How UX People Are Leveraging Relationships to Get Hired With the Help of Career Strategy Lab

Sarah Doody (00:00)

If your LinkedIn feed is anything like mine, it’s full of posts where everyone is talking about how bad the UX job market is right now. And look, they’re not wrong. It is rough out there. However, here’s something I have noticed. Almost nobody is spending enough time on the part of the job search that you can actually control. So that is one of the things I want to dig into today.

Sarah Doody (00:26)

Hey, I’m Sarah Duty, 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.

Sarah Doody (00:55)

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’re in the right place. So there’s an article by Jared Spool from 2025 that breaks down what’s happening in this job market, kind of at a macro level. And I will drop it in the show notes. It’s definitely worth a read. In the article, he points out.

Sarah Doody (01:24)

Some big factors at play in the job search. So one of them has to do with certain tax credits that made it essentially cheaper for companies to hire. And those tax credits have expired. So the second thing he mentioned is interest rates went up, which makes companies a lot more cautious about spending money on headcount. And the third one.

Sarah Doody (01:50)

Is the one I can’t stop thinking about. And it’s the impact of the little feature called one click apply. So here’s why the one click apply button matters so much. When applying for a job takes just one click, what’s gonna happen? Every job posting that has UX in it is going to get flooded. And we’re seeing that happening. Recruiters and hiring managers are saying that they have hundreds of applicants within.

Sarah Doody (02:20)

Hours of posting jobs. Now, if we do the math on that, what happens, right? So let’s say a recruiter spends, I don’t know, one minute per application. One minute is frankly generous. Now, if they have 400 applications, times that by one minute, that’s almost seven hours of work for one role. That’s not gonna happen, right? Recruiters and hiring managers don’t have time to spend one minute.

Sarah Doody (02:48)

On 400 applications. No one is doing that. So a huge number of genuinely qualified people may actually apply, but they’re not going to get seen because of this. They didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not that they’re a bad candidate. It’s just that in the workflow of a recruiter or hiring manager, they never got to that person.

Sarah Doody (03:13)

Now there’s a lot more in this article that I think is worth a read, but I want to get to the part of the job search that we can control, right? What we control, well, one of the things is relationships. Relationships matter more than ever. If you can get on the radar of a recruiter or hiring manager, or even someone who’s already at the company, maybe even on that team.

Sarah Doody (03:39)

You will dramatically increase your odds of not disappearing into that pile of 400 applicants, right? You’ll no longer just be a person in an applicant tracking system or a database somewhere, right? Your name may get recognized, you may get flagged because you knew someone at that company. You found a way to make contact with the recruiter, hiring manager, whoever. This is also why I say

Sarah Doody (04:08)

All of the time, you need to invest in relationships before you need them. If you are applying for a job this week and you’re trying to get a referral link and you know no one at that company, that means you didn’t start building and nurturing relationships soon enough. So relationships, we need to be building them and investing in them before we need them. So I really challenge you to think to yourself.

Sarah Doody (04:37)

If there are companies you know without a shadow of a doubt that you want to apply to and you know no one there, go and try and build relationships with those people at that company, ASAP, so that three months from now, six months from now, you have a relationship with these people. And when you do ask them for a referral, they are more likely to say yes. Side note: a lot of people say no to referrals.

Sarah Doody (05:07)

Because ultimately the referral is a reflection of them, right? Their reputation could be at stake if they refer someone and that candidate gets hired and then turns out to be not so good. So this may be why, if you’re asking for referrals from people and they’re saying no or ghosting you, it could mean that they have no relationship with you. They’re not going to vouch for you because their reputation is on the line as well.

Sarah Doody (05:36)

All right, I want to make this concept of investing in relationships and the power of relationships in your UX job search really, really concrete. And I thought I would just share some examples of how people in my UX Job Search coaching program, career strategy lab, are leveraging relationships every single week to get interviews, to get introductions, to get referral links, and sometimes get hired. So I want to talk through some examples. The names have been changed.

Sarah Doody (06:05)

So Mike, Mike got hired at a public benefit corporation. He had been laid off for I think it was six months, and he noticed that someone inside Career Strategy Lab worked at this company. So he reached out to this person. He they got to know each other. And when Mike was ready to apply, he reached back out to the other person who worked at this company and they gave him a referral link. And guess what? He got hired.

Sarah Doody (06:35)

We’ll never know if Mike was more qualified than other people who applied, but the power of a referral link is so, so important because that could push you higher on the list of people who applied. We don’t know how every single applicant tracking system works, but I think it’s safe to say that maybe some of them allow you to filter or sort by does this candidate.

Sarah Doody (07:01)

Have a referral at the company. All right, next up we have Simon. Simon came through Career Strategy Lab a couple of years ago. He got hired doing a couple of user research projects. And then he ended up creating his own UX research agency. And the very cool thing is that he has now hired multiple people who also were a part of Career Strategy Lab.

Sarah Doody (07:28)

That is the power of community, of building relationships with people who have similar goals, interests in mind, and seeing that sometimes those relationships pay off even years down the road. Simon, like I said, did Career Strategy Lab a couple of a couple of years ago. And even a couple of weeks ago, he posted to let us know hey, I’m hiring again. So relationships don’t always

Sarah Doody (07:58)

Provide value, let’s say, immediately. Sometimes you might not see the value of a relationship for years to come. And that is a great example of Simon. All right. Next example is a couple of years ago, one of our alumni got hired at a big insurance company. And now four or five other alumni of Career Strategy Lab have been hired at that company. How has this happened? It’s because

Sarah Doody (08:28)

That one person who got hired a couple of years ago keeps letting us know that his team or adjacent teams are hiring. And he keeps coming back to the career strategy lab alumni community to let everyone know. And it all traces back to that one person who got hired there two years ago and keeps coming back to his community. And it all tracks back to two years ago when he got hired there. And now he, because he’s

Sarah Doody (08:57)

A part of the career strategy lab community, the alumni community, he keeps coming back to this community and letting other people know that he is hiring. And just two weeks ago, someone that got hired as the executive director of experience design for a large university posted in the career strategy lab community about an open role on his team. That is the power of relationships. That is the power of investing in communities.

Sarah Doody (09:25)

I think many of you belong to communities, right? But are you spending quality time in those communities? Are you building relationships with people in those communities? Or is that community just something that you receive notifications from on your phone, in your email? It’s in your Slack community list, whatever. But if you’re honest with yourself, you’re not really showing up in those communities.

Sarah Doody (09:53)

In order to benefit from the power of a community, you need to participate in that community. And people that I see from Career Strategy Lab who either get hired or hire alumni, guess what? They show up in the community. Because in order to get noticed in a community, you need to be visible, you need to be contributing.

Sarah Doody (10:18)

Right. So the power of community is huge. And I gotta be honest with you, when I started Career Strategy Lab, I was not thinking far enough into the future to imagine a world where we are today with 850 alumni and people hiring each other. It’s essentially turned into a very powerful job referral network within UX. This is definitely, like I said, not what I imagined I was creating, but

Sarah Doody (10:46)

Here we so here’s what I want you to walk away from today’s episode with. You cannot control the job market. You can’t change laws. You can’t change the economy. You can’t change how hiring managers and recruiters operate. You can’t control the presence of a one-click apply button, right? You can’t control supply and demand.

Sarah Doody (11:10)

So focus on what you can control. And there is a heck of a lot you can control that we didn’t have time to get to today. But the purpose of today is to help you realize very tangibly the power of relationships and building and investing in relationships before you need them. So my challenge to you is you think to yourself are there relationships that you’ve neglected? Are you in communities that you are are just existing in, but you’re not.

Sarah Doody (11:39)

Participating in. And if you are planning to apply at companies, but you know that there is no one at the company that you have a relationship with, it would be very smart to try and find and build relationships with people at that company this week, this month. All right, that’s it for today’s episode. If this resonated, I will link to Jared Spool’s article in the show notes. And if you want to learn more about

Sarah Doody (12:08)

Career Strategy Lab, go to CareerstrategyLab.com slash apply. At that page, you can watch a tour to see exactly how I help UXM product people navigate the job search and get hired or promoted with five-figure salary increases without applying to hundreds of jobs. All right. Thanks for listening. I will see you in the next episode. Hey there. I just wanted to say thanks for listening to this episode all the way to the end.

Sarah Doody (12:37)

If you’re looking for links or resources mentioned, visit CareerStrategy Lab.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.

Sarah Doody (13:03)

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 career strategylab.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.