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Design job seekers often fail to talk about impact. Here’s why that matters
Businesses often don’t care as much about what you did but what it resulted in
After reviewing dozens of design portfolios to hire a designer, I’ve concluded that many designers don’t know how to communicate their impact.
Many designers would talk about their project goals and user problems in great detail, along with what they did, but not mention anything about outcomes beyond handing their work off to developers.
I’m not alone in this realization: many others, especially on LinkedIn, seem to voice similar concerns. This isn’t something we’re taught in design school, but it’s becoming increasingly important in the job market to do this for one key reason: it makes us the least risky candidate.
Here’s why that matters, now more than ever.
Businesses often choose the least risky designer, not the best one
One of the things I learned, not only through interviewing designers and reading other research, is that sometimes it’s hard to see the full picture of a designer’s experience in a snapshot.
While portfolios and interviews can give you a sense of who they are, businesses often offer five—or six-figure salaries to unknown people based on talking with them for an hour or two. While I understood that on some level, being forced to decide who to hire based on an hour-long interview with them made me understand one important thing.
Businesses don’t always hire the best candidate; they hire the least risky one. I heard this idea from Charlie Hoehn, author of The Recession-proof Graduate, but I never truly understood it until I was on the other side of the hiring process.
If a designer seems the “least risky” and checks all the boxes decently, they often win over a design candidate who may have better skills but be more risky. This is often why, when you spend a lot of time in a domain (like Healthcare UX), getting a job outside that domain becomes much harder.
This is why it’s important to show them the impact of your design. We often position ourselves as “problem solvers,” which…
