The one thing you can’t DIY in your UX job search

Sarah (00:00)

If you’re thinking about DIYing your UX job search for another few months, this episode is for you. Now, maybe you have been working on your job search or your portfolio or your resume or your LinkedIn or trying to network and do all the things. Maybe you’ve been doing that for three months, six months, 12 months, or longer. And you’re thinking to yourself, I’m just one Google search away from that tip or trick that’s going to help me.

Finish my portfolio, land the interview, stand out to recruiters, optimize my LinkedIn, whatever it is. So you continue down this DIY approach, hoping that you’re gonna stumble upon that one thing that is going to finally change things for you. And this episode is going to help you see how the DIY approach is not always the best one for your job search, and more importantly,

The one thing you absolutely cannot DIY in your UX job search.

So if you and I were sitting across from each other having coffee right now, and you told me, you know, I’ve been trying to finish my portfolio or apply for jobs for the last three months, six months, 12 months. I think I’m just gonna give it one more shot. I’m gonna give myself three more months to see how much further I can get. The first thing I would say to you is, well, what’s gonna be different this time? And I say that because.

You probably are not thinking about what you’re going to do differently. You’re probably just thinking about, well, if I have more time, the time should result in better results, right? If I keep applying for three more months, the numbers game should eventually work in my favor, right? If I keep spending three more months on my portfolio, then I should, in theory, have a better portfolio because time.

Equals progress, right? Except that’s not what I see in reality with people who come to me after taking the DIY approach to their portfolio or to their job search or to their resume for three months, six months, twelve months, sometimes even two or more years. And if you cannot answer the question of, well, what are you going to do differently this time? Then that’s a big yellow flag.

That you are just going to spend more time the next three months working on whatever you’re working on, but you’re not going to change your strategy. And if you want a different outcome with your job search, or if you want a better portfolio at the end of three months, or you want to have a larger, more authentic relationships in UX after three months, then you need a different strategy, right? Because just

Scheduling a bunch of coffee chats with people you randomly meet on LinkedIn is not relationships. Putting more and more hours into your portfolio is not necessarily going to lead to a better portfolio. And applying to more and more UX roles is not going to result in you getting interviews because I know getting hired in UX today is not about the numbers game.

So if you are gonna take this DIY approach, you need to be able to answer the question of, well, what are you gonna do differently from what you were doing before this point in time?

Sarah (03:08)

All right, before we go any further, I want to remind you that I am a user researcher and a product designer. so as a researcher, I really want to understand why people don’t join Career Strategy Lab, my UX job search coaching program. so I open up enrollment for this program every couple of months. after the enrollment closes, I ask people why they did not join.

I have 1,702 responses to this form, those responses are from 1,558 people. That means people have filled out this why did you not join form multiple times, which tells me they’ve considered joining Career Strategy Lab more than once, but at the end of the day, they did not.

Because, and I’m gonna summarize my research here, they did not feel ready, or they were going to continue down the DIY approach. What’s very interesting though is that after people join the program, I ask them to fill out a different form, the why did you join Career Strategy Lab form? And what I notice as a pattern of people who joined is a regret of not.

Joining sooner. Meaning, people say things like, I thought of joining six months ago, but decided to continue my job search alone. And I continued to not get interviews or offers. And they wish they’d joined six months ago. Because if they had joined six months ago, maybe they would have been hired already, right? Same thing with portfolios. I see people joining and then saying,

Six months ago, I thought I could finish my portfolio on my own. Today, six months later, I’m still stuck in my portfolio and I’m still not stuck applying. And so that ultimately becomes the trigger for them to join Career Strategy Lab because they realize they are hitting this wall of using this DIY approach to their job search. I know you may also have this.

A concern that some people have, the feeling of I am not ready or my resume is not good enough. My portfolio is not good enough to join something like Career Strategy Lab. And first of all, I would say, well, you’re missing the point of Career Strategy Lab. Like one of the parts, or we call them sprints inside Career Strategy Lab is your portfolio. We also have a resume sprint.

A LinkedIn sprint, a job search sprint, an interviewing sprint. And so maybe you have friends or maybe your parents even say things like, We have to clean the house before the house cleaner comes over. A lot of you are doing that with your job search, with your portfolio, with your resume, et cetera. And that’s defeating the purpose of joining Career Strategy Lab. It’s like,

You’re paying the house cleaner to come over and clean your house. Why are you tidying up and spending that time? Why not just let them do that job for you? Right. so I would say if you’re thinking to yourself, I’m just going to tidy up my portfolio before I join Career Strategy Lab, if I were to look at your portfolio, I would guess there’s like a very strong, I would say like 80% chance that the work you do on your portfolio.

Is not going to align with what recruiters and hiring managers want. Because do you actually know what recruiters and hiring managers want in a portfolio, for example? and yes, you probably read a lot of the tips and tricks out there on social media, but just to be brutally honest, a lot of what you read on social media is just opinions of people. It’s not rooted in

What recruiters and hiring managers actually want. Whereas everything I put out there, whether it’s on this podcast, conversations I have inside my community for Career Strategy Lab, in the curriculum inside Career Strategy Lab, it is all based on research, meaning I am talking to recruiters and hiring managers to hear exactly what they want. So that helps me.

Teach you inside Career Strategy Lab how to create that portfolio that gives recruiters and hiring managers what they want. So you are prepared to talk about your projects in an interview in the way that UX recruiters and hiring managers want to hear about them and so on and so forth, right?

On the topic of portfolios, here is like a perfect example. So I said earlier, if you continue down the DIY path, you’ll likely be working on your portfolio based on inaccurate tips and tricks you found online. One of those tips and tricks, or frankly, myths, is that you need three to five projects in your portfolio before you can apply.

So if you subscribe to this myth, how long is it going to take you to finish your portfolio? Only you can answer that, but it’s gonna be a while, right? Whereas inside my career strategy lab program, I tell people, you do not need three to five projects. You can get hired and interviews only with one project. And so that’s the difference with taking a DIY approach.

versus following strategies backed by what I hear recruiters and hiring managers want, and backed by I see what is working for people who are getting interviews and offers inside Career Strategy Labs. So Laura is a person who got hired with just one project in her portfolio. Now imagine if Laura had waited to have three to five projects in her portfolio.

She would have waited to apply. And what does that mean? It means that maybe she would not be in that new UX role until three months from now. And what does that mean? That means that by only having one project in her portfolio and applying, she got hired faster. Therefore, she was earning that salary faster, right? And that’s the power of not taking that DIY approach, is that you’re not just in Laura’s case.

Finishing your portfolio faster. You’re finishing a portfolio that gives recruiters and hiring managers what they want. And when you do that, you’re gonna get more interviews, which is gonna lead to offers, which is gonna lead to getting hired faster, which means there’s a financial benefit to that, right? the other cool thing about Laura is she didn’t even apply for the job.

Because she also optimized her LinkedIn profile, that person at that company found her on LinkedIn. That’s how then she got the interview, and then she got hired. But if she’d continued with the DIY approach, she might still be working on her portfolio trying to get those proverbial three to five projects in there.

I want to get to the big topic in today’s episode, which is the thing that you cannot DIY in your UX job search. And that is relationships and connections and proximity to people hiring. So I want to tell you about Marcus. Marcus was laid off from his role at eBay, and he did what maybe you are doing right now.

He decided to take the DIY approach to his job search. He spent six months applying, tweaking his resume, portfolio, et cetera. And he got rejection after rejection, or sometimes ghosted, like you’ve maybe experienced, right? And with those rejections and with the ghosting came confidence, right? A total decline in confidence, thinking that he was not good enough.

That he was not a desirable candidate anymore. And then he joined Career Strategy Lab six months after trying to DIY his job search, right? He got hired as a user researcher at NAVA, which is a mission driven consultancy where he works on federal projects with the Department of Justice. And that happened.

Because Marcus decided to stop the DIY approach after six months.

Now, how did Marcus get hired? It was partially because of his improved portfolio, LinkedIn, and resume. But here is what really moved the needle for him. It came down to relationships. So inside Career Strategy Lab, he made a couple of friends, right? And he noticed that someone worked at NAVA where he wanted to apply. So he reached out to her.

She gave him a referral link, and that’s how he got the interview at NAVA because he knew someone on the inside who could give him a referral link. If you want to hear more about Marcus’s episode, in his own words, I interviewed him in episode 122 of the podcast. I will also link it in the show notes. But relationships and proximity to people hiring.

Or people who work at companies where you want to work, that is very hard to DIY. It’s a lot easier to do that when you are in a community of other people. And the amazing thing about Career Strategy Lab is that now with 850 alumni and growing, we have become a job referral network because people are being able to get referrals to roles like Marcus did. But

They’re also connected with people who are actively hiring for roles at their company, on their team, et cetera.

All right, I want to give you another example of this really important differentiator between the DIY approach to your job search and not doing it alone and instead doing it in a community with other people. so Heather. Heather got laid off and she signed up for Career Strategy Lab pretty soon after the layoff. she’d interviewed at I think five or six places.

didn’t get hired and decided to not continue down the DIY path and join Career Strategy Lab. And while she was in Career Strategy Lab, she saw another person post who said their manager was hiring a contractor. So she reached out to this other person in Career Strategy Lab, sent him her resume. She ended up getting an interview, went through two or three rounds, and took a six month

contract at this company. This company has now hired five other alumni from Career Strategy Lab because of really this network effect that is happening. And this is very difficult to kind of manufacture on your own when you’re working on your job search in isolation or you’re working in on your job search and trying to network in like the ocean of LinkedIn, right?

Because on LinkedIn, you are a small fish in a giant ocean. Whereas in Career Strategy Lab with 850 and growing alumni, that might sound like a small network, but it is a lot easier to form relationships with people in a smaller pond, if you will, because you are more visible, right? Versus

You feel like invisible on LinkedIn. And why is that? It’s because of the gigantic volume of people on that platform.

So I want to wrap up today’s episode and ask you this. Three months from now, what is going to be different in your UX job search? Because you really have a fork in the road here, right? You can continue doing what you’ve been doing. But I would argue if you want a different outcome, you have to do something different. And only you know what you’ve been doing so far.

But if you decide to take this DIY approach, then I would challenge you to write down on a piece of paper what you are going to do differently. If you have struggled with comparison, for example, maybe you are going to tell yourself, I’m going to give myself another month to work on my portfolio, but I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of comparing my portfolio to other people’s because I don’t even know if their portfolio got them interviews or offers. So that’s one example.

Maybe you are thinking to yourself, I am gonna just keep applying for another three months and see what happens. I would challenge you that if you are applying, maybe you’re not focusing on applying to more roles and playing a volume game, but instead maybe you are applying to fewer roles, but roles that are more of a fit, and you are.

Customizing or tailoring your resume and your portfolio. Hopefully, you’re writing a cover letter for each of those roles that you’re applying for. So it’s not about just apply, apply, apply. It’s about be intentional about the roles you are applying to with better quality and more tailored materials because that will help you stand out. So DIYers get very specific about

What you are going to do differently. Because if you want a different outcome three months from now, you have to do something differently. And if you are choosing not to DIY or job search anymore and you’re wanting to leverage the support, the community, the referrals, the critiques, the live calls, and more that I have inside Career Strategy Lab, then get in touch with me, send me a DM on LinkedIn.

Reply to one of my emails. Use the contact form on my website, careerstrategylab.com, and I will share the details of how soon you can get into that program. because if you have been applying for three months, six months, twelve months, or longer, and you’ve reached that wall really, then I want you to know you don’t have to keep doing this on your own anymore.

And that myself and my team are the experts at helping you navigate the UX job search today. And we have the receipts to back it up. If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you hear the episodes I do where I’m interviewing alumni where they’re sharing how they got hired. And you can go back and hear for yourself why not going down.

That DIY path was the pivot point for them to getting more interviews and ultimately offers.

All right, that is all that I have for today’s episode. I will see you next week in another episode of the Career Strategy Podcast.