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“You don’t have the experience for this role…let’s talk!”

Embracing Junior Designers Who Apply for Roles that Require Experience.

Alex Jones
UX Collective
4 min readOct 2, 2018

Hiring designers (or developers) here in Austin is a paradoxical combo of too many and not enough. If you’re looking for people new to the field, you can spend days going through applicant portfolios. If you’re looking for someone with experience, you’ll spend that time weeding out those same portfolios to find people who have the experience you’re seeking. Now, I personally feel that too many companies miss out on the opportunity of hiring talented folks as they only hire experienced designers. Their unwillingness to invest in the people new to our field is a disservice to the candidates and the team.

Lucky for me, that also means I have more opportunities to hire new designers with huge potential.

So, back to the quandary — designers without experience applying for a role that requires experience. Yes, sometimes we need someone who’s worked as a designer before (or developer or writer etc.), but there can be an opportunity to bring in someone new to the field — so long as a couple of key aspects are covered with them upfront.

Level Set With Them, They’ll Appreciate It

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Alex Jones

I lead multi-disciplinary, globally distributed teams that craft remarkable products for millions of people. I start fires (the good kind).

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