Getting Ghosted in Your UX Job Search? You’re Not Invisible — You’re Unpositioned

Sarah Doody (00:00)

so I want to start out with a story. This story is about someone who joined my UX job search coaching program called Career Strategy Lab. And like you, this person felt invisible. Jonathan had 20 years of UX experience. He’d been in director level roles. He’d been doing a lot of leadership. And when he got laid off and started tackling his own job search, he ended up getting ghosted for about 75%.

of the roles he applied to. I think he was applying to something like 25 or more jobs a week. And he did that for a while and then he realized something is not working. I need to rework my strategy for my job search, which is when he joined my program Career Strategy Lab. And when I looked at his kind of trifecta of resume portfolio and LinkedIn, I did not see a skills problem for Jonathan.

Jonathan had the skills. Jonathan had the experience. What I saw was a positioning problem. And once we fixed that, everything changed. He reduced, greatly reduced, the amount of ghosting that was happening. He actually ended up applying to only about five jobs a week instead of 25 or more. And even though he was applying to fewer jobs, he was getting more interviews. Weird, right? Like the math doesn’t math there. It does.

when you are applying with a resume portfolio in LinkedIn that is positioning you correctly for the roles you apply to. So let’s dive in a little

Maybe you are like Jonathan, right? Maybe you have 20 years of experience, 15, 10, five, whatever it is, and you feel invisible too. You’re getting ghosted. You’re applying, you’re hearing nothing. Maybe you get one or two rounds into the interviews and you still get ghosted, right? It is human nature that you would start to internalize that and think, I am the problem. It must be me. It must be my skills, my experience, et cetera, right? So if you have caught yourself

doing that and internalizing that rejection. Number one, you are not alone. And when you do this, you start to think, I’m not good enough. Maybe the job market has passed me by. Maybe things are too hard right now to get hired in user experience, even with 15, 20 or more years of experience, right? Maybe I need to go back to school, get another degree, get more certificates, do some fake projects for my portfolio.

whatever it is, some of you may be thinking, I’m gonna leave UX altogether. And I really hope you don’t because every single day, just this morning, I was trying to do something in my podcast recording software and the UX was so bad. So we need you guys now more than ever. And don’t get me started on the quality that AI can create when it comes to a user experience, but that is an episode for another day. So.

You start to think all these negative things, right? On the problem and you start assigning all these reasons why you’re getting ghosted. I hear it constantly. Jonathan was doing it as well, right? And every single time this diagnosis of being invisible equals not qualified is false. You’re not invisible. You’re un-po-sitioned. I want to say that again. You’re not invisible. You’re just un-positioned. You have the skills.

have the experience, but the way you are communicating your value across your resume portfolio and LinkedIn, and frankly in interviews too, it is not landing. It is not stopping recruiters and hiring managers in their tracks and making them think this person has the skills and experience I need on my team. I must learn more about them. I must hear about what they’ve been working

All right, so unpositioned. I checked and it’s a real word,

So here’s what unpositioned actually means. Positioning is how you communicate what you do and who you do it for and why it matters. And positioning is about connecting the dots between what you’ve done in the past and what you could do in the future for a team if they hire you. Bonus, if we can make that align with things that they mentioned in the job description. When you do this,

when you position your skills and experience in this way, it’s going to make people pay attention. And guess what? You can only get interviews, you can only move farther in interviews when you capture the attention in interest of recruiters and hiring managers and positioning, or maybe in your case, lack thereof, is causing you to be looked over. Now this…

is an easy problem to fix. if you feel like you’re being seen right now, don’t worry, I’ve got you. All right, so how do we change this? How do we go from unpositioned to positioned? We have to look at ourselves as a product, right? Products have positioning. If you have friends that work in product marketing, they’re thinking about positioning all the time. You could have the best product in the world, right? It’s shoes, it’s a car, it’s whatever. You could have the

best product in the world. But if the marketing doesn’t explain why someone should care, it sits on the shelf or in the app store and no one cares. No one buys it, right? That’s what happens when there is a lack of positioning that fits between what the product does and who might want to know about and or buy that product.

Steve Jobs was amazing at this. I’ll link you to another episode where I talk about how to sell your benefits, not your features, which is a whole episode that you definitely don’t want to miss. But like I said, Steve Jobs was a genius at that. And you can learn a lot about positioning from Steve Jobs. But when you’re unpositioned, your resume ends up reading like a list of responsibilities instead of a story about the impact you’ve had.

a story about the scope of what you’ve worked on, right? A story about how you have put your soft skills into play when it came to working on that remote project that took 18 months and there was 15 people on the team across five time zones. That is going to be the level of detail that helps someone pay attention to you versus someone else’s resume.

that just says, I was responsible for product design or I was responsible for user research. Now your portfolio shows what you made, right? But not why it mattered or how you thought through it. Chances are your portfolio right now, it’s probably very, very heavy on output and not on thinking. And when you’re heavy on output and not on thinking, you’re gonna be invisible because guess what? Recruiters and hiring managers,

want to know more than just what you did. They want to know why you did it, how you did it, who you did it with, what happened, what did you do when this part of the project went off the rails, right? So when you’re unpositioned, your resume, portfolio, and LinkedIn end up not catching the attention and interest of someone. And instead, someone looking at your resume or portfolio, for example, or your LinkedIn, they’re kind of thinking to themselves,

This sounds like the last one I saw, right? And that is exactly how you’re not going to get interviews. So if you’re getting ghosted right now, it’s not that hiring managers and recruiters are rejecting you because of your experience. They’re not even getting to your experience because nothing in your positioning is giving them a reason to want to learn more about you. So they’re only spending three seconds on your resume. They’re only spending

15 seconds on your portfolio. Now, we can turn this around. So let’s look at a few tips here.

All right, so fixing our positioning. It does not just start with opening up your resume or opening up your LinkedIn or your portfolio. That is a mistake you’ve probably made in your past. In order to fix your positioning, we first have to get clear on who you are and what you do. And this starts with revisiting your about me, your elevator pitch for you. In my program, I call it a compass statement because

When you have a clear understanding and you can articulate what makes you unique and different, what your strengths are, superpowers, et cetera, that serves as a compass. Because then when you do go to work on your resume, portfolio, et cetera, you have that compass statement to look back to as a filter and a literal compass for what you’re going to, for example, focus on in terms of skills and experience.

on your resume, what projects to put in your portfolio, right? What to feature in the featured section of your LinkedIn profile. And so how do we go about creating this compass statement? We don’t have time to go over the whole process today. It’s actually the first sprint that I do with people in my UX job search coaching program, Career Strategy Lab.

But the first thing I would recommend you do is pull up the most recent bio or about me that you’ve used. Maybe it’s at the top of your portfolio. Maybe it is in your LinkedIn about section. Go find that. And then number one, see if it’s outdated, first of all. But number two, I want you to think about what you’ve done in the past. Maybe think about the last.

two, three years. If you wanna go further, that is totally fine. Now, what you wanna think about is maybe you’re calling yourself a product designer. Okay, but what does that mean? You know the kind of creative writing activity where sometimes at least my teachers and professors would encourage you to ask why five times or five follow-up questions. So if you’re…

elevator pitch or about me says, I’m a product designer. Okay, but what does that actually mean? Right? Well, maybe you focus more on B2B versus B2C. Maybe you focus more on healthcare or ed tech or some other industry. Maybe you focus on SaaS products or enterprise products, right? Okay, just that, just that ⁓ level of detail.

tells us a lot more about what type of product designer you are. Now we could go deeper. Are you also a product designer who focuses on design systems, accessibility? ⁓ Can you also code? Maybe you also do user research, right? Think about that now. Just in two follow-up questions to, I’m a product designer. We have started to go deeper to uncover the

things that you actually do and that you actually have experience and skills in when it comes to product design. And as you do this activity of kind of looking at whatever the state is of your about me elevator, whatever you call it, that is going to help you start to identify the skills, the experience, et cetera, that then you need to go look at your resume and think, okay.

By rewriting my about me, I realized even though I said I’m a product designer, what was missing was that I’m this product designer who also focuses on design systems and accessibility. And I also can code. Maybe you’re not amazing at coding, but you know enough that that would set you apart from someone else who doesn’t know how to code, right? And

What happens with that information? Well, it means that then when you go work on your resume, you need to think, okay, if I’m positioning myself as a designer who focuses on design systems accessibility and I have this technical skill, then there are bullets on my resume. Better talk about design systems accessibility examples of when you

developed something or collaborated with developers, et cetera. Same thing with your portfolio. If your portfolio doesn’t have a design system project in it, you’re underselling yourself because you’re not positioning yourself as a designer who knows design systems, right? If you don’t have examples of how you design for accessibility in your portfolio, same concept applies, right? So as you’re listening to this, and maybe rewind this and listen to this again, because

This positioning is key. Without clarity of who you are and what you do, you will remain unpositioned and you will remain invisible. But when you go back to the basics and rework your about me, I promise it’s gonna make everything easier. You’re gonna stop second guessing what to include, not include on your resume, portfolio, et cetera, even what to talk about in interviews. So it’s kinda like,

If you remember what your writing and English professors would tell you when you’re writing an essay, you can’t write the essay without this thesis, right? If you do, the essay is going to be all over the place. It’s not going to make sense. Same thing in the case of getting hired or promoted. If you have a strong elevator pitch or about me, that is your thesis and that is going to make positioning yourself

for the jobs you want in your resume, in your LinkedIn, et cetera, so much easier. But the problem is you’re too close to this. It’s like a startup founder who is too close to this and you need to step back and do this work to uncover where you are falling short in the positioning of you.

All right, I wanna give you two examples of people who came to me and fixed their positioning. So Jonathan, he had 20 years of experience. He was laid off. He went about his job search on his own for a while. He had director level experience. He’d been DIYing his job search with about a 75 % ghosted rate. And he was applying to at least 25 jobs a week. Guess what? He felt invisible, right?

And the problem wasn’t his experience. The problem was not he didn’t have the skills. He had all of that. For Jonathan, it was that the way he was positioning himself in his resume, in his portfolio, et cetera, was not communicating the story of his impact, of his superpowers, of what differentiated him from other candidates. And eventually he stopped DIYing his job search.

He came into my program, Career Strategy Lab, and the first thing we did was go through this exercise of creating this new compass statement for Jonathan that helped him see skills and experience, number one, that he had been downplaying, number two, that he’d forgotten about, and number three, that was definitely not coming through in his resume, portfolio, and everything else. When he made that shift and got clear on who he was,

and what made him different and amazing as a candidate. That made the process of updating his resume, updating his LinkedIn, updating his portfolio a lot easier. And here is something Jonathan realized. He realized part of why he was invisible was because he was applying to just any jobs that had the word UX in them essentially, right? He was just doing the spray and pray technique, right? ⁓ That is not.

a strategy that’s going to get you hired as Jonathan realized. And he realized, wait a sec, what makes me awesome is that I have a lot of experience in education. That made him narrow his job search to focus just on companies and organizations in education. And guess what? He just got hired as an executive level UX role at the University of Houston.

by niching down his job search, applying to fewer jobs, but jobs that truly aligned with what he was looking for and his skills and experience. And that is what changed with his positioning. He was no longer unpositioned. He was specifically positioned as the exact level UX person with experience in education.

and when he applied to UX roles at education-related companies, he stood out. That is the power of

Maybe you see yourself in Jonathan’s story, right? And this shift from being invisible to intentional. And it is possible for you also. You don’t have to stay invisible because once you fix your positioning, the job search starts to feel really different and more possible. You start applying to roles that are more targeted to what makes you unique and different than other candidates, right?

Interviews become easier because you’ve already done the work of figuring out how to position your existing skills and experience to the roles you’re applying to. You have clarity over what is going to differentiate you because you’ve done the work to think about that. It’s not about becoming more qualified. It’s about finally communicating the qualifications you already have, which starts with repositioning your experience.

So if you’re wondering whether you have a skills problem or positioning problem, it’s probably a positioning problem. I see this over and over and over every single week with new people who join my UX job search coaching

They have 15, 20 or more years of experience, five, 10, whatever it is.

They don’t need more qualifications. They need better positioning. So I hope this episode gives you some hope for your job search, makes you realize being invisible does not need to last forever if you take steps to fix the positioning of yourself as a candidate. All right, that is all I have for today.

I actually was interviewed for the AIGA podcast where I talked a lot about developing your positioning through something I call the career roadmap and a compass statement. So if you wanna listen to that, you can check the show notes below.

or just search for episode 101 of the Career Strategy Podcast, and that will take you to my interview on the AIGA podcast. All right, that is all I have for you today. I hope this was helpful. As always, feel free to send me a message on LinkedIn. Make sure you leave a note if you’re gonna connect with me, and in that note, say, listen to this podcast episode, whatever it was.

And that will help me maybe connect with you faster because I tend to give priority to people who leave notes with their connection request than people who don’t. All right. That is all. I will see you in another episode of the Career Strategy Podcast very soon.