The Bar to Stand Out As A UX Candidate is Lower Than You Think

Sarah Doody (00:00)

All right, so today I want to talk about something that might be encouraging, even though it could sound a little maybe harsh at first. So after years now, almost a decade of coaching UX and product people and reviewing now thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, portfolios, resumes, LinkedIn’s, et cetera, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, the average quality of how UX and product people

present themselves in their resume, in their portfolio, in their LinkedIn is shockingly low. And I’m not talking about what they’ve worked on and their skills. All of these people often have amazing skills, amazing experience. The thing that shocks me is how they communicate their skills and experience and how that shows up.

in their resume, in their portfolio, in their LinkedIn, and then ultimately also in their interview. And I wanna start this episode off with this because this is actually good news for you. When you go to apply to a job and you see that 100, 200, 300, 500 people have applied for the job, there is a extremely high chance that a lot of those people will not get an interview.

because they are underselling themselves and they’re not gonna stand out or some combination of their resume portfolio and or LinkedIn are making red flag mistakes, which make recruiters and hiring managers automatically say, we don’t need to learn anything more about this person. So the bar to stand out is low as a candidate.

And I’m go into more detail about what you can do to stand out. But that is the ultimate reframe of today’s episode. So what are some of these common mistakes that are probably preventing people, maybe even you, from getting interviews in the first place, right? Resume, for example. Big red flag mistake is a one page resume. One page resumes either mean it is unreadable.

because you’ve made the font size so small that no one can read it and you have not included white space on that resume. So not only is it a tiny font, but everything is smushed together. So no one can read it, right? It’s not easy to skimmer scan. And if you have tried to make your resume fit all on one page, you’re probably leaving off information about you. And this is a problem.

because number one, that human who looks at your resume is not gonna see the details they’re looking for. And it’s highly possible that the software that recruiters and hiring managers use, sometimes called the applicant tracking system, may not be able to learn enough about you from your one page resume. And as a result, even though you are qualified, that applicant tracking system may think, nope, this person doesn’t seem to match.

because for example, all your resume bullet points were super vague or you left off a ton of bullet points in order to make it fit on one page. So that is one red flag mistake I see for resumes. We’re gonna do one red flag mistake for each of your resume portfolio LinkedIn. So let’s move on to red flag mistakes in portfolios. All right, one of the red flag mistakes for portfolios is that

They appear to be just scrapbooks of deliverables with no context, more no story, no explanation of process, no explanation of decision making. And they often avoid all of the parts of projects when we encountered trouble, right? When we had to pivot, when things didn’t go to according to plan, et cetera. Hiring managers and recruiters

want to see more than the final thing. They wanna know how you arrived at the final thing. It’s like when you were in elementary school or high school and you would do a math test and your teacher would say, don’t just show me the answer, show me how you got to your answer. And the same applies to our portfolios. They are skimming, they are scanning. And if they are not seeing context, if they are not hearing about process,

If your portfolio is not communicating how you think, then that is going to be a red flag mistake that could prevent you from getting interviews. And don’t get me started on spelling mistakes or bad design in your portfolio. All right, the next one, LinkedIn. What are some red flag mistakes that we’re seeing on LinkedIn? ⁓ There are a lot, but ⁓ let’s do maybe two just because I have a couple. ⁓

not optimizing your LinkedIn profile for the user of your LinkedIn profile, right? And if you are in a job search right now, there’s actually two users of your LinkedIn profile. It’s the human who is going to maybe get to your LinkedIn profile, skim through it and decide if you’re gonna get an interview or not, right? And it’s the LinkedIn algorithm. And a lot of you are not thinking about the LinkedIn algorithm as a quote user,

of your LinkedIn profile, right? Because there are certain parts of your LinkedIn profile, like your headline, the text below your name, like the about section, obviously your work experience, that are signaling to the algorithm if you are a fit. Because the algorithm is literally looking at the words in your LinkedIn headline, in your about, in your work experience. And so many of you are, for example, not even customizing your LinkedIn headline.

When you do that, it just defaults to your current job title and your company. So it might say UX designer at Amazon. And that’s all. Doesn’t tell us your years of experience. Doesn’t tell us any industries you have experience in. Doesn’t tell us you’ve a master’s in HCI, right? So we need to leverage the parts of the LinkedIn profile that help us communicate what makes us amazing and unique and differentiates us. So the algorithm and humans can understand that.

but I cannot tell you how many LinkedIn profiles I see that are not leveraging these parts of the profile or that are misusing these parts of the profile, right? Putting personal stuff in your headline, like you’re a dog mom, a cat mom, that you like baking sourdough or whatever, those are nice personal interests, but it is a waste of space in that precious headline where you could be communicating things

that are going to help you stand out to the algorithm and people. I’ll link to another episode I did about creating a really strong LinkedIn headline, but for now, that’s all we have time

So that is just a really quick overview of why the bar to stand out is really low. Now don’t get me started on, like I said, spelling mistakes, use of AI that is totally obvious,

and so these red flag mistakes that make you not stand out in a good way, it’s not because you’re lazy. It’s not because you’re not good at user experience, right? The problem is that no one teaches you how to do this. Your boss is too busy, right? You didn’t learn this in school if you went to school for UX, right? You spent years getting great at user experience. Maybe you’re now leading teams, shipping whole products.

solving really interesting complex problems, but no one teaches you how to market yourself essentially as a product in your own job search, right? And it’s kind of like being a great product designer who’s never had to sell the product. You know the product is good, but you can’t explain it to someone who should pick it up over your competitors, right? And when you’re too close to your own work,

You can’t see what’s missing in how you are communicating about your skills and experience and the work that you have done. You know you did amazing work, but you just can’t find the right frame or angle to make that relevant and obvious in your resume, in your portfolio, in your LinkedIn, et

right, one quick example. ⁓ Jonathan was a client of mine inside my UX career coaching program called Career Strategy Lab. He is the perfect example. He had 20 years of experience in UX working in director level roles, was laid off, tried to do his job search on his own, but was consistently getting about a 75 % ghosting rate from recruiters and hiring managers. And he was applying to about 25,

or more jobs a week. And Jonathan was very qualified. He had amazing experience. He wasn’t getting ghosted because he wasn’t qualified. He was getting ghosted because his resume portfolio and LinkedIn were not telling the story of his skills and experience in a way that made him stand out. Once he started working with me, he was able to see how he was underselling himself short.

and the changes he needed to make so that his resume portfolio and LinkedIn made him an obvious candidate. I will link to Jonathan’s ⁓ interview on my podcast, because he just got hired into an executive level role at the University of Houston. So if you’re curious, you can go listen to that.

The reframe I want you to take from this episode is that the bar to stand out is low and you should aim for 10 % better. You don’t need to spend another three months on your portfolio trying to perfect it. You just seem to be 10 % better than all these other people that are making red flag mistakes in their resume, portfolio, LinkedIn, et cetera.

So for example, if you have a resume that is currently one page, maybe spend a few hours over the course of the next week, transforming that resume into two pages and asking yourself questions like, did I leave things off my work experience because I tried to put this into one page? If so, add those things back in. Do your resume bullet points.

sound like responsibilities on a job description, like I was responsible for this, I was responsible for that. If so, you need to go back and rewrite those bullet points so they are focused on either outcomes and or communicating the scope of what you did. Sometimes we do not know what happened on a project we worked on because we left before it launched, the project got cut, et cetera. So in the absence of outcomes like

this helped the company make a million dollars, we can focus on scope of what we did. If you did research, this is a great example. How many interviews did you do? If you did a survey, how many people did it go to? Things like that help communicate the scope of what you did because it’s one thing to say, I was responsible for user research. It was another thing to say, I led ⁓ a user research project with

30 in-person moderated interviews where we identified drop-off rates at checkout, which resulted in a reduction in the checkout by 50%. That is a lot stronger than just saying, I was responsible for user research, right? That’s what it means to be 10 % better. I’m not gonna give you examples for your portfolio and your LinkedIn, we just don’t have time for that. But the takeaway is,

Aim to be 10 % better, identify the red flag mistakes, maybe you are making on your resume, portfolio, LinkedIn, et cetera, and then time box yourself so you don’t spend another two, three months on this and do a little sprint to try and make your resume 10 % better. Make your portfolio 10 % better. Make your LinkedIn 10 % better, right? Because as you learned earlier in this episode, these red flag mistakes are not going to take you

months to fix, it just requires that number one, you know what these mistakes are. And number two, you focus on 10 % better because chances are you can get hired with a good enough portfolio. I know this because so many times in my UX job search coaching program, people say to me, I didn’t think my portfolio was ready or I didn’t even make it through the entire portfolio part of

my program Career Strategy Lab, and they say, but I applied anywhere with my in-progress good enough portfolio. And guess what? They get interviews and they get hired, but you’ll never know if your portfolio is good enough, for example, if you spend the next three months trying to perfect it, right? Maybe after getting rid of some of these red flag mistakes over the course of the next week or two, you start applying.

you might start getting interviews, but you will not know until you ditch this perfection trap that is holding you back. So the bar to stand out is low. In order to stand out from everyone else, we need to communicate our value clearly with the users of our resume portfolio and LinkedIn in mind. And I assure you almost no one is doing this.

which I think is why so many really talented UX people come to me after they have been applying for one year or two years or applied to 200, 400 or more jobs, right? So if you are wondering how you can help fix some of these red flag mistakes in your career materials,

I would say number one, get my free UX portfolio case study template. It walks you through how to write an effective UX case study. I will link to that in the show notes below. And I will also link to an episode about your LinkedIn profile and about your resume so that if you wanna tackle any of those today or this weekend, you will have a starting point so you don’t waste time Googling tips.

for your resume portfolio and LinkedIn. All right, that is all I have for you today. So check the show notes for that template and the other episodes about your resume and LinkedIn. And I will see you on another episode very soon.