Being yourself in a job hunt

In this post, I'll explain how I learned that hiring decisions are often made based upon factors not obvious in job descriptions. Which led me to the unexpected conclusion that the right response is to avoid over-tailoring your resume, portfolio, or even presentations and focus instead on consistently broadcasting your top strengths.

And if you make it to the end of this post, you'll see the most absurd, awkward, funny, and embarrassing stories from my job hunt ;).

Facts about my job hunt

I’m a Senior Product Designer with 8 years’ experience designing developer tools, and a previous 4 years’ experience designing online learning experiences as an Instructional Designer.

• Jobs applied to during 6 months: 100
• Referrals: 3
• Referrals that led to a job offer: 1
• Full interview cycles (where I completed all interviews for a role and was one of the top candidates considered for the role): 5
• Job offers: 2
• Jobs quit: 1 (after 3 months)
• Jobs offers that were rescinded due to HR deciding they wouldn’t allow me to be remote: 1
• Do I have a job right now? No. Email me at shannon.soper@gmail.com or on LinkedIn if you want to connect! Update: In Sept 2024, I got a job! Wohoo!

Update September 2026: I do not have a job :). The company layed off the design team right before I had maternity leave, so I took an extended maternity leave and just started a job hunt this month.

Insights, in order from starting the search to doing final interviews.

Don’t look at # of applicants

Every job on LinkedIn shows 100+ applicants. What I've heard from recruiters is that many of those 100+ applications are trash applications from people who aren’t designers at all and just have some bot apply to every open job on the internet.

Sticking with one industry produces interviews

Though I’m interested in many industries, especially edTech, biotech, and healthcare, I almost only get responses from developer tool companies (which is the industry I've designed for in the last 8 years).

Two likely reasons for this higher rate of success:

1. Recruiters and hiring managers want to increase their chance of hiring a successful employee, so they often pursue the candidate whose portfolio looks almost identical to the work they need.
2. Most technical tools and SaaS products aren’t as “sexy” and can seem intimidating to designers. Therefore, they are less competitive than applying to Airbnb or Instagram. So, you’re more likely to get an interview there, just by virtue of actually applying and if your projects show you can design for technical audiences.

At first, it seemed like a less-than-ideal constraint to stick to one industry, and then I got more excited because the interviews are also easier for me. I don’t have to completely rewrite my presentations to fit audiences with no background in developer tools.

And, it’s fun to get a higher success rate. Once I started only applying to developer tool companies and dev tool departments inside of larger companies, I started getting responses to 20% of my applications, which is a really high rate.

Writing cover letters produces interviews

I know I already argued that tailoring your applications & interviews isn't worth it; but taking 5 minutes to slightly tailor cover letters is worth it. I research the company and use the first paragraph of the cover letter to introduce myself and show I know what their product's purpose is. Then, the rest of the cover letter is from some templates that I edit. I copy and paste into their text field rather than uploading a pdf.

At first, I thought maybe AI was reviewing applications and I had to optimize my resume with keywords. It seems like real people are still reading applications. I heard that at one company, they scan the first 50 or 100 or so and then make decisions.

Use Simplify to fill repetitive info

The Simplify.jobs Chrome extension fills in your resume, links to LinkedIn, portfolio, etc and contact info on applications so you don’t have to keep retyping them or opening lots of tabs to copy and paste.

Who is getting all the jobs?

Whenever I have completed an interview cycle and didn’t get an offer, I waited a couple months before looking up the team on LinkedIn to see who got the job.

It’s almost always someone who is leveling down. E.g. a staff designer accepting a senior designer role.

Asking the hiring manager for feedback

I’ve asked for feedback every time I got rejected from a role. Only got detailed feedback by contacting hiring managers through LinkedIn.

Feedback is a clue about the organization’s true needs

I’ve had two hiring managers give me feedback.

What feedback did I get?

One person forgot most of my presentation

One hiring manager who gave me feedback 2 days after my presentation forgot about one of the two projects I presented. They also said they wanted someone who displayed more evidence of collaboration. Tragically, that is one of my superpowers. And they didn’t ask me any questions about it during the interviews.

One person ended up caring about something they didn’t expect

A hiring manager at an excellent company told me that I did a great job with my portfolio presentation and behavioral interviews. It was super useful to know what went well.

Where I fell short of their expectations was in my presentation of a take-home assignment. She said that I could have expressed more enthusiasm for user needs.

I felt somewhat upset by this feedback at first, because the take-home assignment’s purpose, according to their instructions, was to show my visual design skills. The other battery of interviews exhaustively focused on user needs, and their instructions said they gave me the take-home simply to see what I could get done in Figma in 3 hours.

What did I learn?

Their feedback may not be reliable. Even wonderful, intelligent people don't often understand their own behavior very well. Or they might be disincentivized to tell me truth (maybe they just didn't like my haircut, but they can't say that lol).

If I assume their feedback is a true reflection of why they passed on hiring me, I learned that I failed to consistently broadcast my top strengths when I tried too hard to adapt to their stated expectations. I learned I ought to be myself to the max, no matter what people say they want me to be.

In an uncertain world, BE YOURSELF to the MAX

Because of the uncertainy about how hiring decisions are made, I realized you just have to BE YOURSELF. In every interview, every interaction, make your top 3-5 strengths obvious.

This means that you will get hired for what you're truly good at.

Present the same strengths to everyone, and at some point, it will randomly align with what a hiring manager realizes they want, even if they didn’t know they wanted it.

This will make your life easier, since you don’t have to tailor your resumes and portfolio presentations and you’ll have extra time and energy to apply to more jobs.

Caveat: It's a lot lower cost to tailor your conversations, which shows you are listening and understand their product, so I definitely do that. I've just stopped tailoring my slideshows and resume, and I just minimally tailor cover letters.

Of course, if you like tailoring resumes and slideshows, by all means, go for it. It might make a difference, and it also might be a waste of time, since the hiring team may change their minds about what they value anyway.

What are my superpowers?

Since I'm arguing that broadcasting your 3-5 top strengths is the way to find a good fit, here are mine:

1. I'm Dr. Design. I'm truly interested in understanding user's needs and problems, through research, and "diagnosing" the problems so I can prescribe solutions.
2. I'm MVP-obsessed. I'm ferociously committed to shipping MVPs because I love seeing results and solving user problems as fast as possible. I've found that exploring multiple design options, early on, prevents my teams from spending too long designing something too big.
3. My Figma files are tidy & easy to use. They have decision logs about why we made certain design decisions. The layers are labelled. There are no unused layers.
4. I'm a concise writer. I produce design specs that include a hypotheses, how we will test it, and competitor analyses. I write 1-page UX Research summaries and meeting agendas with clear objectives. I give 5 minute presentations with clear takeaways.
5. I minimize confusion and misalignment by facilitating shared knowledge. I invite my teammates to usability tests, sketching exercises, and design feedback sessions. For lingering misalignment issues that I notice, I set up one-on-one conversations.

Funny / awkward stories

Because job hunting can be tedious, let's have some fun reflecting on the funniest/worst interviews I've been in:

They had the ball(s)

Throughout an entire 1 hour Zoom interview, a product manager bounced up and down on an exercise ball. Every time he bounced up, his face blurred in his background filter. I became less interested in the job.

An unexpected expert

A designer did a collaborative design exercise interview with me. She asked me to imagine what school teachers value. I said “they value student success, and they are pressured to value meeting their district’s standards so they can continue to get funding.” She said “Wrong. They only value student success.” Turned out she is the authority on what all teachers think ;).

Self-sabotage

A hiring manager said “Who are you again? What role are you interviewing for? I’m so disorganized, haha.”

Work-life balance = running a cafe

The same hiring manager said “This company has great work-life balance. I spend half my time running a cafe with my husband.”

Ghosting me

2 different Meta recruiters emailed me to invite me to set up a phone call interview. I emailed them back with my availability, and they never responded. It’s been months.

Not reading emails

I showed up to an interview where the hiring manager wanted to ask me all about the materials she had emailed me ahead of time. I hadn't read the email carefully because I thought it was an auto-generated email from the recruiter rather than a personal one from her. I felt very embarrassed.

An Old West style shoot-out

One company invited me to attend their company demo day as a guest, as part of my interview process. Attending was very useful. Seeing their crisp, exciting, and short demos made me want to join the company. However, they unexpectedly asked all guests to introduce themselves. Right after I introduced myself, another senior product designer introduced themselves as a guest. I could only assume they were my competition for the open role. It felt very uncomfortable to know who my competition was…