What to expect when you’re applying for a design job
A primer to keep your sanity intact when interviews don’t go well
I want to talk about what it’s like to apply for a design job — for many design jobs. You might say “But Joe, there are already so many good interview advice guides on Medium,” and you’re right. But writing this is less about novelty and more about maintaining my own sanity during the job search process. If you’re a rockstar designer, if you sail through interviews, if you love the raw vulnerability of talking about your own process, then this guide might not be for you. This is for the designer who’s kept their hopes up through final round interviews only to have their heart broken. It’s for the applicant who receives a rejection the same morning as their next phone screen, and then has to find the fractured pieces of their self-esteem to make it through a 15 minute probe of their proudest skills.
As I’m drawing from my own experience as a young-but-not-new designer looking for his next step after 4+ years of experience in a variety of tech roles, this advice might not resonate as much with a recent graduate or a seasoned veteran, but I hope some of it can apply to any reader either now or in the future.
I’m committing myself to write this guide while I’m in the thick of this job search. I know how quickly the pained memories of the job search fade once you’re on the other side of the process and I want to maintain an authentic narrative. But I won’t publish this until I’ve made it to the other side, because I also want this piece to serve as a reminder to any reader that no matter how rough, demoralizing, or seemingly endless the process seems, it does eventually end with something worth celebrating. And if you’re reading this today, I hope you’ll be in my shoes soon.
Expect to be humbled
The job search is always a humbling process. I’ve struggled through job interviews in the past, but this time, touting more than four years of industry experience, I thought I had finally picked up enough clout to strut my stuff in front of prospective employers and have them “ooh” and “aah” at the things I’ve worked on. But just like you’re hoping to find the best job you can get, the employer is hoping to get the best employee they can find, so don’t be surprised if they tear you down while they pick apart your experiences.
Expect it to take a while
I need to acknowledge one important privilege of mine during this job search process: I continued to have a job while I searched for the next one. I work in consulting, so my professional future is doled out in predictable increments, though the long-term future is never certain. Knowing my contract was coming to a mandatory close after 21 months, I had time far enough in advance to begin my search. While I managed to get an offer before my contract ended, I’m grateful that I began the search five months in advance, because that’s about as long as it took me. I started the process with a slow and narrow approach, expecting to be able to get the next job pretty quickly and passively while working hard at my day job. That was obviously a naive mistake. However long you think it’s going to take, double or triple it just to be safe. Make sure you plan for your financial future and your healthcare future accordingly, because I’m pretty sure I just got lucky.
Expect to spend lots of time on LinkedIn, but please don’t read your feed
LinkedIn is a great tool to fuel your job search. You can even set your status to advertise to recruiters that you’re looking for work and the InMail will start rolling in. But then there’s the rest of LinkedIn. I estimate that my LinkedIn feed is 20% sharing new job opportunities, 30% feel-good clickbait stories, and 50% personal updates about new jobs and promotions. That’s great. LinkedIn is great for celebrating your personal and professional wins and I’m here for it. But if you’re in that demoralizing phase of your job search, it might start to feel like everyone around you managed to find a new job except for you. You might want to train your eyes to gloss over those posts or stick to the messaging features of LinkedIn until you’re ready to make your own update.
Expect to be misrepresented by recruiters
LinkedIn is a great way to find — and be found — by recruiters, but many of the ones who reach out to you may have found you based on loose search criteria or in a wide-net approach to bring candidates to their desks. You might get recruited for jobs that are above your level, below your level, far from your desired work location, or even completely outside of your industry, even if you state all of these things on your profile, resume, and website.
Don’t let the power of suggestion cause you to drift away from your original target. I recommend writing yourself a personal statement or a list of criteria for the job you want: What titles, levels, and responsibilities are you looking for? Are you open to contract work or FTE only? Do you have a location in mind or do you prefer remote work? Is there a market sector that you personally value, like consumer products, enterprise tools, or healthcare technology? Regardless of if and how you advertise these goals to recruiters, you should keep this list nearby for your own sake. When you see a job listing or get invited to a phone screen, cross-reference the job description with your values. As the job search drags on, it can be easy to lose track of your personal goals. You might even get bait-and-switched by a recruiter who shows you a second or third opportunity that drifts farther away from your passions. It’s okay to be open to a variety of jobs, but when you accept an interview for something outside of your comfort zone, that discomfort will show in the interview.
Expect to get paid, and know what you’re worth
This cycle of job search is unique from others I’ve had in the past in that I’ve been asked for my salary demands very early on in the process — sometimes in the phone screen, other times in the first round with the hiring manager. Salary expectations can end the conversation early if the company can’t provide a competitive salary, so I can’t fault a recruiter for wanting to set expectations early. There are lots of good guides for salary negotiation and I’m not an expert on the matter, but I recommend studying up on the job market you’re applying to. I’ve been applying to roles at junior, mid-level, and senior roles at big companies, small companies, and startups, so I’ve been caught off-guard when I’m asked for my expected compensation when I haven’t considered the specific role.
First of all, depending on where you live, companies may be prohibited from asking you about your current or historical salary. That might not stop them from asking, and you can offer up as little or as much as you want to tell them. But even if they are allowed to ask, you can always sidestep the question by reiterating to them that you want to be paid fairly for the role and that you would only feel comfortable comparing to others who are currently in that role. Historically, salaries gaps are biased across genders, races, and a variety of other factors, and basing your next salary on your previous salary tends to reinforce those existing biases.
Secondly, do your research about the job, location, and industry. Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and Indeed all provide robust analytics about salaries based on title and experience. For tech jobs at some of the biggest industry leaders, tools like levels.fyi can be great for navigating the varying salary bands among companies and comparing factors like base salary, bonus, and stock. These might not reflect the amount being offered by your hiring manager, but these tools can give you an objective baseline to justify your asking salary.
Lastly, don’t be afraid to ask the interviewer to provide the first number. They are interested in you and they have already set a budget for the position. That puts you in a position of power to find out what that number is. If they insist that you name a number first, provide them with a range and try to frame it so that the lower end of the range safely overlaps with their range but leaves you with some upward potential to negotiate. The worst thing they can do is counter with their hard limit.
Expect to present yourself… a lot
A staple of the UX interview process is the portfolio review. In most of my experiences, the sequence of steps was (1) phone screen with recruiter, (2) a brief portfolio review with the hiring manager, (3) a larger/longer/deeper portfolio review including the larger organization followed by 1:1 interviews.
The criteria for portfolio reviews is typically to fill 30–45 minutes with an introduction to your background and experience followed by one or two projects that you’re proud of. Considering that you’ll want to use the STAR method (or something similar), you should choose projects that tell a complete end-to-end story, and ones where the final result makes your contributions shine.
You probably already have these projects in your online portfolio, but you should remember that context and use cases are critical even with your own work. Online portfolios are meant to be consumed by an individual reader. Your portfolio review should be a separate presentation deck where you’ve curated the images, details, and pace in a way that will be engaging to your audience. Scrolling through your existing website will not achieve this same effect.
Since this is a pessimist’s guide, prepare yourself to repeat this portfolio review for many different interviews. Dedicate yourself a weekend to make one really solid master deck with three or four projects and structure it in a way that you can pare it down to show only a couple projects or fill up a whole hour if necessary. I found myself saving a separate file for each interview, but by repeating the same projects with the same sequence of slides, it was much easier to practice my material and not trip myself up with something new or different in each interview. I also found it helpful to personalize each deck by including the date or the company’s name on my title slide — the manager knows they’re not the only company I’m considering, but it does show them that I care about this role enough to prepare specially for this interview.
Lastly, if you feel insecure that the projects you selected for your deck contain gaps, don’t highlight your newest or deepest skills, or you can anticipate follow-up questions, feel free to include an appendix to your deck. My “case study” projects aren’t always my strongest projects, but on a few occasions I received a tough question or critique and I was able to turn it around by skipping ahead to an example of something smaller that shows more of my range.
Expect to have your heart broken
The hardest part about a tough job search is the emotional rollercoaster that comes with it. I stand by my assertion that you should treat each and every interview like it’s for your dream job; if you can sincerely present yourself as the best fit for the role, you will convince the interviewers as well. Unfortunately, your interviewers will not be treating you like their dream candidate. Convincing yourself that this is the only potential job that matters is a mindset that should be limited to the day of the interview only. Attaching yourself to the role only builds you up for a deep feeling of loss if you don’t get it. I’m good at staying emotionally calm and not getting ahead of myself, but I did slip into this attachment mindset for a couple jobs. The result was a few weeks of depression, of poor health habits, of distraction from my current job, and of distance from the other recruiters still communicating with me. It’s an ego blow to be told the employer chose a different candidate and it might leave you with low self-esteem about how you presented yourself. If you’re not careful, this self-esteem can carry over to the next interview, marring your charm with noticeably insecure self-deprecation. Obviously you wouldn’t purposely do this to yourself, so there’s not much I can say about avoiding it other than to remind yourself that:
- You have so much career potential, and you will get to where you want to be by trying and failing and learning and growing.
- One day of interviewing is worth a week of job experience. You’re not failing an interview, you’re accelerating your career growth.
- Self-confidence doesn’t come naturally to everyone, but it can be faked.
- You will eventually get a job. It might not be as soon as you want. It might not be your favorite one of the bunch. But whatever hell you’re experiencing will not only end, it will end with a job offer.
Expect to get a job
This is what it’s all about. The arc of a job search is long, but it bends toward a job in the end. I don’t recommend getting ahead of yourself when a job prospect is going well until you have an offer in hand, but it might help you along the way to periodically remind yourself why you’re looking for a new job. Take that list you wrote earlier and envision yourself in that hypothetical job you want. Picture how happy you’ll be when your turn finally comes. Smile. And then ride that high while you tweak your presentation deck and psych yourself up for an hour of uncomfortable probing. Every interview is just one step closer to your last one.
