Hiring. Many of us want to get hired at some point. Some of us want to do the hiring eventually. Karen takes us through the mindset of someone who is looking to hire designers, and how we can best position ourselves to work for the companies we like.
"They need you more than you need them."
This, Karen says, is one of the hardest things for new graduate to wrap their heads around. Companies looking to hire are usually desperately trying to fill a role. Maybe someone just left and projects are piling up. Maybe the company is just growing quickly. Thinking more broadly about the industry, there is simply more new technology coming into the world than their are qualified designers to design them. Just think about all the new products and services that are being created everyday.
That said, to maximize our chance of getting the jobs we want, Karen wants us to:
Understand the mindset of the person doing the hiring. i.e. the hiring manager
Understand yourself, your skills, and how you communicate your fit for the company
Job postings are a complete and utter waste of your time. Personal contacts is the only thing that matters in getting a job. -Karen
Don't spam fifty companies with generic, carbon copies of your resume and cover letters. Focus on a handful of companies, find out as best you can who is hiring and what their needs are. "If you don't care enough to put the effort into finding the hiring manager's name? You don't care enough about the job."
Most importantly, make a personal connection with people who work at places that you're interested in. Start doing this now, even if you're not actively looking for a job. Meet them at conferences, go for a coffee, reach out on twitter. A personal connection builds a stronger case than any resume or cover letter you can put together.
Have empathy, be human. We hear this all the time as advice for designers, but this theme comes up again and again in this class on hiring. Keep in mind that the hiring manager has their own problems and pressures to deal with, and their own desires and needs. The better you can empathize with their position, and shape your approach accordingly, the more likely you will stand out.
Ideally, when your resume comes across the hiring manager's desk, you want your name to ring a bell. To get there, you need to start building your public reputation. How? Talk to people. Network at local events. Volunteer. Talk to people during breaks at conference. Don't be a wall flower. Have a strategy for talking to people. Is there someone you want to meet? Shoot them an email before hand! Also,
"I can't tell you how many perfectly lovely people I've met at conferences and forgotten. Send that person a note once in a while!" -Karen
It's hard to build a public reputation without some conference speaking. Fortunately, many conferences have opportunities specifically for less well known designers. Make plans for getting yourself in front of the design community. Finally, Karen cautioned us that personal brand building eventually reaches a point of diminishing return. Don't get yourself over expose at the detriment of your design practise.
Let's get the general tips out of the way:
Start with why you're awesome. What makes you stand out? It's not because you're "passionate about user experience." That's the baseline.
Organize your resume according to positions held, or relevant skills. Position held is simpler, but you might want to organize according to relevants skills if you are just starting out, or if you have odd gaps in your work experience
Put work experience first, education credentials second.
Use action verbs to describe your accomplishments. Start with the hardest hitting verbs you can find. If you want to describe a collaborative effort, put the collaboration stuff in the second clause. e.g. Designed awesome sauce pan, in collaboration with materials engineers.
Thinking of doing a fancy infographic style resume? Don't. All that says is that you want to stand out more than efficiently tell me how you're going to solve the hiring manager's problems.
Check your spelling and grammar. Imagine you're looking at 50 of these, you'd be looking for reasons to throw resumes out too. Don't let silly mistakes be the reason your resume gets tossed.
Send your resume as a PDF, and name it with your name. "I get a pile of 50 resumes. How many do you think are named resume.pdf?"
"I am busy. I am tired. All I care about is the problem I need you to solve."
Think about writing your resume as a design problem. What are the goals of the hiring manager? They want to quickly shift through a pile of resumes and find the few they will investigate. The resume that helps them do that is scannable, concise, and written for the needs of the role. Design your resume accordingly. Plainly communicate through information design and good writing why you are fit for the role.
"Write to me! As a person! Karen, this is what I know about you. This is why I want to work with you. Show me that you care! A cover letter like this makes my day!" -Karen
Once again the theme of empathy comes up. You cover letter is your opportunity to tell your hiring manager what you know about their needs, and why you are the right person to solve their problem. This is, of course, premised on your research into the company you are applying to. Do you research!
I've hired people who are technically less qualified, but whose passion for the work comes through in the cover letter. Remember there's an actual person at the other end of the hiring process, who is excited when they find that other people want to work with them. -Karen
So, write like a real person. Sound like yourself. The cover letter is where you voice can really come through.
Karen's Tip: Make your cover letter the email, and the resume your attachment. Make it as easy as possible to see the cover letter.
Don't assume people will look at your portfolio. For some hiring managers, this might be the first thing they look at. For Karen, the portfolio is looked at if you survive the resume and cover letter filtering.
Must be easy to navigate. A basic scroll navigation is great. No one has time to figure out your revolutionary navigation scheme.
Organize by clients and deliverable types e.g. sketches, wireframes, prototypes, user research, etc.
Unless your client is the CIA (or Apple), don't let NDA's stand in the way of showing at least some of your work. This is especially true if your work is public for the internet to see anyways. Find a way to anonymize the work and still let your design process show through.
You've only got the hiring manager's attention for a couple minutes, and they are there to establish your basic credibility i.e. can you demonstrate basic coverage of the skills that the company needs. Keep it simple.
"I don't really want to look at your portfolio. What I really want is to have a great conversation." -Karen
Your interview portfolio serves a completely different purpose than your online portfolio. The interview can potentially be awkward, and in this situation your interview portfolio is the number one social glue. It's your tool to structure the conversation about your skills, and direct that conversation to your favor. So tell a good story about your portfolio.
"And I mean stories! I want to know, of all the work you've done, why are you presenting this piece? I want to see how you got here, not just where you got to." -Karen
Tell stories about your process, stories about lessons you learned. The principles of good storytelling applies. Don't show everything, curate! Build a narrative. Think of your interview as a sort of performance, so rehearse it if you have to. Come prepared; orchestrate the story and the pieces required to tell it. For example, don't awkwardly navigate through the file system to find the piece you want to show. Have them lined up and ready to go.
For extra credit, "Tell me what went wrong, and how you dealt with it. This way I can really get to know how you deal with obstacles. Show me you can roll with it when things go wrong."
A classmate asked, "How do we deal with 'do you have questions for me?'"
Have questions to ask your interviewers. Good standard questions include, "Where does the role sit in the company? Who do we report to?" You want to take this chance to get to know the company, the role, and the people better.
If you are ballsy and motivated, ask something along the lines of, "How does this role contribute to the boss or the boss's boss's bonus?" Essentially, you want to know how the work you do contributes to your company's success. You want to know what the company's success metric looks like. (See last week's notes on why.)
Finally, make sure send thank you notes and follow up. Get the contacts of everyone who interviewed you, and send them a brief thank you the next day. Remind them of who you are. Follow up again in a week, and then once every month if they haven't gotten back to you. (Any more than this is annoying.)
A company that works with external recruiters is either a really good or really bad sign. The problem is that it's hard to tell which it is.
Good scenario: The company is so good and so busy that it is will to invest significantly in recruiting top talent.
Bad scenario: The company cannot attract and retain people through natural recruiting means, and have to resort to external recruiters.
Once again, do your research and find out about the company. Either way, don't be rude to recruiters, even if they can be annoying sometimes. You simply never know when they would come around again with a good offer.
The number one thing to be careful of when working with external recruiters is to not make it seem like you will take a job and then don't. External recruiters only get paid when they help a company make a hire, and they invest significant social capital to do so. If you pull out at the last minute, you are really screwing them.