UX Hiring Insights: Patrick Neeman on Soft Skills, Strategy & Hiring Red Flags

Intro: [00:00:00] 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 are in the right place.

Sarah Doody: All right. Thanks for coming over from Riverside, everyone. We’re really excited because we have Patrick here he is. Going to give us a ton of awesome insights into not just UX hiring, but also how to stand out once you are hired too. I think [00:01:00] so much of what makes you stand out in your job search also makes you stand out as a candidate.

So Patrick, I’m gonna do like a little intro and then feel free to add onto it at the end if I, uh, miss anything you wanna highlight. And then we’re going to get into all of our questions. And we will maybe have time for q and a at the end. So, in case you don’t know Patrick, Patrick Neiman is the director of UX and AI experiences at Workday, and he’s led UX design for enterprise applications across a lot of different industries and has really honed in, in this niche of generative ai machine learning and also design systems.

He’s also developed design thinking strategies in large organizations. Also has taught, uh, UX at General Assembly in Seattle. I think it was around 2016 or something like that. And it was

Patrick Neeman: like [00:02:00] four years. It was like, or three and a half. It was like 2016 to 2019.

Sarah Doody: Okay. Yeah. Like it, I mean, a decade ago.

That’s wild to think. That was that long ago now. But we’re gonna get into that as well ’cause I have some questions that would be specific to people that maybe did General Assembly or something else. And Patrick also brings a really unique perspective on how emerging technologies are shaping user experience and product strategy.

And he is the author of UX GPT, mastering AI assistance for ux designers and product managers. So. He can give you a link to that and we’ll put it, uh, in the notes after this. But Patrick, do you wanna add anything else to your bio? Did I miss anything or how did I get,

Patrick Neeman: I got something, I got something really cool to show.

Sarah Doody: Awesome. Yeah,

Patrick Neeman: so, um, is the book, but, uh, not too much, not too much promoting on that I, I’m building on a tool that actually helps compare like all the answers [00:03:00] between the different AI and one of the, the funniest things about it ’cause it, it comes up with a summary of that. And then, and I’m, you know, this is an alpha, so I’m working on some of the visual and GPT five basically said I passed away in 2023.

Sarah Doody: Well, that’s a problem.

Patrick Neeman: So I think we’re gonna have to end the call, but like, this is, this has been pretty, this has been pretty cool. So I

Sarah Doody: have been, I don’t even know I’ve been transported to the future, the past of the afterlife. I don’t know. Wow.

Patrick Neeman: Yeah, it’s pretty funny.

Sarah Doody: Yeah. Phoenix says, sorry for your loss.

Patrick Neeman: Yeah. Okay. I, I, I had to tell my mom yesterday and she was a little bit upset.

Sarah Doody: I mean, talk about hallucinating. I can’t top that. I definitely have my own wild, wild stuff, but I, I will say probably at least every other day, I. Literally curse at chat GPT and say like, that was not in the transcript or that was not in the source material.

Why are you [00:04:00] making stuff up? So, yeah. Yeah, we can’t trust it yet. Wow. Human,

Patrick Neeman: human in the loop.

Sarah Doody: Uh, I’m speechless. Just what a crazy world we live in right now. Okay. In light of, uh, Patrick, Patrick is actually existing in real life today, uh, despite what chat GPT says. Let’s dive right in to UX hiring and big topic.

But I’m just curious, given the state of the job market right now. What are maybe one or two like shifts or changes you are seeing in how companies are hiring right now? And I just wanna caveat this for everyone and say I really like to treat these interviews as almost a user research interview because frankly it is.

And I say that because Patrick and I may say things that we disagree on, Patrick May say something different than what someone else said three weeks ago as a guest here. And it doesn’t mean that we should take one person’s word [00:05:00] over the other in research. Patrick, you can probably relate to this, like it’s all about triangulating to try and find themes, et cetera.

So keep that in mind. I don’t want you to just, you know, think that something should be taken without a grain of salt. So with that in mind, Patrick, state of the job market what are some shifts and changes you’re seeing in how companies are hiring right now?

Patrick Neeman: Uh, what a dumpster fire.

I, I’m gonna be a little bit authentic uh, a little bit of my background just to make sure that, you know, to kind of do it, kind of understand where I come from. I, I worked at a company called Jobvite, which was applicant tracking. Yeah. And I worked there for just under three years. And part of my job was to interview recruiters and, and, uh, hiring managers.

And then, you know, my career went in and I was hiring a lot of designers and everything. And now I’m working for Workday and they have their own ats and they were supposed to buy a job vi, but that’s a whole nother issue. And, and, and so [00:06:00] like, one of the things, you know, I, I had to actually hire a couple of head count recently and, and we focused highly in like, how do we hire people with AI experience and conversational experience?

And we wrote this really, really narrow job description. And because Workday is pretty good technology around filtering people out we weren’t getting many applicants. And, and like another part of it, another part about it, and this is something that I’ve been emphasizing to designers, like we’re still figuring out like how the tools like lovable fit into the process.

So on top of that, we don’t even know what the job titles are gonna be There, there’s a really good, uh, video about the, uh, product management is dead by um, VO and then she talks about the collapsing the talent stack. And so the skills that are required of designers are changing quite a bit. And one of the things going back to the book I, I, I’m actually, uh, have quite a bit of writing experience.

I’ve been a former journalist and such. Mm-hmm. And, and like [00:07:00] there’s almost this implicit requirement of you really know how to need to write well because of the prompt narration. And so it’s been a really focus on AI prototyping and really clear communication, which is actually pretty good. Yeah,

Sarah Doody: I,

Patrick Neeman: it’s, it’s good for getting those kind of designers, but it means, it means there’s a little bit of a skills mismatch between where we’re at and where some of the designers are at.

Sarah Doody: So if, if writing is a critical skill, in your opinion and we have everyone using generative AI to write stuff, like what can people, what is your advice to people on developing that writing muscle, if you will?

Patrick Neeman: Uh, well I like back to writing, and I’m gonna use the book as an example. I actually used chat, JT and Claude, to write the book.

And so we did a pretty heavy edit because to your point, there’s a, there’s a lot of areas where the assistants were still learning. Mm-hmm. But, uh, like one of the advantages that I [00:08:00] had personally was I, you know, I had the, the blog out there and there were like 260 or 280,000 words that my writing indexed.

So I noticed how to write like me, which is kind of ironic. Right. and so best advice that I’ve been giving people is like, think about it like, like it’s a high school essay. Generative tools are really, really good at writing structured language. And, and so if you think about it like a high school essay where there’s like, uh, like a, a introduction and then paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, paragraph, and in conclusion, then it actually works pretty well and it actually forces a level of structure in your writing that that helps quite a bit, even with, with, with the assistance because it understands that structure.

Sarah Doody: Hmm. Before I forget, I wanna go back to what you said about your experience recently in trying to hire these people. Mm-hmm. And your applicant tracking system, I think you said filtered out everyone. Did I get that right?

Patrick Neeman: All applicant tracking systems have [00:09:00] a level of filtering built based on certain keywords if they’re configured right.

Yep. That actually narrow, narrow down on certain keywords. The one thing that generative AI is really good is rewording steps. So they fit the keywords. We’re actually focusing on that, and so that might be one way of using it to actually improve the resume and also improve the case studies like the PDFs to, to, to help get ahead of other people.

Sarah Doody: Yeah. So can you, I wanna just stay on this topic of the applicant tracking system because I keep seeing you know, articles, I’m sure you do too, about how like, AI is changing, hiring, et cetera. And I think to myself, software like Job vi, Workday, et cetera, there has always been an element of, depending on the software Auto filtering people based on essentially knockout questions. Is that correct?

Patrick Neeman: Sometimes,

Sarah Doody: yeah. Like if you, if you, well, yeah, if, if, if the job says you need to be in the United States and you’re in Chile and you apply for the [00:10:00] job and they have that configured, then you are going to receive the, the no message, you know?

Patrick Neeman: Yep.

Sarah Doody: In theory, right?

Patrick Neeman: I’m that, that’s, that, that’s absolutely correct. Like what they do is they sometimes. Certain applicant tracking systems have what they call knockout questions.

Sarah Doody: Yes, exactly.

Patrick Neeman: And, and, and so I’ve been involved in designing that. And if you give a wrong answer or you have a wrong keyword, they’re gonna knock you out.

There are other applicant tracking systems and, and I’m not gonna name the brands because I have to be careful about that. Yeah. But there are other ones that I have to review every single candidate by hand, mainly because designers are a special snowflake with the way that we evaluate them. And, and so the only way to do it was like looking at the linking and looking at the, or the resume and looking at the, the portfolio to figure out are they a good fit?

Yeah. And, and, and so it really depends on. The applicant tracking systems and a lot of the applicant tracking system companies are actually kind of small, so they don’t have the, the actual talent [00:11:00] on, on staff to actually do all these really elaborate schemes around ai. So really just that your mileage may vary and there are a bunch of tools out there that help optimize for different applicant contracting systems.

So I always recommend going to one of them.

Sarah Doody: So if you could give people just one tip on what they can do, like the biggest bang for their buck changes to their resume mm-hmm. To try and increase their visibility to and in the applicant tracking system, what would you tell them?

Patrick Neeman: Let me go get the article.

I think I got it. Lemme go find it. So I’ve done a lot of mentoring off of a DP list. Mm-hmm. And there’s this one story that I talk about quite a bit, and I’m gonna go get this story. it’s a checklist of resources and how they think about it.

And the biggest tip that I give is around is around, don’t do a, do a two column layout for an applicant tracking system. And here’s why. A lot of them use a, use a form of OCR. So they bring in the PDF for the Word document and they [00:12:00] convert it to something that the applicant tracking system can understand.

And the, the, the one thing you have to remember about, uh, optical, character recognition, which is called OCR, some of that technology except for the addition of AI, hasn’t changed since 1992. And so what happens is it goes column one, oh look, and then there’s a column two. It sees that as one big line.

Mm-hmm. And so basically all the information that used so carefully. Crafted for the applicant tracking system doesn’t work ’cause it converts it to a text file. And this is a problem I see around document, uh, parsing and intelligence across the board is if there are tables or columns or anything, it just doesn’t understand the system.

So part of this is literally like having that checklist of do I, I would advise do one column for ATSs and two columns if you’re handing the resume to a person,

Sarah Doody: thank goodness. Because that’s what we teach here inside Career Strategy Lab.

Patrick Neeman: Yeah. Yeah. And, and every once in a while somebody says, well, you should always do a two column layout.

[00:13:00] And I’m like, no.

Sarah Doody: Yeah.

Patrick Neeman: Because like I know how the technology works because of my day job. Yeah. It it’s just, it, it’s, it’s an incorrect statement.

Sarah Doody: Yeah. And you always have to remember that, that version that gets into the applicant tracking system, it likely will be seen by a human. So you still need to make sure that it’s not like.

All eight point font and no white space and stuff. So you, there’s multiple users of your resume. So glad we cleared that one up. Let’s see here. So, I wanna touch a little bit on the idea of contract roles because there’s a myth out there that I keep hearing and people say, I don’t wanna apply to contract roles.

I’ve heard that recruiters, hiring managers, et cetera, think it’s a bad look. What is your hot take on the, uh, first impression of someone having contract roles on their resume?

Patrick Neeman: At this point where the market is, I wouldn’t even look down on somebody that had them. And, and so like in 2022 before Gen AI and before the, of the, [00:14:00] some of the organizational changes, it, it was something where recruiters like, don’t hire them.

But now I think that perspective is softening up quite a bit.

Sarah Doody: Yeah, I think. Contract roles have almost been normalized between the pandemic and the, the job market and the economy and everything. And you know, I, I always like to say if someone’s gonna look down on you for having contract roles, you might, it might be a, a blessing in disguise ’cause they might be a jerk to work with, in my opinion.

Yeah.

Patrick Neeman: Yeah. A lot of people, I mean, this has always been a problem with design field, but because every, everything’s been changing so fast, a lot of people are putting unreasonable expectations and it’s really a reflection of the organization.

Sarah Doody: Yeah, exactly. Okay, so I wanna switch gears and talk more specifics about what candidates can do to stand out more.

And you wrote a great article it’s called What Makes a Effective UX Professional. We’ll link to it for everyone and put it in the show notes, [00:15:00] but you said something that really stood out to me. Um, The lack of a clear professional identity leads to misaligned expectations and undervaluation of our work.

This was on medium if I didn’t mention that already, but it reminded me of something in that I often find when candidates are not clear on their professional identity, it manifests in their resume, in their portfolio, in what they say in interviews, et cetera. And so, I guess question one is really. Do you have any tips for candidates on how to get clearer on their professional identity?

Patrick Neeman: Yes, and they got an, even, even a better article that I wanna share and I’m looking for to Medium. ’cause I think it would actually help out quite a bit also. So I have this article called Ideal designer Profile, and it’s based off of marketing where they talk about ideal customer profile.

And I’m gonna share my screen and it’s really about who are you, right? Like what, what’s your [00:16:00] background? And the best story I have to tell about this is literally I had a designer that I was interviewing and he was actually a really, really good designer.

But the three things he really, really cared about was mobile. Consumer and accessibility and, and my background, I’ve never designed a mobile app for in my life for pay. You know, I care about accessibility, but a lot of places it’s been too expensive to implement the way that we wanted. Mm-hmm. And then um, consumer I am the least consumer designer you’ll ever meet.

And then, and so like when I talked to them, the three, he said, I want to do mobile consumer accessibility. And the three things my boss didn’t care about was mobile consumer and accessibility. And so I, based on that, and it, it isn’t his fault, he did find a role that, that fits his background, but like, literally it’s about you gotta define who you are.

Like, I’m Enterprise and that’s, that’s who I am and I accept it. And I’m not gonna be designing any Uber app for mobile. And so [00:17:00] you really have to decide if you’re a startup or big company. And, and sometimes the switch in between, like I’m working for a really big company, but I also have a lot of startup experience.

Mm-hmm. So it’s about really kind of figure out like where your focus should be in defining who you are when you’re early in your career. It’s gonna be challenging because you’re still learning who you are. But as you, as you keep evolving, then you’re gonna understand, you know, like one of the, one of the examples that I use is like, you know, when I was working in contract lifecycle management, VOS are a very special group.

They like data density. And it’s like literally if, if you don’t like having a lot of information on a screen and design design, it’s probably not the right field for you. Hmm.

Sarah Doody: Yeah. We will link to that, that article. Another thing you said in the article I mentioned was around how. soft skills can turn us into superheroes. And, you know, when companies are hiring, they definitely wanna see, you know, the, the craft, the hard skills, if you will. Right.

So do [00:18:00] you have any tips for candidates on how and where they can showcase their soft skills, you know, throughout their resume portfolio, et cetera? Do you have any tips related to that?

Patrick Neeman: I’m gonna point out one thing about soft skills, just about being a designer, and then we’ll go to that. Okay. Uh, I referred to this video where, uh, Neil Gaman, uh, famous author did this speech about, uh, for a commencement speech for college, uh, for a university, and was talking about you know, how do you get hired.

So it’s literally do good work, do it on time, and then be nice to people. People gotta like you. You really have to do two outta three. So if you do good work and you’re nice to people, they’re gonna give you a pass on some of the speeds. Hmm. Right. And, and so I really, I really give that advice quite a bit.

And then one of the things that we do you know, I’ve done in places I ask a lot of behavioral questions. And what I want to see is you got people to align, you bridge silos. You, you filled in a gap of ownership. If you have those kind of phrases on a [00:19:00] resume, I’m a data 0.01, but that actually plays really well with me.

Sarah Doody: Yeah. It’s really about walking people through, you know, not just what you did, I was responsible for X, Y, Z, but to your point telling us how you did it right. And that involves the collaboration, the solving of problems, the how you dealt with that curve ball that happened. And you just have to think of all the places you can communicate that, all the touch points, I guess, in your interview.

Patrick Neeman: Yeah, absolutely.

Sarah Doody: Alright, so, here’s a, here’s maybe a controversial one. What do you think is one thing that, that candidates think matters a lot, but actually doesn’t matter or probably isn’t worth their time? Like, is, are there any things you think candidates are doing or spending their time on that you would tell them, actually you should spend your time doing x, y, z?

Patrick Neeman: is an interesting one and I, and I, I’m kind, you know, and this is back to my data [00:20:00] 0.01, but like, I like decks a lot more than I like websites for looking at portfolios mainly because like the website. Yeah. And, and in smaller environments and startups, they might want somebody that actually could show that they can, they can code or do whatever in anything.

Uh, and I, you know, I, I keep hearing like, oh yeah, designers should code. And I’m going like, wow, that’s, you know, so 2005. But, but like when I, when I, when I see a story, I kind of wanna see how they present it in a deck because that’s the environment I work in. Like I work in an, uh, all remote environment or we work, going to work and we’re, but we’re on, we’re on calls, zoom calls all the time.

And so being able to convey a story and a number of slides is actually really important. And, and I would actually figure out like, how do you get to an optimal number of slides? Because like, I am overwhelmed by so many of these decks because there’s so many slides. It’s, it is challenging.

Sarah Doody: I am really fascinated with that take.

I, I agree with you, but that rationale of the deck [00:21:00] also provides a preview of how you will present and communicate ideas in, in your job if you’re hired. Makes a lot of sense. It just wasn’t on my pro con list of the website versus presentation that I have out there. So that’s a really interesting perspective.

And you know, back to the argument of well UX people should have a website ’cause you’re supposed to be able to make a website. And I often think of our mutual friend, Dan Macaron, who we were having a conversation one day and he essentially said like, I’m really good at product strategy and research, but you don’t want me to like literally make your website.

You know, and so I think we just have to keep in mind that not all roles within user experience. Are tied to the literal making of the website with your hands, you know, in the dirt, so to speak.

Patrick Neeman: Right. Like where I work at all the engineering teams take care of that. And so we have to know the constraints of what we’re doing, but we’re not gonna [00:22:00] know every single little detail.

Sarah Doody: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I wanna move on. Sorry, we’re kind of hopping all over the place, but I added this question because, you know, you, you did teach at general assembly and I’m curious. If you have any specific tips for people that are seeking their first UX job, whether that be after completing a, a program like General Assembly or even, you know, a graduate or master’s degree from somewhere like University of Washington’s HCI program.

I know that’s a really awesome program, but what tips do you think people earlier in their career or what mistakes maybe do you think they’re, they’re missing or making?

Patrick Neeman: So this has changed quite a bit from the, the general assembly days. I, I mean like, because before it wasn’t even really possible for a lot of designers.

I would say build a product, build a prototype, show me an idea, show me [00:23:00] that you know how to ship, show me that you, you’re thinking through like all the use cases and everything, because quite honestly, now you can do it. Like I, I have like two or three lovable apps on the internet that people are using and they’re not using ’em a lot, but they show that I, that they show that I know, I understand.

Conversation history and, and the prompting and the system prompts and all this other stuff. And it’s actually magical because when the designer gets a lot of control over what they’re doing, and like some of the, the AI tools produce really good experiences based on best practices and it actually enhances their portfolio.

And so like, that’s, that’s the big new tip that I would do. And it would actually show that you’re willing to move to this new world. I mean, it’s changing quite a bit, but this is like one of the change like that, that that ship is sailed

Sarah Doody: and

Patrick Neeman: this is a way of demonstrating value.

Sarah Doody: Yeah. And maybe this question is premature given, you know, lovable, et cetera is somewhat new-ish, but has anyone ever done that for roles that you were hiring for?

Whether they, you [00:24:00] know. used AI to make it, or, or did it some other way?

Patrick Neeman: We had three designers that we interviewed recently that used AI to build prototypes and were able to walk us through it.

Sarah Doody: Did you hire any of them?

Patrick Neeman: Two of them.

Sarah Doody: Amazing. Amazing.

Patrick Neeman: Yeah, they, they, they got moved up to the front because I, you know, basically I’m looking for a world where prototyping is actually more prevalent than Figma.

Hmm.

Sarah Doody: Interesting. Two outta three. That’s pretty great. Okay, so

Your answer really puts to rest the debate of, uh, can I include personal or mock projects in my portfolio? And, and we agree. I’ve always thought, yeah.

Like, I wanna hear how that idea came to be, like what problem were you solving, et cetera. And just because it didn’t launch and there’s 50,000 users or something, doesn’t mean it can’t show me how you think, operate, communicate, et cetera.

Patrick Neeman: Yeah. Like a, a good example of, of something [00:25:00] where designers have to be really careful about what they take on.

’cause like a, a typical use case is redesigning an airline ticket.

Sarah Doody: Mm, yes. Or the, or the,

Patrick Neeman: or the experience. And that’s something that’s been kind of, uh, tortured. And um, one of the, the trivia questions I’m, uh, I’m an answer to is who worked at Orbits before it launched? Let me tell you, learning everything about the airline industry and like what, what ticketing looks like, that’s something that no designer should ever try to do without really understanding like all the constraints of World Spa.

Mm-hmm. And so you have to be really careful about the examples you use.

Sarah Doody: Yeah. It, it reminds me of, you know, like redesigns of Spotify or other kind of data heavy things. Even something like Uber is like, well, nice, cute idea in theory, but how would that ever actually be able to manifest given, you know, the, the data or like accessibility of that data, et cetera.

So, yeah, I, I agree. The [00:26:00] boarding pass has kind of been beat to death in my opinion.

Patrick Neeman: Yep.

Sarah Doody: Alright, so, uh. We already kind of covered this one, but maybe there’s another answer that will pop into your mind. But, you know, when it comes to the software that is used in hiring, are there any other misconceptions that candidates may have apart from, you know, uh, two column resume and if it’s auto rejecting people, which we already talked about.

Patrick Neeman: Yeah. Well, let’s go back to the ats. Yes. And misconceptions misconception number one, companies are really good at hiring. They’re not.

Sarah Doody: And why is that?

Patrick Neeman: They, they use not have a clear idea of who they wanna hire or even what the, what the description should be. And, and a lot of them, what they do is they pull a description off the internet and use that and don’t, u don’t usually edit it.

We, you know, where I work at, we actually provide tools to help them out with that. But a lot of companies don’t really pay attention to that, or they don’t even know how to structure the interview process. That’s one that I’ve seen [00:27:00] to, uh, thinking that all applicant tracking systems have all this AI in it.

You know, the one that I work on has it. But a lot of them don’t, mainly because they just, they aren’t that, that technologically advanced. They don’t have a team for it.

Sarah Doody: Yeah.

Patrick Neeman: Number three, thinking that like re recruiters are the most organized people in the world. They’re not so, like, they, you know, it’s basically they get buried with a whole bunch of resumes.

And do you talk about the six second study?

Sarah Doody: No, but tell us about it.

Patrick Neeman: So, uh, there, they did this study at the Ladders and this was like, oh yeah, a decade and a half ago. And they talk about how long do recruiters look at a resume and they did eye tracking and they found it to be six seconds on average.

And, and, and so it’s, it’s actually true because I would take like a 22nd glance of do they, does it look like a resume? Does it look like a case study? And then based on the design, if it’s too elaborate or for, you know, if something that, I don’t think it’s gonna be a fit. Then I would, you know, [00:28:00] basically put it in the reject list and, and then I’d do a first pass, and then, then I’d do a second pass, and then I figure out who I wanna, uh, interview.

Right? And so literally it almost becomes like this winnowing down to getting down to the, the first one. And it’s never a fair process. And, and so the way that I, that the advice I’ve given is like, the world’s an unfair place. Make it unfair for somebody else. So you gotta figure out a way of standing up and it’s kind of challenging now.

Sarah Doody: And so in the spirit of like, let’s help candidates control what they can control in the job search, thinking back to like resumes that, that have stood out to you, you know, what might pass that six second test.

Patrick Neeman: Clean layouts, good typography, really good wine spacing. Really good hierarchy of information, that’s an information architecture challenge.

and really don’t, like, not, not, I actually don’t want it to be too creative.

Does that make sense?

Sarah Doody: [00:29:00] Totally. Yeah. Yeah, because

Patrick Neeman: I, I work in enterprise, like if you’re working consumer, if it’s, if you’re going artistic, that’s fine, but I work in enterprise. The other thing that I, I’m gonna bring up in this uh, in this, this call mentioning it, is like, figure out a way of networking with people at the company.

There’s this notion of what they call weak ties, which is basically you know, I have a friend that that’s looking for a designer. I know a bunch of designers. I’m gonna refer one of them to them. And the, the person who did the study on this and define a weak ties as a concept is Mark Vetter. And he found that, uh, in his study, and it’s down here further, the strength of weak ties.

He found that 53% of people, or 56 or some crazy number, I think it’s somewhere in here, actually got their job through a weak tie, and he did the study in 1973. So the whole business of LinkedIn is built around the weak ties. And it’s really, it’s about how do you network, how do you be [00:30:00] nice to people so they get to know you and then, and then basically you get ahead of the other candidates.

Sarah Doody: That’s fascinating. And, and you think like if, if it was important back then when social media didn’t exist. How much more important and hopefully how much easier is it now if you can you know, not have to like, contact people by telephone or a letter in the mail or something like that. So in the, in the spirit of relationships and connections do you have any tips for people, whether it be things candidates have done or people in your network, how weak ties have engaged you or how you engaged weak ties to, to get hired?

Do you have any stories or examples you can share with us on building and maintaining relationships in your job search and your career in general?

Patrick Neeman: There’s always like a list of people that I kind of keep in touch with just to see how they’re going go going. And it’s more along the lines. It’s, it’s not because I’m saying, Hey, I’m gonna get a job for them.

It’s just about, we want to talk about technology [00:31:00] and cool stuff. And so like, you know, the, the one thing that I point out a lot about the weak ties thing, the last time I got a job, it was either, it was either through a recruiter going after me or I actually knew the people hiring and they were acquaintances of mine.

The, the last time that I got a job outside of the recruiter or that, uh, was literally, uh, two decades ago, you know, like you literally, the ever start job was somebody that, that, that I had worked with before. He brought me in. And then we got acquired by Workday. You go back to I Service, it was a weak tie.

You go back to Apio was, it was a recruiter. It, it is so far back. And I did, I did interview you for other jobs also, but a lot of those interviews were also weak ties, and they just decided not, they decided to go a different direction, which is totally okay too.

Sarah Doody: Right, right. And I’m curious from your ex your perspective actually hiring.

What are your thoughts on candidates either [00:32:00] before or after they apply, contacting you, the hiring manager? Has that happened to you on LinkedIn or email? Is that effective or what makes a good reach out, you know, stand out versus one that you just ignore?

Patrick Neeman: Uh, it, it, it, it depends. Like there was my backfill for Workday, for the, you know, the, the role that I was in before.

Mm-hmm. Like, you know, there were a bunch of people contacting me, but it was a different group. So I just told ’em, look, I’m not in charge of that hiring process. And it was okay. You know, if it’s a smaller company you do research, I’d say go ahead and do it. If it’s a larger company, I would actually avoid it because you might be reaching out to the wrong person.

Hmm. You know, and quite honestly, my LinkedIn inbox is a whole bunch of people looking for selling me IT systems because they don’t do really good filtering of, oh, you got AI in your title? Yes, I know how to spell it. But I, like a lot of us, we’re getting so, so much spam on LinkedIn. It’s kind of hard to, to stand out.[00:33:00]

Sarah Doody: If only LinkedIn would redesign the inbox to allow us to organize the conversations so we could, you know, pay attention to the ones that matter, et cetera.

Patrick Neeman: Yep.

Sarah Doody: Alright, so as, as someone who, you know, has progressed in, in your UX career and gone from, you know, like mid to senior to super senior, whatever you wanna call yourself what are some tips that you have for people as they’re, let’s think as they’re going from mid to senior and then maybe we’ll go from like junior to mid.

Patrick Neeman: I got a really interesting comment about this.

Sarah Doody: Yeah.

Patrick Neeman: You wanna know how many times I’ve held the title Senior UX designer,

Sarah Doody: either every job or no job.

Patrick Neeman: I’m at zero.

Sarah Doody: Okay. There you go. Yeah. Like I

Patrick Neeman: came, I came in as a print designer, I was a creative director. There were places where I was a consultant or I was managing people.

That’s been my entire career. And, and so one of the things I [00:34:00] actually tell my designers is like for some of the, the progression through the career ladder, I don’t actually know, I don’t have empathy for it. I, I have compassion, but I don’t have direct experience. Okay. And so it actually presents challenges because of the way that it came up.

What I will tell you when I wanna give advice on is like how to get to principle. It’s about having a wide swap of like, what, what’s go, like affecting a system. And it’s about going deep at one point and then going wide at another and going deep when you need to. And so, and it, it’s a really challenging thought process.

And so you have to get all these different experiences to get there. And, and the other thing that I explain to designers is as you grow up in your career, the ladder na uh, narrows Hmm. And so there are less positions. Like, I got the coolest job title in the world. I don’t want to get promoted. Having AI in my job title is like the, the kind of the cap of a really cool career where I’ve got to do with some awesome, awesome things.

Mm-hmm. And, and so you have to be really [00:35:00] targeted and show value every day because you don’t know when you’re gonna get picked.

Sarah Doody: Hmm. Yeah. You never know when that recruiter might come knocking on your LinkedIn inbox. With a perfect fit job, it’s very useful to kind of always be ready.

Patrick Neeman: Yep.

Sarah Doody: So here’s a good follow up to that. So, if you were hypothetically job searching, you know, on Monday, uh, what would you do differently than maybe what you would’ve done five years ago, let’s say, or three years ago,

Patrick Neeman: five years ago, I would’ve gone in the figment. Does it take.

Taken all the stuff I worked on and polished it and put it in a deck. Today I would build a lovable prototype with the assets I have, get it as close to look and feel that, that, that I could to the application and actually record a video or walk people through it. Hmm. Because there’s like literally lovable prototypes.

They stop traffic. They are [00:36:00] so amazing. ’cause people get to see the story and if you can practice a story with that, it’s actually super helpful.

Sarah Doody: Yeah, yeah.

Patrick Neeman: Additionally, another thing that I’ve been playing with is this tool called Paygen. We’re recording a video where I basically, I, I have a little bit, it’s really strange.

One, I’m actually recording things that I have to prep for. I have a little bit of social anxiety. But doing this, because it’s really kind of free form, I, I enjoy quite a bit. So what I’ve done is I’ve used hey, Jen, to produce like representations of me talking through my case study. It’s pretty good.

Sarah Doody: Hey Jen, like Jennifer, but Jen.

Patrick Neeman: H I’ll do, I’ll type it in in the, okay. Jen,

Sarah Doody: I’m super curious about this one. I’ve definitely not heard of it.

Patrick Neeman: Yeah, basically you can do other people where you do your own avatar and record video and you could pump in a script and it’ll do it for you.

Sarah Doody: Very interesting. Okay. We will definitely check that out.

I’m sure some people on the call right now will check it out. Alright, [00:37:00] so that kind of wraps up all my questions. Is there anything that we didn’t cover that you wanna leave us in terms of, you know, last wisdom for someone that is involved in hiring and, you know, also works in on software that is involved in hiring,

Patrick Neeman: everybody’s not perfect.

Like it’s un unfair world. There’s a lot of decisions made that are a lot less about you and just about the way the system works. I mean, one of the conversations I, I had with somebody about this. The hiring process is, isn’t about can you do the job, they really, you’re basically, it’s about can you interview?

Mm. And, and it’s, it’s kind of an, it’s kind of an unfair process to be honest, because, you know, how you present in an interview will be much different than how you present on a day-to-day basis.

Sarah Doody: Yeah.

Patrick Neeman: And so it’s really working through that, working through that as a whole process.

Sarah Doody: Yeah, I think it’s really, it’s really challenging and my advice to people is, is [00:38:00] always, you know, if you feel passionate about changing how broken it is, then focus on getting hired first, and then go be that change in the company where you are.

But if you try and focus on both while you’re trying to get hired, it is just going to, it’s gonna drag you down, it’s gonna reflect your personality, your outlook, your mindset, et cetera. So yeah, hopefully some people can go get hired at companies and start to be the change internally.

Patrick Neeman: Can I add one more thing to that?

Yeah,

Sarah Doody: yeah.

Patrick Neeman: We’re going through very, uh, dynamic changes in our environment. And, and the pressures you all are feeling, literally are all the pressures that everybody internal to these companies are feeling. Hmm. And it’s a very, very challenging and stressful time. So one thing to remember is like having compassion the person at the other end.

And here’s another reason why they move from company to company to company. And they might remember you and they might decide you weren’t a fit for one company and then you’re a fit for another. And I’ve [00:39:00] actually had that happen to me where like, there was a crew that recruited me to one company, they moved to another company.

I was thinking about working over there, and they, they just, you know, told the story about the previous interview. and it, it’s actually back to Seattle. Seattle is a big company and a small town. And, and so, and people have long, long memories here. And so one of the things you have to be careful of, of like making sure that you’re, you’re presenting yourself in a way that they might remember you in a good light four or five, seven years ahead.

Sarah Doody: Yeah. It, it goes back, it ties beautifully back to the weak ties that you mentioned, right? I mean, the power of acquaintances and being very mindful about the first impression and the ongoing, uh, touch points I guess, that you have with people you know, in, in so many scenarios.

Patrick Neeman: Absolutely.

Sarah Doody: Yeah. Well we may have time for one or two [00:40:00] questions, so I wanna look at the chat and I don’t know if Becca or Erin, if you’ve spotted any that, that we should throw it.

Patrick here live. What do you think?

Becca: Yeah, that would be great. If you don’t mind, Patrick, I saw a couple in here. There was a question from AAM who said, what advice would you give to a person who keeps making it to final rounds, but has failed to land on an offer in the current market?

Patrick Neeman: One of the, the pieces of advice I give is like, I track every, every single interview that I ever have, and I put notes in that interview as far as like, Hey, how did it go? What do we think the trigger point was and everything. And then I also, after the fact mark that interview of like, would I have like working there?

After the fact. And for, for example, there was one particular job that I interviewed with that I, I didn’t take it because I took the role and then, and then I I realized it wasn’t gonna be a good fit for that other role [00:41:00] anyway. And then I talked to a senior director that was in that role after me and totally confirmed it.

And so I, I’m religious about taking notes on the interviews to see if it can spot any patterns. And I got, I got notes all the way back to 2016. It’s pretty crazy.

Sarah Doody: Well, you never know if you might interview again at a company that you interviewed at in 2018 or something. I mean, obviously the, the culture has changed, but those are good, uh, interview breadcrumbs to not delete off the cloud.

Patrick Neeman: Yeah. And it, it’s great to do now with Gen ai it’s even easier. It’s great to, to do some research on the company after the fact. Yeah. And go like, probably a good choice not to work there.

Sarah Doody: Yep. Definitely. All right. Is there any more, Becca?

Becca: We had a question from Ellie. Ellie said, I’ve noticed that many hiring managers still emphasize Figma proficiency, but are also starting to expect experience with AI assisted design tools like lovable. Could you share your perspective on how designers should balance [00:42:00] the two? For example, how important is it to demonstrate the ability to move from AI generated designs into Figma for refinement?

Patrick Neeman: I’m expecting more lovable experience than Figma and I, I’ll, I kind of want to get a Figma because my approach is more prototyping esque, uh, a big fan of a tool called actual rp, but lovable is more valuable now. That, that’s a really hard one of where you spend your time.

The, the one thing that I expect designers to, to be good at right now is prompt engineering. Hmm. Because of the nature of the work that we do. And, and so I, I even look for them, do they do their pre-game planning in Gemini or CLO or chat GBT before they hit lovable so they understand the workflow?

Sarah Doody: Yeah. Go, goes back really nicely to the idea of like, don’t just show the final thing, show the process. And that step, like you said, of how did you, you know, plan out and strategize about what you were going to build. And lov lovable beforehand is just as important, if not [00:43:00] more important than the actual lovable thing.

Patrick Neeman: Yeah. And I, I’m gonna use Ellie’s question as example in the chat. She, she walked through the actual prompting. She used my book. To show how she did the prompting and walk through the process of how she did all the pre-planning. It was pretty cool.

Sarah Doody: All right. We will make sure we link to that book. I think that’s all we have time for, guys. So Patrick, thank you so much. This was, it was great to just catch up with you. Great to hear what you’re up to. And you know the reason, like I said at the beginning, the reason we do these is to help give people perspective from people involved in hiring, because I know social media and LinkedIn is just so full of opinions on hiring and.

You know, if the opinion is coming from someone who is not actively involved in hiring, then it could just be throwing people into a, a dumpster fire essentially. So,

Patrick Neeman: not, not helpful.

Sarah Doody: Not helpful. Right. So thank you for, for giving us your time to be able to share [00:44:00] your, your real life experience as someone on the other side of hiring.

Patrick Neeman: Thank you.

Sarah Doody: Thanks. Alright. That’s all guys. Thanks Patrick. bye.

Outro: 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 careerstrategylab.com/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 careerstrategylab.com/hired.

And please feel free to send me a DM on LinkedIn. I would love to hear from you.

Post Roll: 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 [00:45:00] offer or interviews yet. First of all, I want you to know it’s not your fault. It is challenging out there and 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 career strategy lab.com/apply to learn more or have a call with someone on my team or myself so we can answer all of [00:46:00] your questions. Hope to talk to you soon.