A designer’s guide to organizing a job hunt
I approach job seeking like a design challenge: investigate, ideate, design, test, and track. Being laid off during a global pandemic was an exhausting test of patience, and the job search was unlike any of my previous transitions. One silver lining is my newfound job search organization and techniques; I’d like to pay it forward by sharing these experiences.
👋 For background, I’m a designer in the Boston tech scene where I’ve crafted my skill-set at growing scale-ups within various industries like education, food, and fitness. Across my career, I’ve taken on different titles in pursuit of my passion: advocating for a human-centered design approach to solve business problems. I’m an experience designer, product designer, growth designer, researcher, and UX practitioner.
Investigate
Reflect
When I leave a company, I like to write LinkedIn recommendations for my teammates and collaborators. The best way for me to close a professional chapter is by articulating what I’m grateful for, celebrating successes, and reaching out to peers. This helps me reflect on my experience and could potentially help collaborators’ careers in the long run too.
When I consider a future role, I make a list of goals and expectations. With a couple different companies, industries, and roles under my belt, I’m able to vet potential roles based on what I would like to replicate or avoid. Before I had much professional experience, I reached out to people in my industry to talk about potential pathways. This practice always alleviated my anxiety about having it all figured out right away.
Pitch
When I give my elevator pitch of previous experience, I like to give an overview of each role, frame each transition by what I was looking to learn next, and finish with what resonates with the new opportunity. It’s helpful to be ready with success stories and “war stories” to give a full picture of how I make design decisions and navigate interpersonal relationships when inevitable trade-offs happen.
When I have calls or interviews I have a few tabs open and ready: my portfolio, case studies, LinkedIn profile (resume with descriptions), the job listing, and a questions doc (elaborated later).
Coordinate
Scheduling can be stressful in of itself, especially when juggling a full-time job on top of the hunt. I try to schedule interviews at a similar pace to give myself the advantage of choice for potential offers, but keep applying to new roles even if I’m further along with a company.
My job hunt folder includes my resume, portfolio, and design challenge files, a text file with all the cover letters and thank-you notes I write organized by company, job listings I’ve applied to (I screenshot PDFs with Chrome extension GoFullPage). Previously I’ve kept all my notes in a text file but this year I filled a notebook instead since it’s easier for me to make quick scribbles without disrupting the interview.
My Trello board is organized as:
Categories: phone screen, interview, design challenge, done
Labels: upcoming, waiting to hear back, ball in their court, ball in my court, offer, declined, end of the road
Ideate
Introduce
The most common ice breaker question I get is “what are you looking for in your next role?” So whether it’s been a week, month, or year since my last interview, I make sure I’m prepared with a couple nuggets of things I’m looking for in terms of role, team, and projects.
I’ve noticed a lot of interviewers fish for answers that reflect their own team dynamic and makeup. If I can’t hold up a mirror with my previous experiences, I try to voice what partnerships I’d prefer in the future.
Inquire
Often there’s a limited amount of time for me to ask my questions so ideating beforehand helps me feel prepared. It also gives me a direct comparison of each potential role to see which aligns best with my original goals and hopes. For any conversation I look the interviewer(s) up on LinkedIn to get an idea of their background and tenure. I always have a couple questions ready that I’d like answered based on the perspective of the person I’m talking to.
I’ve organized my questions doc into sections based on context. Before the interview, I skim through and highlight the most relevant ones I’m curious about at that stage. Here’s an excerpt for example:
🧑💼 Recruiting
- How is the delivery team organized, ie. makeup of cross-functional teams?
- What is the approach to supporting remote working?
- How much is the company growing year over year?
🧑💻 Design
- What does collaboration look like, within design and cross-functionally?
- How much accountability and decision-making responsibilities does this role include?
- How do you hear from users/customers?
- What are the learning opportunities for continued domain and career growth?
👩💻 Product & Engineering
- If you’ve worked with designers in the past, what would you like to replicate?
- How is experimentation integrated into the workflow?
- What is the product vision overall and specifically for the team this role is on?
👩💼 General
- What are the biggest upcoming challenges or opportunities you’re excited about?
- What problems are you trying to solve?
Design
Show
As a designer it’s critical to have a portfolio. I’ve created case studies for my public website with more in-depth counterparts as presentations to share during interviews. I try to “show and tell” beyond high-fidelity final mockups to showcase my thought process through sketches, wireframes, and GIFs. Metrics and outcomes are really helpful in connecting my personal contribution to the success of the business.
This article is laced with advice from my mentor Alyssa Boehm, who truly leads by example on the art of being prepared. She recently reminded me to be explicit about my design workflow, so I created an infographic to share with stakeholders and be fully transparent about what I bring to the table. I tend to gloss over pieces of my workflow that I think are assumed, but I want to be clear (especially as a visual communicator) whether I show my infographic or reference it in conversation.
Clarify
When presenting work whether I have 5 minutes or an hour, I try to cover the usual questions my audience has in order to elevate a further conversation past the basics.
- TLDR: a quick overview of the project
- My role and specific contribution
- Team makeup
- Timeframe
- Problem area
- Audience needs and desires
- Business goals and metrics
- Highlight reel of decisions I made throughout the project including any trade-offs, collaboration, surprises in data or research, etc
- What I learned
- What I’d do differently
Test & track
As with any design task, I adapt my process to fit the moment. This time around I created artifacts and implemented techniques that would alleviate my stress and prepare me for interviews without creating too much (unpaid) work outside of the interviews themselves.
While my experience and advice may be specific to me, product design, Boston, the tech industry, etc, interviewing is an animal and I hope surfacing what I’ve learned can help someone else successfully interview and secure a job. Good luck out there! 🍀
