3 Know your users
“We spend a lot of time designing the bridge, but not enough time thinking about the people crossing it.”
Prabhjot Singh
When you submit a UX portfolio to a recruiter, potential employer or client, it will be examined without you present, and often by a person who has never spoken to you.
I have spoken with with several hundred hiring managers and recruiters from across the globe over the past few years. They have one common complaint: they estimate 9 out of 10 of the portfolios they review are poorly curated with little focus and apparent thought.
They say the portfolios they often see are haphazard galleries of user interfaces or disorganized collections of commonplace design documents such as site maps, wireframes and mockups.
So, it seems the biggest mistake UX designers make with their portfolio is to throw together some semi-decent artefacts into a PDF or website and expect a hiring manager to get on with it.
Part of the problem may be that portfolios are assembled in a state of panic at the last-minute in order to support a job application. We should take better care when demonstrating the value of our craft.
The more work you do ahead of time, the better. It starts, like all of the best design projects, with getting to know your users.
The recruiting process
Let’s be honest. The recruiting process at many companies leaves a lot to be desired. And that’s my British understatement.
Few companies have a formal, repeatable interviewing process for hiring. Recruitment consultants and others claim a failed hire can cost as much as a third of the position’s annual salary. Despite this, many companies choose to wing the recruitment process, bringing people in for interviews, asking a few questions and hoping for the best.
Hiring can take a long time and be time consuming. At larger companies, managers often need to justify and seek financial approval for a post. They must then prepare a job specification and advert, and argue with the human resources department over where to advertise the post. Only then can they review applications, screen candidates by phone, interview candidates in-person, arrange the job offer, and get the HR department to send rejection emails. It can take 3-4 months from sourcing to hiring for a full-time employee.
In a March 2014 blog post,1 Etsy Product Design Director Cap Watkins shed some light on the company’s recent design recruitment drive.
In the six months between October 2013 and March 2014:
• 1030 portfolios, websites and dribbble accounts reviewed
• 103 designers approached
• 28 designers were not interested or did not reply
• 75 design candidates informally interviewed once or twice
• 14 brought into the Etsy office for an in-person interview
• 8 designers hired. That’s 7.8% of the original 103.
As Cap wrote at the time, “I’m not sure if that last number is good or bad (I have nothing to compare against), but, personally, I’m happy with it.”
The recruitment drive was spread across four design managers. Cap wrote, “At my peak, I’ve personally spent upwards of 60% of my time (including outside normal business hours) sourcing, emailing, meeting over coffee or Google Hangouts, documenting, sharing notes, setting up second screens, UX exercises and, finally, interview loops (which include pre and post-huddles). This is not to say I don’t enjoy it. I really love meeting and getting to know other designers. But the time commitment is real and, unless you’re carving out regular, sustained blocks of time for recruiting, you’re not going to be successful.”
Recruiting can also be unrelenting. It can depend on how buoyant the local employment market is, but it’s common for a UX designer or researcher to switch to another employer after only a year, even if they’re a permanent hire. So, a manager may be running a hiring process every twelve months for each role they take care of. Next time you see a manager, perhaps you should give them a hug.
Realistically, we’re not going to improve the hiring process substantially overnight. But we can meet our needs by meeting the needs of our users. We can use design skill to ensure our portfolios are tailored as much as possible for our primary users: recruiters, hiring managers, or prospective clients.
Recruiters
Start typing the phrase ‘Recruiters are’ into Google and autocomplete shows no mercy.
Then there are the jokes.
Q. If you had a gun with 2 silver bullets, a vampire, a werewolf and an recruiter, who would you shoot? A. The recruiter. Twice. Just to be sure.
Okay, I confess. I just re-wrote an old lawyer joke there, but it worked really well. Too well. Recruiters are vilified in much the same way as lawyers. Visit LinkedIn on any day of the week, and you will hear that recruiters:
• advertise jobs that do not exist, to build a database of candidates that they may call on in future
• use fake LinkedIn profiles to apply for vacancies represented by other agencies, so that they can poach clients
• misrepresent opportunities to candidates or overstate their relationship with a client
• change candidate résumés or CVs without permission
• act excited about a candidate only to never contact them again
• quiz candidates on who their details have already gone to, so they can submit other candidates for the same vacancies
• quiz candidates on their previous hiring managers, to identify and develop business leads
• treat a candidate’s referees as business leads
While shady behaviour like this does occur, not all recruiters are evil or incompetent. The best ones will, with care and attention, match the right person to the right vacancy and facilitate the hiring process until the appointment has been made.
The best recruiters will:
• work with employers on their vacancy specification so that it clearly articulates the experience and skills required
• act as an advocate for a great candidate that wouldn’t be considered based solely on their résumé or CV
• provide insight on their client, the current job market, and future trends
• give constructive feedback on a candidate’s résumé or CV
• coach a candidate through all aspects of the interview and hiring process
• advise candidates on their career and what to focus on
Recruiters may also have roles on offer that cannot be found any other way. They may be pro-active in finding a candidate work, suggesting matches as and when they come up. So, ignore the bad PR - a good recruiter is worth knowing.
What recruiters know about UX design will vary
The most common complaint about recruiters is that they are ignorant of what we do. After all, they approach us with jobs like this, where the stated job requirements seem at odds with the job title or role:
I have an urgent requirement for a UX designer for an immediate start. Ideally you will come from an agency background with good experience in Mobile design for web and app and be able to produce user journeys and both lofi and hifi wireframes. Must have experience in Adobe CS, HTML5, CSS3, .NET and SQL paying £250-£300 pd.
Some of the larger I.T. recruitment agencies do not claim to know anything. They admit they play a numbers game, submitting as many résumés or CVs as possible to a client in the hope that one or more of their candidates will be called for interview.
These agencies are most likely to be the ones that will email you inappropriate jobs just because keywords in your résumé or CV matched a new vacancy on their books.
Staff at a specialist UX recruitment agency should know more. They may even have completed a short UX design course and be aware of some basic UX fundamentals. Even so, their knowledge may be skewed by the needs of their existing client base. If, for example, they have dealt mainly with corporate clients, their understanding of UX design will reflect that.
Yours isn’t the only call they will make today
Recruiter Alysse Metzler, in her book ’Recruiting Snitch’,2 reveals that during the course of a single day, a recruiter will:
• Read and respond to 60+ emails
• Attend more than two hours of meetings with hiring managers
• Conduct six phone interviews
• Update 15 candidates
• Consult with upset managers or employees
• Screen more than 50 résumés or CVs
• Respond to 5+ voicemails
Alysse also reveals that almost 60% of recruiters will be working on 11 vacancies or more at one time. Given this workload, is it fair that we should expect even specialist recruiters to understand the minutia of user experience design? I suspect not.
Building a good relationship is key
Recruiters will quiz potential candidates based on known client requirements, if they have been clearly communicated to them by the client concerned. Sadly, this is often not the case. In the case of some roles, particularly freelance or contract ones, all the recruiter may know is that the client needs a UX designer.
Questions that recruiters often like to ask include:
• Are you looking to work a digital agency or client-side and in-house?
• What industry sectors have you worked in? Ecommerce? Travel? Finance? Insurance? Telecommunications? Government?
• Do you have experience in designing responsive websites, native mobile apps, kiosks, or user interfaces for internet-connected hardware? How about social media apps or chatbots?
• What about project methodologies? Agile? Lean? Waterfall?
• What software do you use? Axure? OmniGraffle? Sketch? Balsamiq? UXPin? Flinto? InVision? Origami?
• How experienced are you with research tools such as card sorting, persona development, usability testing and workshop facilitation?
• Are you client-facing? How experienced are you at pitching and justifying your decision decisions?
• Have you acted as the UX lead on a project, or managed teams?
In Chapters 5-8, we’ll look at how to best communicate the answers to these questions in your UX portfolio.
In ’Recruiting Snitch’ Alysse Metzler also mentions that almost two-thirds of 101 recruiters she quizzed said that they had previously hired on potential and personality rather than qualifications. So, if you are passionate about something, you are more likely to get the job over someone who is more qualified but without passion. Your UX portfolio will also need to communicate passion.
Ultimately, the route to success with a recruiter is to build a great relationship with them. The role of your UX portfolio is two-fold: to support your conversations with them, and to help them act as your advocate during any application process.
Hiring managers
If you worked as a doctor, your application would likely be reviewed by another doctor. If you were a lawyer, another lawyer would take the reins. But in user experience design, the situation is often not quite so simple. The hiring manager could be almost anyone. They could be a fellow UX designer, a project manager, a creative director, a lead developer, a product owner, marketing professional or even a small business owner.
These potential employers or clients will all have a different idea of what UX design is, and what UX design role should involve. At best, they will have developed a person specification which details what their ideal employee should achieve. At worst, they may just know that they have problem to solve and that a UX designer may be able to help them.
Also bear in mind that the hiring manager may not be the actual decision-maker. They may only have permission to put selected portfolios in front of a more senior manager or a review committee.
What they are looking for will be subjective, influenced by their role, past experience, company culture, and other factors. Let’s discuss these now.
Company and culture
The company and its culture will have a profound impact on what a hiring manager looks for in a portfolio.
Digital agencies or consultancies will often be interested in seeing a broad portfolio of work and strong examples of attractive documentation. In terms of methodology, waterfall is often common as they are typically paid to produce something then hand it off to their client. Often an agency will be looking for someone with strong stakeholder management skills. They’ll want to know how much pitching for work you have done previously and how good you are at explaining UX to non-UXers. Will you be able to explain to clients who don’t know about UX why they are being asked to spend on it? Or to stand up and defend your work in the right way?
At a corporate, different skills and experience are often required. It can take a long time for things to be done, so hiring managers look for perseverance and experience on long projects. The ability to deal skillfully with internal politics is also valued.
Startups, on the other hand, favour collaboration and speed of delivery. VP Product and UX of PatientsLike Me, Kim Goodwin, reckons they value process skills for bringing order to chaos, but only if it is not called a ‘process’.3
Job role
Lynn Teo, when Chief Experience Officer at McCann Erickson, gave one of the first presentations on UX portfolio design.4 In it she suggests that a portfolio reviewer’s job role has a profound affect on what they look for in a portfolio.
UX leads, she said, will be interested in UX design methods, whether the candidate is a team player, and the quality of the work shown.
Project managers will be interested the overall design process followed, the candidate’s communication skills and whether their work was delivered on time and on budget.
“Creative directors”, Lynn continues, “will be interested in conceptual thought, problem statements and the effectiveness of the solutions detailed in the portfolio”.
UX maturity
The extent to which UX design has been adopted within an organisation will also influence the experience a hiring manager looks for in a portfolio.
Last time I counted, there were 30 UX maturity models, but they all reflect roughly the same stages of adoption:
• Stage 0: Unrecognised. UX is ‘not important’.
• Stage 1: Interested. UX is important but receives little funding.
• Stage 2: Invested. UX is very important and formalised programs emerge.
• Stage 3: Committed. UX is critical and executives are actively involved.
• Stage 4: Engaged. UX is one of the core tenets of the organisation.
• Stage 5: UX is in the fabric of the organisation; not discuss separately.
Hiring managers at less mature organisations will want to see experience in similar organisations. They will be concerned that a designer who has most of their experience in UX-mature companies may face difficulties in an environment where UX design is considered something that gets in the way of what stakeholders wish to do. At less UX-mature organisations, UX designers spend more time on internal education and on justifying why money and time must be spent on learning what a company’s users and customers need before designing.
Size of team
As a general rule of thumb, small teams need generalists. Big teams can use specialists.
Delivering the right blend of content is key
As I indicated in Chapter 2, a UX portfolio is a sales document – in it, you’re trying to communicate your value by demonstrating how you brought value on similar projects or to similar companies. The more you can tailor your portfolio to the hiring manager, the more likely you will be called for interview.
All of your users will be pressed for time
There is one thing that both recruiters and hiring managers will have in common. Lack of time.
Recruiters will glance over portfolios in-between phone calls, while hiring managers will often review them a few minutes at a time between meetings.
In 2012 the job site TheLadders revealed that recruiters spend about 6 seconds reviewing a CV or résumé before they make the initial ‘fit/no fit’ decision.5
When it comes to portfolios, the situation is a little better. My own research suggests that you have 30 seconds or less to make a good impression.
There is one major difference between recruiters and hiring managers though. Recruiters will review portfolios in order to rule the owner in, while hiring managers, looking for a limited number of candidates, will often be looking to rule people out.
Learning more about your users
Taking the time to thoroughly research a company is an important part of any job search. Firstly, you need to evaluate whether you and the company would be a good fit. Secondly, you need the information to shape your portfolio.
Focus your search around the company, the industry it is in, the potential job role, and your likely portfolio reviewers.
Try to learn what your role would really involve. Identify who would you work with. Learn how the UX team is integrated into the business company. Find out if they have access to users. Identify if the company really practice user-centered design.
Job advertisements
A good job ad will describe what the position needs to accomplish, clearly articulate the UX professional’s place in the company, and then identify the expertise and skill set required by the candidate. For bonus points, it will define what success looks like for the candidate 90 days or even a year along the line.
Sadly, many job advertisements are poor. At best, they state the skills and experience the prospective employer thinks would be needed to complete the work at hand. At worst, the advertisement bears no relation to the role at hand. You may think I am kidding. I’m not. A few years ago I applied for a role with a startup that called for ‘Knowledge of HCI techniques such as task analysis and state modelling’. I was perplexed, as I expected a startup’s focus to be on collaborative product design and testing. So, at the subsequent interview I asked how they used these HCI techniques. “We don’t”, came the reply. They asked me why I asked, so I explained that the information was in the job ad. It quickly transpired that nobody on the interview panel had actually reviewed the job description that was being used to source applicants. A year later, when they advertised the role again, the same job description was used. I’d like to say that such a slapdash approach to hiring was uncommon. Sadly it’s not.
When you review the job advertisement, try to identify the challenges they potential employer or client faces. Try to work out the problems they are trying to solve. If you choose to tailor your portfolio for the vacancy, these are the needs you need to address.
Don’t stop at only reviewing the advertisement for the role you are interested in. Review the advertisements for any roles you may work alongside. Entering the potential employer’s website into the WayBack Machine6 may allow you to see the advertisements of roles that have already been filled and removed from a employer’s current website. Understanding the other roles available should give you some insight into the company’s organisation and how user experience design may fit into it.
Websites and social media
Start with the company’s own website. As well as job ads, check any employee biographies. Pay attention to their experience and any company structure implied. Try to understand who you will be working with and how. Is there a company blog or media section? These may contain industry insights, product announcements, and sometimes information about working practices.
A simple search of LinkedIn for a company name will reveal if any of your contacts previously worked there or are connected to people there. These folks may be able to offer valuable insight and be willing to make an introduction for you.
Thinking of making a speculative enquiry? Following your target company on LinkedIn may help you keep up with their current activity.
Want to get to know your hiring manager? Do an advanced LinkedIn search for the company and the manager’s most likely job title. Once you have identified them, check their profile and the groups and influencers that they follow.
Can you find your predecessors on LinkedIn? How do they say they previously worked at the company? Search SlideShare and Speaker Deck for past presentations that they may have made. Any hint of working practices?
Other social media
Is the company on Twitter, Facebook or other social media? What are they talking about and sharing? If customers are interacting with them, what are discussing? Check out relevant message boards too. What are customers saying about the company and it’s services? What problems do they talk about? What do they celebrate?
Google and other websites
Set up a Google alert for an email notification each time the search engine finds new results related to your target employer. Use Google news to keep with relevant company or industry news.
Are there any industry news and blogs? If so, how is the company perceived externally? Employee review websites such as Glassdoor can provide useful insight too.
Networking
It’s amazing how many people fail to quiz their friends and former co-workers about a potential employer or client. Don’t miss this valuable opportunity to get the inside track. You may end up getting an internal referral that turns a strong application into an absolute certainty. (Referrals by existing employees often bypass human resources checks and go straight to the top of the pile.)
Attend local gatherings of design professionals to make contacts. Look out for events by the IxDA,7 UXPA,8 SIGCHI,9 the IA Institute,10 and NUX.11
Attending conferences and chatting in the corridors between sessions can be valuable too. A comprehensive list of events can be found on the ‘Find UX Events’ website.12
Finally, don’t forget that you can use the Eventbrite, Meetup and Lanyrd websites to locate events that representatives from your target company may speak at or attend. Try searching with Google for ‘site:meetup.com ’ or similar.
Career fairs
Career fairs where an employer or group of employers invites potential candidates to come and learn more are more common in the USA than in the UK and elsewhere. Be prepared. Have copies of your résumé or CV printed to share, and sensible questions to ask. It’s an opportunity to make a great first impression. Use it wisely.
The pre-interview
You may, through your networking efforts, be offered the opportunity for a pre-interview. Also known as an informational interview, this is a low-pressure and informal discussion with an employee of your prospective employer. The person you speak with may just be a friend of a friend and have no involvement in the hiring process, but they will have valuable insight and may be willing to act as referral later on.
As with the career fairs, prepare good, well-researched questions. The person you meet will not necessarily evaluate your skills, but they will want to appraise your personality, communication and interest.
Chapter summary
In this chapter we discovered:
• 9 out of 10 portfolios fail to meet reviewer needs.
• The recruiting process is imperfect, time consuming, and unrelenting.
• Portfolios, like our work, should be user-centred.
• Recruiters are often vilified but the best are really useful.
• The UX knowledge of recruiters will vary.
• Building a good relationship with a recruiter is key.
• A hiring manager could be practically anyone.
• What a hiring manager looks for in a portfolio will be subjective, influenced by their role, past experience, company culture, and other factors.
• Delivering the right blend of content for a hiring manager is key.
• Hiring mangers and recruiters are often pressed for time, reviewing portfolios in-between meetings and phone call.
• Your portfolio has 30 seconds or less to make a good first impression.
• Recruiters will be looking to rule candidates in. Hiring managers will be looking to rule applicants out.
• Job ads, websites, social media and real-world networking can provide valuable insight on your chosen company, the industry it is in, the potential job role, and your likely portfolio reviewers.