Original Question
[Last Updated]
Having an up-to-date portfolio displaying a diverse range of projects, case studies, and real world examples with a focus on showing skills, application, and impact.
You want to find ways to make your experience, creativity, and ideas concrete and measurable/tangible to your audience.
Get a domain, use Wix or Squarespace, but get a proper portfolio site with more than just giant images.
Make it easy for the recruiter/managers to identify your competencies; use case studies if possible.
I've seen a lot of mock-ups on portfolios but not a lot of real-life applications of the designs or working websites. Also, a lot of people not actually putting their portfolio link on their resume or LinkedIn profile AT ALL (or if they do it's a dead link). Most of our clients want to see what you've done and how it works, not just a general idea of how it COULD work.
If they have experience; Too many fantasy case study projects in a portfolio - Real world business problems are what we love to see.
Having a shiny well-crafted detail-oriented portfolio.
Candidates can't clearly communicate the problem they were solving and the impact to the business during portfolio presentations or interviews.
One of our challenges has been finding folks with a diverse portfolio that isn’t focused solely on product design. Product design is a great field, it’s just not ours…we need more agency experience, or more experience working on multiple projects and clients. UX does exist outside of apps.
Please stop showing all these school projects, especially for non-junior positions. If you are applying for a senior role, there should be NO school projects, only real world projects.
Ask for forgiveness, not permission. Identify an error in a business, make it better, then pitch it to them. At worst you get a pitch deck sample.
...I agree that the portfolio and presentation seem to be the challenge. To stand out from the competition, why not try a project related to the company you are applying for and mention you are excited about the opportunity so you put together something for the company?
Use of misleading keywords in resume (especially ux research related).
Those who do not make sure their content is up-to-date in all materials. CV is showing one information and portfolio another. This is the minimal to show that you care about the position you are applying for. We are not magicians to guess which one is true (Tip: Add the year that the project was done.)
Being able to come prepared, talk about yourself efficiently, answer questions directly, generate interest in your research/ideas/story, ask relevant questions, and adapt to your audience are invaluable.
The difference between successful and unsuccessful candidates is their ability to present their work in a succinct and impactful way given the amount of time and audience.
Candidates aren't prepared with understanding the company, industry or role and don't ask good questions.
Not being clear about their reasons to apply for a company, or what career trajectory they wish to have. (think agency vs in-house ; domain specificity vs agnostic)
Lacking a clear story and reading one’s audience in order to adjust and tell a story that will make sense to that audience (e.g. it’s surprising how often candidates don’t even ask the interviewers how familiar they are or not with the topic they are presenting on).
Poor verbal communication skills. Candidates being unable to quickly communicate ideas and directly answer questions. We’re all busy, all of the time. Go with a punchy sentence answer over a long winded story.
People who didn’t prep for the interview as advised, and people who don’t listen during the interview. There have been interviews where I have repeated a question three times before the candidate answered it.
Candidates can't explain what differentiates them from other candidates - what are their superpowers, what makes them unique?
There's a lack of design thinking while job hunting and candidates are very ego-centric. Most application material talks only about themselves and what they want; they rarely consider the audience they talk with, the position, they don't research the company and come to interviews unprepared, etc.
Focus on what’s important to understand your process and results. We review multiple portfolios, we don't have the time to read a whole book about your case. Soft skills are important for UX as much as tech skills. You need to know how to communicate your work clearly, not just for hiring process, but in your daily work.
Candidates who make it to an HR, UX leader, or group UX interview, but don’t seem to have put in any appreciable time practicing what they want to tell us about themselves, prepping more than 1-2 questions, learning about our company (at all), or reviewing their long forgotten portfolio materials. It’s so disheartening when they have what it takes in their resume and portfolio, but they don’t seem to have put a few simple hours into prepping for the opportunity.
Some candidates try to dazzle you with technical knowledge and textbook methods but don’t effectively communicate how they think or make decisions; this is one way to show critical thinking skills, creativity, and ideation.
Answering the “Why,” of your research is a good opportunity to communicate the impact of your work by highlighting the problems you tried to solve, why it was important, and what your work contributed to the problem space.
Many people do not show they can think critically about problems or ideate. Answering the why of their methods.
A lack of ideation and measurement in case studies - I love this more than execution (Show me the scrappy napkin notes).
For designers - a focus solely on designs, especially high fidelity designs and not enough on their decisions: What they were, why were they important, how they make them and what goes into them...
An almost exclusive focus on methodology.
Inability to articulate design decisions.
Not talking about the journey & why some decisions/solutions were favored over others. Being designers we all know that folks are capable of churning out wireframes. What would be nice to know is to hear the story in the candidate’s own words.
Not being able to differentiate their design approach from that of a web or graphic designer. How did you come to this solution? What types of inputs did you leverage? Why is this the right experience?
I see many candidates just going step by step through the process because that's what the school taught them. No critical thinking about problems. No iterating on research. Maybe two rounds of usability testing without a clear tie to why.
Lacking the storytelling component in UX; folks tend to share that same design process that we all know but miss the impact that they made as a designer or design leader.
Candidates are very academic, they explain the design process ("I did the interviews, and then wireframes, and then UI..."), but not the why behind it. They share zero context, zero challenges, zero learnings, and self-criticism is rare.
Those who do not communicate well what they did, their role, the story behind the product, or which problem they are trying to solve. If we can't understand that, it's hard to evaluate your work.
When the focus is on getting a job instead of finding the right job, it’s easy to look past mismatches between oneself and the position
People who have NO training or experience in UX, applying for UX jobs...
Candidates take the job without listening to what they should do as daily tasks. We are very clear that our UX consultants aren't creative designers, daily tasks include a lot of repetitive work, client education, and devs support. After a few months, they go into burnout or leave because they aren't happy with not doing more creative work.
Bias that UX should work the same way it has worked in other companies they have experience with.
Not paying attention to the job description and requirements. For instance, if the job says Open to people in US only, and you live in a another country, do not apply! If a job is only open to people in a certain country, there is a reason (probably something to do with payroll).
People who don't have at least some practical knowledge of UXR
People don't consider the UX of how to put together a portfolio (if they choose to) or resume, and whether or not it makes sense to apply for a job or not based on the requirements.
Much of UX work is embedded in XFN (cross-functional teams/networks), showing you’ve got good habits and work well with others matters.
Differentiating between the ‘I’ & ‘we.’ Good design never happens in a silo. There’s nothing wrong with the ‘we’ but it’s important to know what the designer did on their own & what areas they collaborated on.
Forgetting to give credit where credit is due; it takes a village and design always needs partners to ship -- I want to know how they collaborate, build relationships, and define the finish line.
Finding senior designers (3-7 years of experience), especially someone with more rounded experience. A lot of seniors seem to come from a ‘ux team of one’ situation where they had no UX mentor/leader themselves. So they still need a lot of mentorship in certain areas, because they never had the benefit of it for themselves.
<aside> 🤔 On recruiters/hiring managers…
~ JL
<aside> 💡 I'd like to offer an insight that many times the issue is not the candidate but the person the candidate is speaking to and making decisions about the hiring process.
</aside>
People who know very little to nothing about UX. Too many times the first person of contact, who will be responsible for relaying a candidate's fit, experience, etc... to hiring managers, are in no way qualified to effectively provide an accurate representation of candidates. It is an incredible disservice to candidates who are often reduced to glorified graphic designers when they're UX expertise isn't even in product design. This is compounded by entire hiring teams who have no idea what UX is or what they are asking for. These kind of teams are essentially setting up candidates to fail, either in the process or on the job.
An incredible lack of transparency about the work, what stage the hiring company is in, the resources the candidate will have available, and even the hiring process itself. Some of the people commenting should have a deep moment of reflection and ask themselves if they are effectively doing some of the things they're saying their candidates are not.
Interviews can be very stressful and aren’t always an accurate reflection of someone’s ability to present in a meeting or an event.
As someone that has been actively interviewing for months now with big tech, mid size and startups, I can say that each team and hiring manager has its preference at the moment of interviewing and dependent on what they are hiring for. Many times the search is for something specific. They want to see a particular thing, hear a specific word or ask for a unique ability. If the candidate doesn’t have it, then that’s it.
Discussion/Reflection Questions
Are you effective in your communication? Was your candidate actually unprepared or did they do the best with the information you gave them?
Were you clear in what you are looking for in the role? Or is your singular role actually multiple roles combined into one?
Did you have guidelines for a portfolio review? Did you expect the candidate to perform the review in a specific way but fail to mention that to the candidate?
Is the hiring process indicative of what it's like to work with this company?
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