Follow Along
Presentable podcast #23: How to Get Hired, with Jared Spool
May 2nd, 2017 · 60 minutes
This week, the legendary and outspoken Jared Spool joins the show. We discuss why most companies are terrible at hiring for design jobs, and what designers can do to take control of their careers and attract meaningful work.
Links and Show Notes
6:28
What’s the medium the designer works in?
“The medium of design is behavior” — Robert Fabricant Twitter
7:40
Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap
10:00
Center Centre — The School for UX Design
13:20
The best hiring managers and teams are smart enough to think about what they really want the person to do
14:33
The first question in hiring a designer: Are there people who have done all that already? If so let’s look for that.
14:50
Gestalt theories
15:52
Brad Frost
Twitter | Facebook | GitHub | Google+ | LinkedIn | Instagram | CodePen | Lanyrd | Flickr | LastFM | Spotify | SlideShare
Nathan Curtis
Medium | Twitter | website | LinkedIn
17:00
Does a designer job rec that says they have to be able to do “everything” mean they have to drive an 18-wheeler? The story of the radiologist who is certified to drive an 18-wheeler.
20:26
Is there diligence a designer should do before the job search?
20:42
Well before you’re looking for the job, you need to collecting the evidence you can do the job while you’re doing the job you have
→ Artifacts, stories, insights, pieces of what you did to solve the problem
24:45
Two milestones you have to accomplish as a candidate
1. Get the hiring company to fall in love with you
2. You have to fall in love with them
27:24
Get them to fall in love with you
1. Craft a resume that talks to the points in the ad
2. If you’ve never done it, how you’re going to learn all the things you’ve ever learned that are equivalent
28:27
Hiring manager’s buy vs build mentality
Do I get someone who can do the work at a higher price, or do I get someone at a lower price who can’t do the work but has all the potential to do it?
30:40
Jina Bolton
Medium | Designing a Design System | website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Dribbble
31:37
The value of saying, “I’m not the right person to do this job, but I know someone…”
32:08
Crafting a narrative
“It’s story” / The scene at the end of Star Wars Episode IV
The journey is the best part.
When all you do is show end product in your portfolio, that’s what you’re doing, showing the final scene.
You need to show the journey.
35:43
Tell me when there was a challenge, what it took for you to overcome it.
Just knowing what challenges you tells me a lot: knowing how you overcame that tells me your resourcefulness, grit, stick-to-itnevness, how much you collaborate, how much you go to outside resources, do you go to outside the normal expectations and find inspiration and concepts from things that never occurred to me? Now I’m seeing you as who you are.
37:10
“Capturing that and being able to recount, that is really hard… Then you craft a story.”
38:40
Cookie cutter approach to hiring in large orgs is mired in trying to avoid bias. Hiring is biased, otherwise it is a lottery and has nothing to do with candidates’ skills.
42:38
“A good hiring process is an evidence gathering hiring process. A great hiring process doesn’t look for the best evidence, it looks for the first individual that has all the evidence that says they will do a great job.”
44:18
What should designers be looking for?
44:35
Early designer
A job where they’re going to learn new things they’ll be know for for a while
47:33
Never refuse an offer you haven’t gotten yet: Is this the job that’s going to get me my next job?
48:00
More senior
Who do you want to learn from?
Who on the team does strategy work? How much support do they get from the boss?
50:53
The definition of design that I’ve fallen in love with is: Design is the rendering of intent.
How does the org render its intent? Where does that get driven from?
52:30
United flight seat change UX
53:40
You have your eyes and ears tuned to frustrating customer experience and a boss who will give you air cover for that.
When are you willing to provide the air cover to say, “Frustration is no longer acceptable, delight is only acceptable.”
55:36
I’d qualify that statement that your boss doesn’t need to know anything about design
55:44
Cost/benefit analysis of the impact of design
