How to find a design job in the West. A third worlder’s guide.

Lessons from 70 job interviews

A designer leaving his lovely home country

For 15 years, I lived in Russia and designed digital products. I worked at the best design studio and IT company in the country, participated in a few startups as a designer and as a co-founder, led small teams and hired people. Things were going fairly well.

However, at the beginning of 2022, I decided it was time to move westward. To the US, or the UK, or Europe. Someplace where laws work and designers are needed. There was only one problem — I had nothing to show to potential employers. My only asset was my old patched together portfolio. It induced a burning sensation in the eyes and would have been inhumane to send to anyone.

Preparation

As I came to learn, the way western companies hire designers is different from what I was used to. Back home, it was normal to get a job offer after one or two interviews and a take-home assignment. In the West you need to go through a battery of interviews and exercises, each of which is made to test you from a new side and often requires prior preparation.

I had to prepare the following:

• New portfolio
  I added new works, translated everything into English, and made a site from scratch since I couldn’t find a template that would reflect the entire depth of my inner world.
• Case presentation
  Figma slides illustrating the whole process of working on two recent projects. Two versions: short and long.
• Resume
  A one-page PDF with a brief summary of my work experience and contact details.
• Linkedin profile
  Identical to the resume in its content, just with a little added context about myself.
• Personal intro
  Who I am, what I did, what I achieved. The main points from the resume with a little more detail. Two versions: short and long.
• Responses to typical questions
  During interviews all companies ask identical questions. Answering them quickly and sensibly without preparation turned out to be harder than I thought, so I practiced them.

Sending applications

After almost a month of preparation I embarked on the search for open jobs and began sending applications. I started with well-known American companies, like DoorDash, Stripe, Lyft, etc. Because it’s Silicon Valley, the startup Mecca, the epicenter of cutting-edge innovation and all that. In total I sent 55 applications and received… zero interviews. A week later it became obvious that Uncle Sam wasn’t waiting for me. Back then it wasn’t clear why.

After pulling myself out of depression, I began responding to all the fresh jobs at large and rapidly growing companies from Europe and Britain. After setting a job filter on Linkedin, I checked new posts three times a day and submitted applications. Things began to take a turn for the better, a few days later I started getting requests to chat. A week later I was drowning in them.

My failures with American companies had seriously damaged my self-confidence, so I was sending subsequent applications en masse and didn’t reject anyone who responded. For a month almost every day I had 4–6 calls, and in every one of them I had to jump through different hoops and intensely sell myself. Gradually, an apathy towards this process began to creep up on me and I started turning down calls with companies I didn’t really want to work for. With the rest, generally, I went through 2–6 qualifying rounds.

Hiring stages

The average path from application to offer looked like this:

1. Within 2–7 days after applying, a recruiter emails me and suggests we schedule a call.
2. In the call they ask general questions, check whether I can string words together, and see if I know anything about their company.
3. The recruiter sets up a call with the hiring manager, who I’m supposed to present my projects to and elegantly answer all their questions.
4. Then follows another call where I have to do a design exercise with one of the company’s designers. Sometimes, instead of exercises, I would have to do a take-home assignment and present the results in a call.
5. Then calls with key team members are set up. This could be a product manager, other designers, developers, analysts, etc.
6. At the last stage I would have to talk with someone from management: a design director, a product director, a direct direction director.
7. After that follows the offer and its negotiation, if it suits the mood.

Funnel

Overall, I contacted 160 companies.
40% didn’t respond.
40% responded “no”.
15% showed interest.
70 calls conducted.
4 offers received.
3 more offers would’ve likely been received if I hadn’t stopped the process.
The final conversion rate from applications to offers — 4%.

7 weeks passed from the first interview to accepting an offer. Including preparation — 11 weeks. With the fastest company I went through all the stages in a month. With the slowest — unknown, because I didn’t have time to wait, but certainly more than two months.

There were rejections at all stages except take-home assignments and exercises. Most often the process was cut short after an interview with the design lead and other designers from the team. The reasons from their side were all different. The most common reason from my side was poor compensation.

The initial rejections were boilerplate messages along the lines of “the candidates fought like lions and the most ferocious one has won, but it wasn’t you”. The rejections at later stages sometimes contained feedback: “you fell short on X, Y, Z.” Unfortunately, sometimes it conflicted with what was happening on the call, but at least shed some light on what the feelings were on the other end of the line.

Compensation

The salaries of all options with relocation were identical. In Europe: €80–90,000 a year. In Britain: €90–120,000 a year. The majority of companies provided an extra relocation budget of about 5% of the salary. Some offered modest stock option packages. Other methods of compensation didn’t interest me, so I didn’t pay attention to them.

When it comes to remote work, I encountered two approaches: some companies pay remote workers across the world the same amount as their office people; others adjust the amount to the cost of living in the candidate’s country/city. In the second case the number can be, say, twice as low. Stock options, insurance, pension, and other attributes of honest office folks aren’t offered to foreign remote personnel too often.

Relocation

Most companies offered help with the move to their country. I didn’t have the chance to experience this assistance in its entirety, but realized that its extent was seriously exaggerated. Nobody could make an embassy appointment for me, pass a language test for my wife, put an apostille on the marriage certificate, find an apartment in the new place, and so on. The help is, rather, informational. Although, I’ve heard that some companies assist with moving your stuff and provide temporary housing. Plus, in some countries, companies sponsor work visas.

Relocation paperwork takes ages. If a company has made an offer, usually it understands this and is ready to wait from a few months to half a year. With most of them it’s possible to start working remotely under a separate contract.

Outcome

Companies that made me offers were medium to large European startups. Valuations in the billions, multifold yearly growth, and all the other attributes of success in tech. However, it so happened that I went with the smallest of those companies. I didn’t go to Europe either, instead settling for the small but welcoming Armenia.

In the course of this job hunt my understanding of the process changed a lot, along with my priorities. Firstly, because I started almost blindly, there was no time to do proper research. Secondly, my idea of what I needed to demonstrate was very different from what real people at real companies wanted. As a result I made many mistakes that cost me time, nerves, and opportunities.

And so that at least somebody benefits from all this, I’ll dissect the main stages, peculiarities, and mistakes of job hunting abroad.

Minimum requirements

To be considered for a UX/UI/product designer position in a good western company you will need:

1. Actual product experience
The vast majority of jobs are intended for designers with a good track record of working on products: you need to start solving business problems right after joining. I know there are cases where product teams hired freelancers and designers from agencies, but for this you need an impressive portfolio and self-promotion skills. Beginners will have to do something extraordinary to get a decent position, even more so to be relocated by the company.

2. Fluent English
Designers communicate with users, colleagues, write copy for mockups, persuade and explain. Hiring folks know this and consider strong language skills to be a bare minimum requirement. “Strong language skills” are when you can, without any critical problems, talk about your work for an hour and answer any question. This can be tested by talking with anyone who knows English well. In any case, in the first interview you will understand where you stand. In the 70 interviews that I had, I never talked to anyone who had problems on this front.

3. A portfolio that doesn’t make people close it immediately
Besides going through a bunch of job interviews as a candidate, I happened to hire designers and review a ton of applications. Most candidates submit something weird: Figma projects, links to Google Drive, Notion, Dribbble, PDF files. This doesn’t work. The person that is looking at your application has already seen 148 other applications today, and 256 yesterday. Their willingness to dig around your Figma is through the floor. Make a nice user-friendly site for them. You’re a designer, for Christ sake.

The site must have either detailed case studies of your projects, or nice images of your projects with brief descriptions of your contribution and results. Nobody will read the case studies of course, but without them there is a chance that the recruiter will think you can only do the visual part. Your choice. For reference check out the sites of designers that work at your dream companies. They can be found on Linkedin.

An important point — everything has to be translated into English. This is especially true for mockups. Otherwise ոչ ոք ոչինչ չի հասկանա.

Countries and visas

This one is for my fellow third world dwellers. A permit to work in a country is a crucial screening factor. If you don’t have it, it’s worth finding out how hard it is to obtain. This will save you a lot of energy and preserve your mental health.

I considered three directions: USA, Britain, and Europe.

USA

It is extremely hard to get into the country. There are three main visas for work:

• H1-B — a work visa that can only be obtained with the help of your employer. The process is called visa sponsorship. There are a limited number of visas that can be issued every year and an unlimited number of visa applicants. Because of this, every year in early April, visas are distributed amongst the applicants via lottery. The odds of winning aren’t great, many people only win after 3–4 years, many never do.
• L1 — a visa for transferring valuable employees between the company’s branches in different countries. It is done by the employer after at least one year of working, say, in a British office of the company. Which you would need to somehow get to in the first place.
• O1 — a visa for individuals with extraordinary abilities. You can get this visa yourself, it isn’t strictly tied to an employer. This will require submitting a thick stack of documents proving that you’re a glorious representative of your profession: a member of professional associations, a contest jury member, published in well-known magazines, and so on. The process of preparing for and obtaining the visa can take a year or more.

My response rate from American companies was zero precisely because of the lack of a visa, and perfectly bad application timing — the middle of April. Right after the end of the only visa lottery that year.

Britain

It’s difficult to get into the country, but doable. These are the options:

• Skilled Worker Visa — a work visa that requires sponsorship from the employer. Unlike the American H1-B, there are no quotas. However, it seems like the process of sponsoring such a visa isn’t simple for the employer, because recruiters often brought it up in conversation as an important factor. Though that could also be because of my unfavorable citizenship.
• Global Talent Visa — a visa for people with extraordinary abilities. An analog of the American O1. The requirements and the complexity of the procedure are identical.

My response rate from British companies was 6%. From international companies with open positions in the British office — 16%. In the second case it was implied that the final offer could be for another country.

Europe

The main nesting site for tech folk in Europe is Germany, as such I mainly researched German visas:

• Blue Card — an all-European work visa. Can be obtained on your own. For this you’ll need to have a contract to work in a specialty for which you have a university diploma recognized in Germany. If you meet all the requirements, the process is quite simple. The main obstacle is the huge line to submit the documents at the embassy.
• Work visa — in Germany you can obtain one after proving at least 3 years of work experience in IT. For other professions there are options too. This visa can also be done on your own without significant issues.
• Many European countries have visas for freelancers. In Germany, for instance, to get a visa like this you need contracts with German companies. Which doesn’t seem to be that different from a work visa. For other countries, you’ll need to research separately.

My response rate from European companies was 47%. All the offers were from them as well.

Having a visa was hands down the most significant factor of success in my search. At the same time it was the most unpleasant and lengthy stage. Assess your chances of getting a visa with a clear head. If it isn’t that important where you move to, focus on companies from countries with reasonable visa requirements. If it is important, research carefully and prepare for the process in advance.

I’ll say the obvious, but before selecting the country, find out the relationship between wages and cost of living there. You might be surprised how little money you’ll keep in your pocket and how little you’ll be able to afford. For instance, an average London bloke with a seemingly large salary of $100,000 per year, after paying his taxes and bills might keep as little as $15,000. Whereas housing in London costs an average of $850,000. This is 57 years of work.

It’s also worth finding out the requirements for obtaining a permanent residence permit and citizenship. In different countries and under different visas they can differ a lot.

And last but not least, language. Don’t think that somewhere in Germany or Portugal you can live normally knowing only English. If you don’t want to stay forever in a silo of your immigrant friends, immigrant shops, immigrant lawyers, and other attributes of immigrant existence, you’ll have to learn the local language. Besides, it is often required when applying for a residence permit.

Remote work

Apart from the classic options with relocation, in recent years there have been more and more remote jobs. Most of them are tied to a certain region — you can only work from the US, Germany, Europe, etc. If you’re not in one of those locations, there isn’t much sense in applying for these jobs, in my experience.

There are fewer jobs unlimited by region. Often those are at companies from small countries (Baltic States, Greece, Belgium) or companies somehow related to remote work. You can work with them either under a service contract or under an employment contract signed through an intermediary (Deel, Remote).

The main advantage of such work is that you can live in an inexpensive country and pay low taxes, while having more freedom. Some of the popular locations are the post-soviet countries, Portugal, Czechia.

The disadvantages are the other side of the advantages: you have to deal with all the legal aspects of work yourself, figure out relocation, and in general do everything on your own. Plus, everything related to social security is shakier: you’re easier to fire, no pension, medical insurance, stock options, etc. Although, it depends on the company and the extent to which it’s interested in your talents.

Finding jobs and sending applications

The majority of decent companies post their jobs on Linkedin. A lot of good options appear on Otta. If you’re aiming for a specific country, there’s most likely a popular local job site. For instance, in Germany it’s Xing.

For remote jobs there are a ton of specialized boards: Remoteok, Himalayas, Weworkremotely…

The expiration date of a job post is 1–3 days from publication. After that there are too many applications and they stop being reviewed. For well-known companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon, the time frame can be 1–3 hours. I’ve seen jobs receive more than 200 applications in the first hour (this is visible on Linkedin).

If you aim for large known companies:

• Don’t leave them for later, the hiring process there is the longest.
• Make sure that your resume can be read correctly by application tracking systems. The first screening stage in many corporations is conducted by a robot. If it doesn’t like something, your application will end up in a trash can and no human in the company will ever see it.
• Try to find an employee of the company that could refer you to a recruiter. This will radically improve your chances of being noticed. Ideally this person should have the same specialty as you and have some experience of working together. For the referral they will need a link to your portfolio, resume/Linkedin, and the link to a relevant job post. Don’t apply via the site in this case.

Companies that ask about the current or expected salary in the application usually pay below the market. Provide an honest number so they can understand whether there is a point in starting the process. Or pass by.

Don’t be a smartass when responding to additional questions in the application or when writing the cover letter. There can be humor there, but mostly the hiring person wants to get a meaningful response.

With large companies it makes sense to apply for multiple different jobs with a break of at least a few days. Often different recruiters are in charge of them. In medium and small companies this is pointless, most likely your specialty is covered by one recruiter.

Most companies respond within 3–4 days. After that the probability of a response goes down. The longest positive response I’ve received took 3 weeks. Long responses at the first stages are decent indicators of chaos within the company (in small and medium ones) or bureaucracy (in large ones). Sometimes both. Long responses at the late stages can also mean lukewarm interest in you — the company is talking to other candidates to find a better fit.

How to approach interviews

If a company likes you, buckle up for countless interviews with its team members.

The first interview is going to be with the recruiter. If you’ve passed it successfully and have another one scheduled, this means that you’re good enough professionally to work on this team. In terms of experience, specialty, level of work. After that the whole hiring procedure will almost entirely revolve around presenting your portfolio and talking about your work process. How you research problems, involve other team members, iterate, and all that. The results of the work are touched on briefly.

The main success factor is how well you tell stories. About yourself, your projects, technological processes, past situations, principles, etc. This is very important to understand — most interviewers judge not how good you can do design, but how good you can tell and show how you do design.

This skill is completely unrelated to design work and needs to be practiced separately. Like in sports: N repetitions of the personal introduction, N repetitions of the story about projects, N repetitions of the answer to the question of how you interact with product managers, etc. Until it gets good. Fortunately, the topics and questions of most companies are the same. It is better to train with a live partner, preferably with a designer who has experience in hiring designers.

The second success factor is knowing the company you are interviewing for. Before the beginning of your interview series it’s important to research as best you can what it does, what products it has, how they work, how it makes money, what its culture is like, and what they expect from you.

Firstly, to answer the ubiquitous question of why you want to work there. But more importantly, to understand this yourself: does anything the company do move you, do you want to spend the next few years of your life there, will it advance you further in your desired professional direction? Ideally, this information should inspire an enthusiasm for the company that your interviewers can’t help but notice and appreciate.

Secondly, this immerses you into the context and allows you to better understand your interviewers, and therefore to adjust your stories to suit them. What’s better to show — a desktop dashboard or a mobile game? Do you emphasize research experience or visual mastery? It all depends on what they want to see.

Also, ask questions at every stage of the interviews. If you know enough about the company and you’re interested in it, questions should arise naturally. If they don’t, find out more about the company. A lack of questions is a sign of a lack of interest. Both for the employer and for you.

Typical screening stages

0. Sourcer

This person finds specialists relevant to the requirements they were given and invites them to talk. This invitation doesn’t mean anything, except that there are words in your resume similar to those written in the job description. The sourcer doesn’t know the meaning of those words. If you apply for jobs yourself, you won’t have to deal with them.

1. Recruiter

This person processes job applications, conducts the first interview, and usually coordinates the subsequent hiring process. Their objective is to weed out clearly unsuitable applicants: people without experience, language skills, work permit, interest in the company, etc.

During the interview you’ll usually need to briefly talk about yourself and your work experience, then the recruiter asks a series of questions, after which you can ask a few of your own. Recruiters don’t know anything about design either and ask very general questions:

• Why do you want to work at this company? (this question can be asked at any stage)
• Do you have experience working with technology/platform X?
• How much money do you want?

This format — “introductions, questions from the interviewer, questions from the interviewee” — is applicable to almost all stages. Before the calls your resume will be at best briefly scanned, at worst — not opened at all. That’s why you need to tell all the important and interesting facts about yourself at the beginning of every conversation with a new person.

2. Hiring manager

Most often this is your future direct boss from the design side. This person understands design, the way of working and the needs of their team. Their objective is to find a specialist that already knows how to do everything that needs to be done in this position and can seamlessly integrate into the team. This is tested in the format of an interview or a presentation of your projects, or both formats subsequently.

The format of the meeting and what needs to be prepared is usually communicated by the recruiter before scheduling it.

2.1. Interview

During the interview, the manager will try to find out everything about your work process, technical and social skills. Typical questions:

• How do you interact with the team: product managers, developers, analysts…?
• How do you work on a problem before starting with the mockups?
• How do you judge whether your solution was successful?
• What would your ideal work process look like?
• If you could change anything in your project, what would it be and why?
• Tell me about a situation when X, Y, Z happened.

2.2. Projects presentation

In the call you’ll be talking about 1 or 2 projects that you worked on. Most often you’re given 30–40 minutes, sometimes 10–20. During and after the presentation the interviewer will ask questions about it, and about your design process in general. There might be multiple interviewers.

It’s important to understand that a good presentation is not opening projects in Figma and showing a few frames. It’s a ready-made sequence of slides explaining a project from the problem statement to the final results. You will open these slides full-screen and will do a voiceover for them one after another. It’s not important what you use to make the slides, Figma will do. An example.

Generally, before the presentation is organized you’ll be told how many projects have to be shown and how much time will be given. You can’t exceed this time limit, the interviewers have their next calls scheduled. It’s worth having a short version of your presentation (10–15 minutes per project) and a long version (30 minutes per project). The presentation slides should have large images and few words. You’ll say the words with your mouth.

The projects should sell you well. The widest possible area of ​​responsibility, the maximum number of demonstrated skills, different platforms, visual prowess, positive results in numbers.

Again, it is important to understand what the company does. If they have a mobile banking app and you show them a desktop translator, they won’t be too impressed.

Your audience can be inattentive. You might often notice how the interviewer is typing something and gets distracted. Sometimes those are notes about you, sometimes they aren’t. Ignore it, concentrate on your story.

Also, be prepared for the situation where, after your presentation is over, the interviewers don’t know key facts from it and repeat questions that their colleague asked 5 minutes ago. Treat this philosophically. It’s not easy to comprehend information after a hearty lunch.

3.1. Exercises

There are two types of test exercises often given to candidates:

1. Whiteboard challenge
This is where you solve some design problem in Miro or Figjam. It’s conducted in the form of an hour-long call with a designer from the team. Problems can be fictional: create an interface for a time machine or design a smart door. They can also be realistic: design an app for finding your car in a parking lot. The result, typically, is sloppy wireframes of several screens.

2. App critique
You choose or you’re given an app that you must analyze in detail, understand its logic, its business objectives, and suggest improvements. Most often these are worldwide popular apps without personal data: Spotify, Google Maps, Uber… It is also conducted in the form of a video call with a designer from the team.

These exercises are about process, not result. You’re supposed to show that you can dissect a task, understand context, formulate problems, generate ideas, exhibit your devilish charm.

3.2. Take-home assignment

Assignments aren’t too popular these days. Out of 15 companies that I was in serious talks with, only 4 gave an assignment. Usually it involves a high-fidelity design of a couple app screens, or a wireframe prototype of a certain user scenario plus a high-fidelity design of one screen.

It’s important not to take assignments literally. Your goal is not to do what they say, but to solve the user problem to benefit the user and the business. If this implies challenging the assignment, then it should be justifiably challenged.

Don’t take seriously the number of hours that you’re told to complete the task. The job will be given to the person who makes the best design, regardless of the time it took.

My deliverables always consisted of an interactive prototype + a description of my thought process + a couple of tables/schemes if I made them. A full-on case study is too much here.

If the company likes your solution, you’ll need to present it on a call. It won’t hurt to prepare for it. Although at this stage your ability to talk about design will be less important because, presumably, you’ve demonstrated that you can actually do design.

4. Team

At this stage you’ll need to have a chat with your future colleagues. These might be product managers, other designers, developers, analysts. Sometimes separately, sometimes all together.

Each of them will be asking questions related to their job and your interaction with them. The product manager will be curious as to how you divide responsibilities with managers, how you prefer to conduct research, receive tasks, how you react to criticism of your solutions. Developers will be interested in how you involve developers at the design stage, how you hand-off mockups, whether you’ve worked with a certain library. And so forth.

At this stage it is important to show that you’re a team player — you involve everybody in the process, listen to everybody, can adapt and see the situation from different angles.

5. Top managers

The final steps are usually interviews with somebody from the company’s management: a design director, product director, co-founder. These people ask questions of a fundamentally-philosophical kind and are interested in your understanding of their business and product. This understanding must exist. It’s also worth having ideas prepared about how their product could be improved.

Quite often these are peculiar people with strong opinions. The nature of their peculiarity can sometimes be understood by googling them. Read their Linkedin, blog, watch videos. Additionally, this will help you understand if you want to work for them. You can also ask what you should expect from these people at the end of the previous call with the hiring manager. They are usually interested in your success.

If everything goes well, you’ll get a job offer, champagne, rioting applause. And then you’ll write an article about all that.

Compensation

There are two stages when it’s appropriate to discuss money: at the end of the first call with the recruiter and when the company is ready to make a job offer.

In the first case, it’s worth asking about the salary range for your position. If the recruiter asks about your current or expected salary, don’t give them your number. If they push for it, you can say something like “the market average for specialists of my level seems to be X”. This will give you room to maneuver later on.

Before making you an official job offer, the company will ask about your expected compensation again. Still, don’t be the first to say the number. Let the employer say it. After that you’ll be able to compare companies’ offers and negotiate better terms within the range you found out earlier.

To get a better compensation you’ll need to have offers from multiple companies. Each company should understand that if it doesn’t give you the best terms, you’ll go to the other guys. If those guys are direct competitors, you’ll have the strongest leverage. Don’t make ultimatums, just keep them posted about your situation — “I wanted to let you know that I received a sweet offer, but I’m still interested in joining your company”.

Every offer has a deadline. Most commonly, 3–5 days. You can negotiate to move it a bit. To get multiple offers within these deadlines, you’ll have to manage your call schedule wisely — hurry some companies up, slow others down.

A better compensation isn’t always a better salary. More often it’s a heftier stock option package. Although it can be anything — a signing bonus, remote work, more vacation days, a more flexible schedule, etc.

In American companies the room for negotiation can be huge. In Britain and Europe the situation is much worse, but nevertheless you can almost always improve the initially offered compensation.

Remember that a job isn’t a favor an employer makes you. It’s a contract for buying your time to convert into profit. It should be beneficial for both parties.

To learn more about the topic I recommend starting with Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer.

Logic and consistency of hiring

There are no quality criteria in a designer’s hiring. Almost everything is an opinion. This is especially true for interview stages.

Not once have I received the same feedback after my presentation and interview with hiring managers. One time I got exactly the opposite feedback within a few hours — one company loved my personal qualities but noticed technical flaws, the other was impressed with my technical abilities but had strong doubts about my personality. Me, the presentation, the questions and answers were all the same.

People are extremely irrational. They like individuals similar to them, overestimate or underestimate the abilities of others because of their height, weight, nationality, a famous company on their resume. They fixate on minutiae and miss the essence. They say “yes” more when they’re in a good mood and “no” when they’ve had a bad week.

These traits can be used to your advantage. After having a call scheduled, you’ll learn your interviewer’s name. Find them on Linkedin, google their articles, public appearances. Based on this you can get a good idea of what the person likes and what they consider to be a good design. During the conversation you can emphasize this and signal to them that you’re from their tribe. Or understand that you need to head elsewhere.

Rejections

Everyone has been rejected, including the people who rejected you. This doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. It means that the hiring person didn’t like you.

When rejected in later stages, it’s always beneficial to get feedback. However, it needs to be taken with caution. Only things mentioned by multiple different people are worth paying attention to. And even then they aren’t necessarily a problem. Sometimes people just have different visions. It’s better to understand this during hiring than while working together.

TLDR:
Treat job search as a design challenge. Research the problem, understand the users, and help them to see that you are what they consider a good designer.