5 tips for UX designers when dealing with us mean, mean recruiters

We all know that recruiters can come as the good, the bad, and the ugly. This is not a secret and depending on your experience you may have had to kiss a few frogs to get your Prince Charming.

However, it’s a two way street and so I want to make the life of my candidates, and all of you lovely UX designers out there, easier by sharing some tips on how to get those interviews and get those dream jobs (or atleast a better one). These tips go for whether you are dealing with me or an internal recruiter at a company.

Artists, you need to live and breath that mindset

Your CV is your selling point. If you’re designer this is especially true. Make your CV look and feel like you are creative.

It simply cannot look like a standard CV with lots of paragraphs. You’ll want a picture of yourself, some graphics, a bit of colour, anything that says you.

Yes I do want to know what your hobbies are! Yes I do want to know why you love UX design! This is your story, tell it, make it human. Someone employs you after all, warts and all.

As UX is such a new topic, most of you won’t have started your career as a UX designer. Tell me your journey about how you got to where you are.

Be the carpenter, not the toolkit

I will start by saying that it is important to know what programs and tools you are comfortable with. That’s key. So do tell me about your competencies with Sketch, or Axure or whatever latest cool thing is insert here..

However, if I had to choose, I would much rather hear what you designed, how did you collect the requirements? What was the outcome and did you enjoy it? This sort of story puts a smile on my face and if you make me smile then you have half a foot in the door.

Be clear

Are you a UX designer? Are you a GUI developer? Give me a title to work from. You will have a chance to showcase all of your skills, don’t worry. A good recruiter will read all of your CV and understand your story a bit before the interview, but be clear from the start as being unclear can be a showstopper and make you forgettable.

Remember, recruiters have lots of CV’s that the see everyday, make me remember you.

No Netflix and Chill? Cool!

I really want to know if you spend your evenings on courses and weekends at conferences. I want to know what bootcamps you have been on and what blogs you write.

Include details and links of all this in your dossier. It will make you stand out, it will show you to be passionate and it will make me excited to speak to the person behind this CV for of passion and enthusiam.

A word on portfolios

They are supremely important. Possibly the most important part of your CV. Please don’t show me just the final product.

The job you’re after doesn’t start with the final product. I would love to also see your hand sketches, your mistakes, your thinking, and then the beautiful and user friendly outcome.

Finally, it sounds so simple but a link to an online portfolio is better than a pdf of lots of pages. If I am to send your CV to hiring managers then it would be great if it could all fit on one email. I once had to send 5 emails to one CTO for just 3 candidates due to size restrictions.

That’s all folks, I hope that was helpful, if you want to read more on how I learnt this stuff and how I used to be pretty bad at this then here is the link :)

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-i-sucked-ux-recruitment-do-longer-matthew-smith?trk=prof-post

Cheers, Matt