The death of entry-level design and research roles
Candidates switching careers or graduating HCI programs are landing unwanted and trapped in the job market
Since tech hiring “pot” went from boiling and active to still and quiet, I’ve noticed a shift in my mentees on ADPList, a free design mentoring platform.
I typically mentor entry-level designers and researchers and they’ve always had a nervous energy: an excitement about this next chapter in their lives and/or an anxiety made overwhelming by imposter syndrome.
For the last year, my mentees have reached a new level of exasperation. “All the entry level roles require work experience,” they say. I empathize and agree that’s pretty messed up, and try to guide them on how to present the experiences they do have.
I thought maybe it was because jobs were listed with a “Product Designer” title, but when I checked, it was worse than I thought.
Here’s the job requirements for 2 real job postings I found on Sep 12, 2023 for full-time positions. Emphasis is my own.
Example 1: “Junior Product Designer”
- Minimum 1 year of project experience required — fully remote position
LM: Okay, project experience could mean lots of things, maybe this isn’t so bad. - 1 year experience working in technology as a Product Designer
LM: Whoops, looks like this is what they meant. New graduates or career changers most suited to this title wouldn’t have this 🤨 - Experience shipping products with a cross-functional team of PMs and engineers, throughout all stages of product development
LM: All stages depends on the company/feature maturity and requires working on a scrum team for a meaningful period of time. - Strong communication skills to articulate design decisions and drive stakeholder alignment
- Experience building internal tools as well as consumer-facing experiences
LM: 1 year of experience could provide this type of breadth? Please, someone, tell me how folks realistically achieve this? 🤯 - Comfort in a startup environment — You’re adaptable to ambiguity and change and can work on more than one project at a time in a fast-paced environment
LM: Most entry-level designers haven’t had real-world practice prioritizing work and responding to conflicting feedback. That’s a pretty intimidating skill to have right out of school or a bootcamp. - You approach research and design with rigor and craft but can execute pragmatically to find the simplest solution
- The full stackability to uncover user needs with research, explore UX possibilities, and execute visually polished, engineering-ready design
LM: To be truly “full stack” you have to have the time to build depth of all these skills. Doing it and doing it well are different things. Folks will learn the steps through training, but when does it get full stack status? - Bonus: You also have experience in marketing web design
LM: Okay sure this is a bonus skill, but talk about a niche set of experience… 😬
Example 2: “Junior Product Designer”
- Are deeply passionate about digital products and always strive to simplify user interactions, reducing complexity
- Possess proficiency in Figma and have previous experience working with design systems
LM: Design systems has a lot of nuance, are they asking for experience creating/building/modifying systems or selecting them from the Figma dropdown menu? 🤔 - Understand the significance of visual design and take pride in delivering polished products to end-users
- Have an impressive portfolio showcasing your contributions to digital product design
LM: Impressive? 🙄 Is that truly necessary? What does that mean? - Are skilled in working with metrics, gathering and refining customer insights, and prioritizing initiatives that drive business impact and user value
LM: Most design education doesn’t educate folks on metrics (maybe I’ll write on that soon too 😉); if you’re lucky, you might learn about some universal UX metrics and how to collect them. More commonly, designers learn business metrics/OKRs on the job, in the context of specific industries and corporate expectations. - Proactively seek opportunities to enhance processes and outcomes through detailed interactions, even if it means stepping out of your comfort zone
- Exhibit strong communication skills and fluency in English, both spoken and written
The requirements of these roles is ambiguous, at best, and cheapskate, at worse 🤦♀️. Maybe these companies don’t know what they’re looking for — that happens for all sorts of skill levels. Or maybe, they want all the experience, but don’t want to pay the salary associated with a more advanced job title. 🫣
The Hiring Pressure Cooker May Be Partially to Blame
I’ve sat on both sides of the hiring table.
As a job seeker, you try your best to interpret the tiniest of signs from your interviewer or application.
You’re out of work and feeling anxious for every day of silence after sending your resumes into the void of applicant tracking systems (ATS).
You got a quick rejection, so you assume it’s time to throw out your resume.
The interviewer seemed rushed, so you must be a horrible interviewee.
The interviewer asked the question you’ve practiced for a week, you whiz through your answer and the interviewer just says “okay, so my next question…”, so you assume you messed up and your nerves make the rest of the convo awkward.
As a interviewer, you’re trying to balance all the inputs that make for a well-qualified candidate.
You have a very limited budget and had to fight in this tech economy for the headcount, so this hire has to be a good one.But it won’t be easy since you have limited recruiting help and could be spending hours and hours vetting, interviewing and discussing candidates.
You are swamped by resumes that don’t match your job description, so you wonder if you’ll ever find who you need while rejecting a majority of candidates (which makes you feel a little crappy every time you click the reject button).
You lead back-to-back interviews and ask the same questions to treat everyone equitably; but, after 4 phone interviews in one day, you can’t help but compare candidates when you make your determination.
Every portfolio you look at is different, and yet you don’t have more than 30 seconds to vet it, so you lean on your gut reaction to the images and your personal preferences.
Hiring manager hacks
When I hired an full-time associate user researcher, I received nearly 1,000 applications for 1 open role. I had recruiter support on interview scheduling and communications, but I looked at every. single. resume. I know… it was crazy. I believed it was the only way to give everyone a fair shot — and Lever didn’t make it easy to do otherwise.
Unfortunately, your eyes do start to glaze over and you develop “hacks” for getting through them all.
- Typos. Only 1–2, maybe, if everything else is strong. More than 3, reject.
- Resume design. Researchers might get away with a standard template, but intentional layouts or typography encourages me to spend those precious extra few seconds scanning. Designers using Google docs templates aren’t treating their resume like a product, reject.
- Education. Formal training like a BA or higher degree? You have more credibility since you’ve spent more time “practicing”. Bootcamps? It’s better than no training, but doesn’t compete with college degrees.
- Experience. Did they intern or work at a similar company or industry? Then I’m definitely talking to them, if other things check out.
These hacks mean that the best associate role candidates can end up being the ones with work/formal education experience. This even applies to intern roles, which increasingly are flooded with PhD and Masters candidates who worked before more higher education. This leaves career changers and self-taught folks trapped needing experience, but unable to get it.
Rather than hire promising candidates, we end up hiring proven candidates.
So, what now?
In this economic environment, that means everyone’s expectations of a career trajectory should change. Hiring managers have to recognize they’re partially to blame in this role’s demise and consider alternatives; entry-level candidates need to be more flexible in how they establish their career.
It’s unclear if this is a long-term change for the tech industry, but I don’t see any signs yet that the wind will change direction.
Admitting to my role in all this
I’ve targeted most of my hires as mid-level to senior, knowing that my budget will require them to plan, execute and make tradeoffs independently — a lone design wolf on a scrum team. I’ve personally justified this by saying we worked on complex subject matter or products with hidden idiosyncrasies (which, let’s be honest, is most products), or there’s not enough engineers, or there’s no budget, or many other things.
I’ve been part of the problem — and I have to think and act differently.
