a timer called Flow. I will link to that in the show notes. But I really encourage you to use it because it is amazing how much you can get done when kind of the pressure’s on in a 25 minute work block because I don’t know about you.

But if I give myself eight hours to do something, it’ll probably take the whole eight hours. But if I give myself 25 minutes or 45 minutes, I can oftentimes get that thing done a lot faster, right? So try out the Pomodoro technique, get yourself a Pomodoro timer and see how much more productive you can be with this accountability that comes from

Sarah Doody (07:07.619)

this idea of essentially time boxing. All right, tip number four is to commit to following up three times. This one is really tactical, but the reason I wanted to include it is because I think a lot of people waste and lose time in their job search to worrying, to overthinking and to wondering, meaning you send an email to someone and they don’t get back to you. You were talking to a recruiter,

You are ghosted and then you spend all this time worrying, agonizing, wondering what happened? Do they hate me? Am I not good enough? All this stuff. You could put an end to all that worrying and wondering and catastrophizing if you just followed up. Because here’s the thing. Look at your own inbox. You might be behind in messages, right? People don’t reply.

Not because they’re trying to be a jerk. It’s because they’re busy. Something popped up. Their kid got sick. They’re on vacation. They forgot to put an autoresponder on. Your message got down to the bottom and they just haven’t caught up yet. So, I would say commit to following up with someone three times. Now, there’s no perfect rule in my opinion for how often to follow up. Should it be one day, three days, one week? Just, I don’t know.

Let’s not overthink it. But what I do know for sure is that if you don’t follow up, you’re gonna be stuck in this trap of wondering. This isn’t about being annoying. This is about following up with a bit of polite persistence. And most of the time, people are gonna say, wow, thank you so much for reminding me. I just didn’t get to it yet. They’re probably not going to respond in a negative way. If you want a little schedule to follow it up,

Maybe it goes something like this. Maybe you follow up five days after the initial email or message is sent, then wait maybe another five days, then wait maybe another 10 days. The goal is that you are just trying to keep yourself in that thread top of mind. Another thing I like to do at the end of emails is to just add a line to kind of take the pressure off of that person, but also try and…

Sarah Doody (09:33.493)

open up communication between you two, the line would go something like this, no pressure to reply right now, but can you do me a favor and just let me know when you think you might be able to get back to me? That way it puts the ball in their court and it hopefully gets them to reply. So there is an expectation there and you can stop worrying. All right? So that is number four, commit to following up three times.

All right, the last tip, tip number five is to schedule a weekly job search CEO hour. So the purpose of this is to help you kind of audit and assess what worked in your job search this week or do it every other week, whatever you want. But the goal is that you’re zooming out a little bit to gather data, to evaluate what’s working, what’s not working, et cetera.

So you do not fall into the trap of just applying to jobs and applying to jobs and crossing your fingers and playing the numbers game and hoping that eventually it all works out. Because when you do that, it’s called the spray and pray technique. When you do that, that is how you get into the trap of all of a sudden realizing you’ve applied to 400 jobs and you haven’t gotten interview. And that is not what I want for you. So by doing this job search CEO hour,

every week, every other week, you’re gonna be able to check in with yourself and course correct sooner. So a couple of questions I would ask myself would be, what actually worked this week? For example, did you tweak the email you send to ask people for a referral and people actually said yes instead of no? That would be something that would go under that what worked this week, right? Maybe you had a job interview.

And a couple of days before the interview, you practiced by recording yourself on a tool like loom, L-O-O-M dot com, to just hear yourself answering questions because doing that can sometimes make you aware of things that you do when you’re speaking verbally. And just raising that awareness will help you correct things that you do in a real life setting. I know.

Sarah Doody (11:57.973)

As doing podcasts and YouTube for so long, I say and do certain things that annoy the heck out of me and I hope that I don’t do them as much anymore because I’ve heard myself talk so many times after creating so much content, right? But you won’t know unless you do things like that. Okay, the second question maybe you would ask yourself is what was a time suck? Like what felt like it took a lot longer than it should have?

Did you in hindsight spend three hours tweaking your resume for one job that you applied to? If so, how can we not do that again, right? Did you overthink the email that you sent after the interview? Well, that might be why you wanna go back to number one and make that plug and play template document of common.

emails and messages that you’re going to send in your job search. Another question you could ask would be, what is the one thing I need to focus on next week? There’s a lot of tasks in your job search, right? But if we can really think about what is just the one thing I need to focus on, it makes it all easier. Is there one job you want to apply to? Is there one change you want to make to your resume?

Do you want to go and do the second thing from this podcast? Set up a text replacement tool, right? So that is important because the overwhelm of all the stuff we could do in our job search, it’s a lot. And if we just choose the one thing, then at the end of that next week, assuming we’ve done the one thing, we can feel like we’ve had a win, right? Another one I would ask would be what…

is my ratio of jobs applied to versus interviews secured. And this is something you should be tracking all the time in my opinion, but this gives you data to help tell you whether or not the first impression that people are having about you through the combination of your resume, your LinkedIn, possibly a portfolio if you have one, whether or not that first impression is working or not.

Sarah Doody (14:21.229)

Because if you apply to 25, even 50 jobs, and you’re not getting interviews, that is a yellow flag that something is not working. And that should be the point that you hit pause on applying and zoom out and look at your resume, your LinkedIn, your portfolio, et cetera, to figure out, am I telling a consistent story about myself across all these or, wait.

My LinkedIn’s kind of says one thing and my portfolio says another, my resume kind of sounds like something different. Cause if that’s your scenario, we need to correct that for sure. But those are some of the four questions that I would ask if I was doing my own job search CEO hour. And the other thing I would say is what is one win from the week? It could be big, it could be small.

It doesn’t have to be like I signed the job offer, but maybe you Did an interview and you felt really confident after versus Feeling like this sinking feeling that you didn’t do a good job, right? That would be a win Maybe typically you feel like you bomb interviews and for whatever reason this time you felt like you nailed it That is definitely a win. The reason this is important is because when we document our wins

it’s kind of building up that confidence muscle, right? Similar to resilience, if you listen to my episode about career maximalism. But documenting our wins is so important because when we don’t, it’s so easy to focus on the negative, right? So those are my five tips for saving time in your job search. I just wanna go through them really quickly one more time. Number one is to develop this plug and play script

of templates and messages, emails, four common job search scenarios. Number two is to use a text replacement tool to kind of like automate messages. Number three is to use some type of timer, the Pomodoro technique to help you focus and not waste time. Number four is to follow up three times so you don’t end up wasting time stuck in worry.

Sarah Doody (16:41.528)

And number five is to schedule this job search CEO hour. All right, that is all for today. Super practical things that can have a really big impact on your job search, not just in terms of saving time, but saving energy, saving yourself from getting caught in negative thinking, and hopefully putting you on the path to getting interviews and offers more quickly. So I’m curious, what is…

one thing from today’s episode that you are going to try. Let me know, feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn or drop a comment. If you’re watching on YouTube or if your podcast player has comments, feel free to drop it there. I’m super curious to hear. Or if you have any tips of other things that have saved you time in your job search, I would love to hear about them. All right, that is all for today. I will see you in another episode.

Hey there, I just wanted to say thanks for listening to this episode all the way to the end. If you’re looking for links or resources mentioned, visit careersstrategylab.com slash podcast to find this episode details and the details of the hundreds of other episodes. If you’re looking for help with your UX or product job search, you may want to consider checking out my program, Career Strategy Lab.

where I help UX and product people just like you navigate unexpected challenges in their careers, whether that’s a layoff, trying to get promoted, or getting hired without applying to hundreds of jobs. To learn more about that, just go to careerstrategielab.com and click UX Career Coaching at the very top. That’s all for today, and I will see you next time in another episode of the Career Strategy Podcast.