4 important tips for design job seekers
As industries that were hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic resume hiring, many design candidates will spend the spring and summer polishing their resumes and hunting for new jobs. I’ve been a hiring manager for over 8 years, and during the past year I have myself interviewed for several jobs, one of which I accepted. With the experiences of being both an interviewer and an interviewee fresh in my mind, I wanted to share some learnings from my own experience as well as common mistakes that I’ve seen design candidates make. I’ve organized these recommendations into four key categories:
1. Craft a well-organized and easily scanned resume
Your resume is your first opportunity to demonstrate your design talents, and you want to leave a good first impression. I have seen prospective candidates make two critical errors in their resumes that make them much less likely to make the interview stage.
The first is to give their resumes minimal design attention. I have reviewed hundreds of resumes for design positions that look like they were made with a basic text editor. Key features include a single column, lots of bullet points, and no color or borders. Many use the exact same font style throughout the resume, creating a distinct lack of hierarchy throughout the document. As a design candidate, you should treat your resume like your first and most important design project on the path to getting a job.
I have also seen many resumes that go the opposite direction, including so many design flourishes and packing in so much information that it is difficult for a prospective reviewer to know where to start. These resumes are often overly colorful, filled with little bar charts and other visualizations meant to showcase a candidates level of skill in particular areas. Some continue on for pages, describing projects in exhaustive detail, even though the candidate should already have a web portfolio to accomplish this task.
A good rule of thumb is to try to keep your resume to a single page, possibly adding a second page if you have significant experience (10+ years). Your resume is one of your most important information architecture projects, where you have limited space and time to make your best sales pitch to users who can quickly move on to the next option. Resist the urge to list every job or project you’ve completed, particularly when they aren’t relevant to the jobs to which you are applying. Resist using Microsoft Word to design your resume, as it will limit your ability to organize information. A well designed resume will allow a recruiter to find and understand the following within 10 seconds of reading.
- Candidate’s name
- Candidate’s previous positions (company, years employed, title) and key achievements that are relevant to the position
- Candidate’s education (institution(s), degree(s), and years attended)
- Candidate’s most important skills, which should match the job requirements as much as possible
- Candidate’s contact information, including email address, portfolio, and social media links, if present, all which should have embedded hyperlinks
Additional information, such as personal achievements, interests, and a summary of goals, can be present in a succinct form to add additional flavor and personalization, but should not overshadow the above information. I even had one candidate list “2006 Time Person of the Year” under a short achievements section, which added a little humor without crowding out otherwise important information. Recruiters often have to read through hundreds of resumes every day, and they do not have time to read a small essay on your final school project. Help them do their job, and they may move you on to the next stage of the process.
2. Focus on the most promising positions
As the years pass, more and more of the hiring process has gone digital. It is easier than ever to fire a resume off to hundreds of positions, and many candidates opt for this path. These candidates are often poor matches to the job description, don’t stand out from the dozens of applicants with basic design skills and generic or blank cover letters, and rarely move forward to the next step in the hiring process. Even if it only takes a few minutes to submit an online application, you are wasting everyone’s time if you aren’t a good match.
There are several things that a prospective candidate can do to stand out in crowd of resumes. The first is to ensure that the skills and experience highlighted in your resume match the job description. This may mean tweaking your resume for a particular position to emphasize certain aspects of your background and experience. If you lack a significant amount of skills or experience listed in the job description, you should consider not applying. If you do decide to apply despite these apparent deficiencies, you need to clearly articulate why you believe you are still a strong candidate for the role.
The next step is to write an engaging cover letter. If your cover letter could apply to any position by changing one or two sentences, or simply restates your resume, it is likely too generic and won’t aid your attempt to secure a job offer. On the other hand, a cover letter that is written from the heart by a passionate applicant who has clearly read about the company and the position and highlighted exactly why they are a good fit is more likely to catch a recruiter or hiring manager’s eye. This is also your best opportunity to explain why any gaps between your resume and the job description should not be a deal breaker. Unfortunately many recruiters ignore cover letters, but if you are focusing on the jobs to which you are a good fit, it’s worth taking an extra 20 minutes to write an informed cover letter. Remember to respect your recruiter’s time by keeping your cover letter brief (~300 words) and proofread carefully.
Focusing on the most promising positions also means engaging with the company and team to which you are applying. If the job is local, see if any design team members attend local meetups, professional groups, or are part of local Slack groups. Whether it is local or remote, you should look for connections on LinkedIn or other social media platforms. This is where prior networking comes into play, so if you are not engaged with the professional design community, now is the time to start.
Once you have opened a channel for dialog, engage with your contact(s) about the company, role, and team. Don’t oversell yourself; instead, focus on forming relationships and learning about the position. You will have ample opportunity to highlight your skills and experiences during the interview process, and your initial contact may be enough to get an internal referral, which usually leads to a phone screen. You may even learn that the role is not the best fit for you before you apply, which can save you and everyone else considerable time.
While the focused approach does require a higher initial investment of time and energy, it not only makes it more likely that you will eventually land a job, but it makes it much more likely that you find a job and culture that you enjoy. Nothing wastes more time then starting your job hunt all over again after 6 months.
3. Prepare to discuss the right projects
During interviews, I frequently ask a candidate to tell me about a particular situation, only to wait through an agonizing 10–20 of “let me think” and “hmm, that’s a tough one”, and then listen to a jumbled explanation that isn’t even a good fit for the situation I presented. Other candidates will spend the entire interview speaking in hypotheticals, as if they have never done similar work before. The best way for interviewers to understand your skills, capabilities, and experience is to ask about your previous work, and any candidate who wants to perform well should be prepared for these questions.
Many junior candidates struggle due to a limited number of projects, while experienced candidates often get stuck choosing one project from many years of work. However, most interview questions can be handled with just a handful of examples, as long as they cover some common themes:
- A situation where you overcame a significant challenge.
- A situation where you succeeded and measured the success.
- A situation where you failed at some level but learned from the failure.
- A situation where you took on a leadership role.
- Situations where you faced interpersonal conflict with teammates and stakeholders.
- For people managers, situations that demonstrate your leadership style and how you deal with problems from your reports.
Many projects encompass multiple situations outlined above, but before entering any interview, you should be prepared with at examples that address the above points. If possible, spend 5–10 minutes immediately before the interview reviewing project notes and deliverables and mentally preparing yourself to go into depth on them to answer questions that may arise. Your ability to respond quickly and with confidence will position you well against other candidates who stumble through project details, no matter how impressive or interesting the projects themselves may be.
Finally, make sure that these projects are represented in your online portfolio. Even if you are restricted in sharing details of your deliverables publicly by terms of your previous employment, you can often still give an outline of the project, the role you played, and the outcome. Interviewers may refer to your portfolio before, during, and after the interview, and continuity will help them in shaping a positive view of your experience.
4. Tailor your responses to your audience
I have already discussed the importance of tailoring your application, particularly your resume and cover letter, to the needs of the particular position to which you are applying. As you move through the interview process, it is also important to craft your interview responses for the audience with which you will be speaking.
Early on in the process, you are most likely to speak with a recruiter, or possibly a hiring manager at a smaller company. Recruiters are rarely experts in design or user experience, and often have only a basic knowledge of many roles out of necessity. They know the checklist of skills, experiences, and design tools requested by the hiring manager, and they generally have a good understanding of general qualities that make a good employee (hard-working, open to new ideas, accepting of criticism, etc.). Internal recruiters in particular will be interested in how well you fit into the culture of the company. If you’ve done your research ahead of time, you should be able to demonstrate how you will be a good fit for both the requirements of the position and the culture of the organization.
Most hiring managers will themselves be designers, so it is particularly important to be honest but positive about your own skills and experience. Make sure you have reviewed current design trends and advice from professional publishing communities like UX Collective, but resist the urge to fall into constant name-dropping. If a particular book or author is relevant to the conversation, feel free to mention it in your conversation, but bringing up big names in the design community too often will overshadow your own achievements.
At some point during the interview process you are likely to speak with team members beyond the hiring manager and recruiter. These interviewers often include software developers, product managers, other designers, analysts, researchers, members of the support team, marketers, and more. At smaller companies that have yet to build a design team, the hiring manager may themselves be in one of these roles. If you are given names ahead of time, I recommend that reviewing their profiles online to understand a little of their professional background and interests.
Even if this is not possible, you should always prepare to recount situations in your past when you successfully interacted with teammates in a similar role. Ultimately, most prospective teammates are most interested in two things: whether they will enjoy working with you, and whether you can help them and their team succeed. Your answers to their questions should aim to satisfy both of these questions, and are likely to vary based on who you are speaking with. For example, if a product manager asks a question about overcoming a challenge, you could talk about finding a solution to a particularly vexing customer problem which led to an increase in overall customer approval. If the question comes from a developer, you might focus on a technical problem which your worked closely with an engineering team to find an elegant and usable solution that didn’t add technical debt.
While your answers should consider your audience, it is important to ask questions yourself when given a chance. Use the opportunity to try to understand each interviewer’s day-to-day work and needs. Not only will it help you give more appealing answers, but you will find yourself in a more comfortable position as you gain familiarity with your interviewer and their environment. Most people enjoy talking about their work and passions, and interviewers move more quickly and smoothly if they transition into a more natural conversational flow. In addition, if you do get an offer, learning more about the team will help you decide if it is a company where you would be comfortable working.
Finally, make sure to be friendly and courteous in all your interactions. You may be working with these colleagues for years, and it is important that you feel comfortable with each other. Most interviewers would rather take a chance on a bright, friendly team-player who may need a little extra mentoring than an unfriendly or aloof rock star. Send an individually-tailored thank-you email to each of your interviewers after each interview, or ask the recruiter or hiring manager to pass it on if you don’t have their contact information. Even if you don’t end up working with them now, you may encounter them in the future, and it never hurts to build professional relationships.
Conclusion
The tips above will not guarantee you a design job, but they will position you well against the competition. Remember that even the best designers in the industry have faced challenges in getting a job offer. As the exact needs of the hiring manager and the skills and background of the competition are beyond your control, you should focus on the aspects you can control by putting forth the best possible application and interviews.
Be ready to accept some degree of failure during the process as a learning experience, and don’t be afraid to reach out to the recruiter or hiring manger if you have questions about the process. Continue to apply, interview, and network, and good luck on the job hunt!
