What is Wrong with Hiring

It's been a tough couple of years for UX research professionals, and many are considering pivoting their careers within tech or beyond.

Leadership coach Tatiana Vlahovic reminds us that researchers plenty of marketable skills that can be applied in other contexts and roles. Challenging as they may be, professional and personal inflection points present opportunities for UXR practitioners and leaders to expand and evolve their caree...

In this AMA, Amy and Laura (or maybe her doppelgänger) answer some listener-submitted questions.

- Hiring managers want UX rock stars, so how do you get hired if you've had the misfortune of working in places where you weren’t supported or were underutilized, and didn't get to have much impact or work on cool stuff?

- How do you describe work impact on your resume if it's not tracked or measured, a project got canceled, or you got ...

A lack of standardized definitions for UX research roles and levels across companies presents a challenge for job searches, hiring, promotions, and career planning. 

Amy chats with Lawton Pybus and Thomas Stokes of Drill Bit Labs about their research on the state of UXR job leveling, qualifications, responsibilities, and compensation for IC and manager roles. 

Join us for a fun discussion of what they learned and actionable recomme...

Why is the tech job market still so bad? Why are the mass layoffs still happening? Why is hiring so broken, and whose fault is it? Job seekers, hiring managers, and recruiters alike will want to tune in to my conversation with recruiter and founder of Hire Breakthrough, Kimone Napier, for some commiseration and perspective during this defeating and demoralizing time. 

We also talk what exactly an ATS is and why you don’t need to wo...

Amy chats with writer, podcaster, speaker, Pokémon enthusiast, research champion, and founder of User Research Academy, Nikki Anderson. Nikki provides sage advice for taking your job interviews, resume, and portfolio up a few notches, and shares the most common mistakes she's made as a candidate and what she's seen as a hiring manager.

She also imparts a supportive mess...

Amy chats with coach Roberta Dombrowski about the experience of interviewing for tech jobs as “an only”. If you’ve ever been an “only” (woman, person of color, neurodivergent, queer, etc.) or first of your kind on a team, this one’s for you. Hiring managers, recruiters, and anyone else who cares about other people, can also learn a thing or two about creating an inclusive hiring process to set “onlys” up for success.

Roberta is the...

Senior Product Design Manager and respected UX community contributor Mitch Clements shares how he created an attentive, fair, and effective hiring process to scale his 26-person (and counting!) design team at Encino. UX hiring managers and job seekers will appreciate Mitch's reflections on:

• Lessons learned on screening and interviewing candidates in a crowded market, from entry level to advanced practitioners
• The necessity of i...

Leadership coach, design executive, and founder of Happy Path Sally Carson. Sally shares her hiring insights and job search advice based on 20+ years in tech, including her time as a hiring manager and leader of design teams at LinkedIn and Cisco. We talk about:

• Using a "jobs to be done" framework to craft your resume, portfolio, and other materials according to the needs and goals of your audience

• Insights into how recruite...

Amy chats with Dave Miller, an 18-year talent management veteran and founder of Design Citizen, a human-centered recruiting and career advisory firm for product and creative professionals in tech. 

Tune in for lots of gems as Dave shares his insights on past, present, and future tech industry and job market trends (good news: things are looking a bit better!), with a healthy mix of reality check and optimism about the impact of AI ...

In this special episode swap, Amy joins Jeremy Miller, host of Beyond UX Design, for an in-depth conversation about the state of the UX job market.

We touch on some familiar topics around the mass tech layoffs, but the primary focus of our discussion looks at how job seekers can manage their response to layoffs and navigate the job search during a chaotic time.

Plus a fun April Fool's Day Joke... 

Links

Check out Jeremy's Podcast, ...

Today we answer some great questions from our fabulous listeners! Hope it helps!

• Is it worth applying to jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed?
• We're supposed to network to find a job, but what do you do when no one you know has an open role? 
• When hundreds or thousands of people apply to a job in just a few days, should you even bother?
• Why does it seem like companies are hiring more UX contractors these days? What does it mean for the ...

What can job seekers, hiring managers, and companies do to mitigate bias in hiring? In this conversation with writer, speaker, consultant, and all around awesome guy David Dylan Thomas, we discuss the individual and collective actions we can take to alleviate the burden on candidates who just want to get a damn job.

Buckle your seatbelts for an adventurous exploration of cognitive biases in hiring, how to address common concerns li...

Amy chats with coach, trainer, speaker, and founder of The Early Manager, Joe Cardillo (they/them), about how we can use research and emotional intelligence to "read the room" when interviewing—i.e., figuring out the context of the organization, team, and manager to ascertain fit and effectively position ourselves to land the role.

We cover:

• Asking specific questions to get specific answers

   

• Questions as a form of positioni...

Feeling slightly depressed, Amy talks about the state of the UX and tech job market in the US, which is complete shit show right now. She tries her darnedest to make sense of what's going on and what we might expect in the near-term, based on existing data sources and job seeker sentiment.  

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Episode transcript

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Laura and Amy discuss the really unpleasant topic of "professional branding" (ew!), and try to make a bit more palatable and relevant. As awful as it sounds, putting a bit of effort into how you show up in the world and tell your story can be beneficial for a job search, career development, networking, and professional opportunities. And don't worry, it doesn't mean you need to become a Thoughtfluencer TM with a massive following...

Amy chats with Hang Xu, a former UX designer and the founder of Collective Supply, an independent design talent firm, about assessing organizational design/UX maturity during job interviews, and whether or not it matters. 

We cover:

• Hang's backstory, how he got into talent management, and his excellent satirical LinkedIn content
• The state of design & tech hiring today
• The philosophical, historical, cultural, and practical o...

For this episode, we answer some listener-submitted questions, including

• How do I answer those annoying questions like "tell me about a time when you had a difficult stakeholder" or "a challenge with a teammate", especially when I don't have a good example?
• How do we deal with the farce of companies expecting everyone to have a cogently designed professional brand and career when sometimes we choose...

We're wrapping up our Hiring Horror Stories series with more spine chilling anecdotes from hiring managers who, like their job seeker counterparts, must also regularly deal with unacceptable levels of hiring clusterfuckery. 

In Part 3, we share some terrible tales from our listeners featuring major organizational incompetence, pompous candidates, frustratingly fickle decision-makers, and more. We like to think that a couple of th...