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How to get a job as a UX/Product Designer?
Some tips from experienced hiring managers.
Hi! This is Magda and Maciek. Together we are managing the Product Design team at K2 digital agency. One of our key responsibilities is recruiting new designers. We have been doing it for more than 10 years, so we have a lot of experience in this area. (Update: we both no longer work at K2.)
Here we want to share some advice for people looking for a new job as a UX/Product Designer. Of course not necessary at K2. It should be helpful if you are applying for the job at any type of organization. We’re in touch with a lot of design team managers at various companies and most of them tell us that they pay attention to similar things.
This article is partially based on our talk from UX Poland 2018 conference in Warsaw. (You can check our slides from this event at the following link, but it is all in Polish: https://www.slideshare.net/macieklipiec/jak-zjednac-sobie-ludzi-i-zdobyc-prace-jako-ux-designer.) In this article we want to answer:
- How the recruiting process usually looks like?
- What is the most important thing hiring managers are looking for?
- What skills do you need as a UX/Product Designer?
- How to prepare your CV/resume and portfolio to be invited to the interview? (Think about this as „conversion optimization”).
- How to approach the interview and eventual design challenge?
- How to choose the right company to apply? (We haven’t talked about this at UX Poland, because it’s from the candidate’s point of view, so this is a bonus material.)
1. What the recruiting process looks like?
In most companies the process looks almost the same with slight variations. Here’s how it looks like at Google:
- Phone screening.
- Portfolio review.
- Design challenge.
- On-site meeting.
- Team matching.
- Offer.
Naturally Google is a very large company with many offices around the world. In our case it’s simpler, but all important steps are the same. We…
