Are you an invisible genius in your UX career?

Sarah Doody (00:00.238)

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’re in the right place. All right, welcome back to our series on diagnosing problems in your UX job search. This is based on observations and insights I’ve had since 2017 doing UX career coaching and UX job search coaching with

thousands of people at this point. And if you have not listened to the first episode in this series, then you’re gonna wanna check the show notes and listen to the first one in this series, which is all about this common problem of identity fog in your career and job search. Very important. And I really encourage you to listen to these in that order. So check the show notes for a link to that identity fog episode. Now,

I am going to drop in to this episode, my product of youth philosophy. So if you’ve already heard this from episode one, you can skip over it. But I’m doing it because it is so, so important to understand this product of youth philosophy because it serves as kind of like a home base. So in the future, if you ever feel stuck in your job search, understanding the three parts of my product of youth philosophy.

will help give you a place to focus so you don’t feel like I have no idea what I should do right now. So I’m gonna drop that in and then we will get to today’s problem, which is being an invisible genius. I wanna share a little bit more about my philosophy as to how I think candidates in any industry, but especially the industry of user experience,

Sarah Doody (02:22.966)

should think about themselves in their job search and their career. And if you’ve been listening to my podcast for a while or following me for years, you know that I have this philosophy called the product of you. Now the product of you, which is also the name of my book, which is not out yet, but stay tuned for that. And the product of you is this philosophy all about the idea that we should treat our careers as a product.

Because if you work in the field of user experience or product development, you’ve heard of the jobs to be done framework probably. If not, we’ll link it in the show notes. But essentially it’s the idea that people who are looking for and buying products need it to do a job for them in their life, in their job, in their house, whatever, right? And in the same way, companies are hiring you to do a job for them.

And that is why I think there is such beautiful overlap between looking at how we create and design and sell products and how we can design ourselves and our careers and market and sell ourselves. So we get promoted, so we get job offers, we get consulting clients, et cetera. So my product of view philosophy is really simple and it can easily…

be visualized in a little Venn diagram. I don’t have slides for this. So just imagine a Venn diagram and Venn diagram, three circles. One of the circles is design. One of the circles is market. And one of the circles is sell. And if you think of a product, products need strong design, right? By design, I mean the product’s literal design, the features.

how it works, how it functions, what it looks like, what it does, et cetera, right? That’s what I mean by the design of a product. Then it’s not just enough to have a well-designed product, a product needs to be marketed, right? Marketing is really about visibility. And so you can think of marketing activities as Super Bowl ads or social media ads, sponsored posts, TV ads, podcast ads, et cetera, right? In-person like pop-up events.

Sarah Doody (04:42.328)

All of these marketing activities are designed to create visibility as well as other things like trust, et cetera. And then the third part of our Venn diagram is the element of sales, meaning not kind of transactional interactions. Cause I think when I say sales, a lot of times people think of kind of like just gross feeling, honestly, right? It’s transactional, it’s inauthentic, et cetera. That’s what I mean.

I mean relationships. Sales is all about relationships. So in order for successful products to exist and not go out of business, they need solid design, they need solid marketing, and they need solid sales. And the same applies to you, the product of you, right? You need solid design, meaning you need to know your features, your benefits, your skills, et cetera, and how to communicate those.

Then you need to market yourself. That’s reality. Marketing in the case of your career, there’s three primary things. And then there’s some other marketing activities you could do. Obviously your resume, your portfolio, your LinkedIn. Those are the three main ones. Other marketing activities you might do could be speaking at conferences, writing articles, teaching, who knows? Then sales.

If you don’t like the word sales, replace it with relationships, because that is really what sales is all about. It’s about connecting, because people buy from people who they think know them and who understand their problems and that they feel like they have a connection with, and that is relationships. So that is my philosophy, the product of view philosophy. But I wanted to share that because it kind of frames up the three main symptoms.

that I see people experiencing in their job search. All right, so, invisible genius. I’m gonna go through some of the symptoms of an invisible genius, but first, I just wanna talk about it at a high level. So, invisible genius shows up in the marketing part of our Venn diagram. We talked about identity fog in that design part of the Venn diagram. Invisible genius is attached to the marketing part. Now, what does invisible genius mean? It means,

Sarah Doody (07:02.904)

that you think to yourself, I’m awesome. My team thinks I’m awesome. My boss thinks I’m awesome. My former colleagues think I’m awesome. Why is everyone else not realizing how awesome I am when I apply to jobs? That is invisible genius in a nutshell, right? And I use this phrase invisible genius because that is literally how you feel. And I want you to know,

You’re not invisible because you lack the skills. You are invisible because your marketing materials are not communicating clearly and specifically enough about the design of you. The first part of our Venn diagram. And as a result, you are either underselling yourself or you

are sounding like every other candidate because you’ve spoken in jargon, in boilerplate language. And when recruiters and hiring managers think about it, if they’re going through hundreds of applicants a day and resume after resume after portfolio, et cetera, is all sounding the same, no one’s going to stand out. So if you can stand out, you will stop being invisible. So I want to get to

four symptoms of an invisible genius and keep track. And even if you only score one out of four, that is still a yellow flag that you have some work to do on all or some combination of your resume, your portfolio and your LinkedIn. So symptom number one is that you believe you are qualified but you don’t get interviews.

You believe you’re qualified, maybe you have even shown friends or colleagues job descriptions for roles you applied to, and they agree you are a perfect fit for this job, yet you apply and you don’t get interviews. That is a sign that you are an invisible genius. Symptom number two is that your current or past colleagues, classmates, boss manager, et cetera, think

Sarah Doody (09:24.728)

You are awesome. Honestly, maybe even referring you to jobs at their companies where they are now, right? And even with a referral, you’re still not standing out in your job search. That would be like a red flag that you are definitely stuck in invisible genius land. Now, the third symptom is that you are getting interviews, which is good, but you’re not moving past that. So that is a sign.

that you are communicating enough to that recruiter who’s kind of doing the first pass of vetting candidates, but you’re not moving on, which is probably because you have not communicated the depth and the details that the hiring manager wants to see.

And that’s how you end up being invisible genius, even though you’re getting interviews, but you’re not moving on. And then the fourth symptom of an invisible genius is really that you’re seeing other people get hired and you think to yourself, wait a sec, I’ve worked with them before. I’m actually more qualified than them. How did they get that job? Right? And you’re kind of having this like FOMO or a bit of jealousy or just honestly confusion like

why, how did that person get hired? I’ve worked with them and I know I’m better than them. So how did, you know, maybe you both even apply to the same job. That is definitely a sign that you are in invisible genius mode. And so how do we get out of invisible genius mode? How do we make sure that our resume and our portfolio and our LinkedIn, those three things, let’s just only focus on those three.

How do we make sure that they are making us visible? So I don’t want this to turn into like a three hour episode here, but the high level tips that I would have for you are that number one, you need to go back to the design of you, that first part of our Venn diagram and get really clear on the specifics of who you are, what you do, what makes you unique.

Sarah Doody (11:49.134)

what differentiates you from other candidates. And after you make a list of all those things, you need to go look at your about me on your LinkedIn, your resume, your portfolio, the case studies in your portfolio, the bullets on your resume, and honestly ask yourself, does my resume communicate everything that I wrote down in terms of the design of me?

your skills, your strengths, your differentiators, et cetera. Because what I find is a lot of candidates have very strong skills, but then their case studies and their portfolio, for example, they just kind of scratch the surface. Like if you are a user researcher and you make a list of everything that you’re great at in skills and strengths and experience and everything,

And let’s say you’re really good at both quantitative and qualitative research, specifically in healthcare and finance. Just imagine that, right? But then in your portfolio, the case studies that you put in there are potentially not showing both quantitative and qualitative research and or are just kind of reading like recipes or instructions of what you did versus walking me through

Why you did that research to begin with? What did you want to learn as result of doing that research? Why did you choose that research method over another research method? Why did you decide to focus on interviewing these types of people versus those types of people? What did you learn from the interviews? Did you use any specific software, et cetera, right? And then what did you learn? What were the insights? How did those insights get applied to the broader project? If the project was large enough,

you know, to cover that. That is what will help you stop being invisible. But you stay invisible when your case studies kind of read like instructions, like first we did research, then I did a survey, then I created personas to, you know, help communicate details about the users. Then I did an affinity map, like

Sarah Doody (14:13.636)

That’s not what people want to hear. People don’t want to hear just what you did, like an inventory of tasks. They want to hear how you think, why you did certain things, et cetera. They want to get inside your head as though they’re hearing what was going on as you were working on the projects. That’s what they want. And that is how you can stop being invisible and instead become an in-demand candidate because you’re no longer selling yourself short.

in your resume portfolio LinkedIn. The other thing I will say, and this will be it, is that you need your resume portfolio and LinkedIn to all communicate the same message. There is this phrase I heard years ago, and it goes like this. When you confuse, you lose. Meaning, if we confuse a recruiter or hiring manager, you have lost to them. They are on to the next candidate. So we don’t want to confuse them if…

They look at our resume and they start to like form an impression about us. And then they look at our portfolio and it does not match the impression that they had when they looked at your resume, for example, right? That’s bad. We’ve confused them and now we’ve lost them. So that is the other mistake I see that keeps people being invisible when all three core career materials, resume, portfolio, LinkedIn are not telling the same story. So I’m curious if you

want to share your score with me, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I will link my LinkedIn in the comments below, but I’d really be curious to hear your score. Did you score four out of four, one out of four? Let me know. This is going to give you some clues as to where you may be stuck in the job search. And in our last episode in this series, we are gonna talk about the cell part of our Venn diagram.

also known as relationships, if you don’t like the S word of cell, but I would give you a preview. The common reason that people get stuck is what I refer to as stranger syndrome. And I will tell you all about that and the symptoms to know if you are stuck in stranger syndrome in the next episode. As a reminder, these aren’t gonna be consecutive. So just check the show notes or just scroll through and it should be pretty obvious.

Sarah Doody (16:36.206)

how all these three episodes connect together. And I hope that so far this episode or the first two have helped you start to identify the underlying reasons of why you are stuck in your job search. Because I think a lot of you are so fixated on stuff like, should my resume be one page or two pages? Should my portfolio be a website or a PDF? Should I, you know,

play the numbers game or not play the numbers game. Like you’re focused on all this other stuff and it is distracting you from some of these like underlying problems that are going to make a bigger impact if you focus on these underlying problems. So that is all for today. I will see you in the next and last episode of this series. And don’t be a stranger. If you want to reach out to me on LinkedIn, I love chatting over.

The direct messages on LinkedIn. So feel free to send me a message and tell me your score and I will talk to you in the next episode. See you later.

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 careersstrategylab.com slash 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, then I invite you to watch my free UX job search workshop.

at careersstrategylab.com slash hired. And please feel free to send me a DM on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you. 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

Sarah Doody (18:41.589)

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 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 slash 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.