A No-BS Guide to Getting Your First UX Design Job

8 min readFeb 22, 2020

Top 12 Job Hunting Hacks and Hiring Secrets!

Maybe you’ve experienced this situation: You run across an article posted on LinkedIn promising “Top 10 Tips for Getting an Entry-level Job in UX Design.”

Your heart starts pumping. You’re hoping this is the missing piece that’s eluded you in your job search. You open the article, start to scroll through, and as your eyes catch “Tip #3: Positive Thinking is Key,” you begin to realize that this seeming “expert” advice is completely worthless.

After reading enough of these articles, I decided that since I finally landed a UX Design job, I should write an article that hopefully puts things in more direct terms. Here are some basic statistics before we start:

My job search start date: October 15, 2019
Number of job applications completed: 800+
Number of UX first-round phone interviews: 42
Number of design challenges completed: 5
Number of on-site/extended Skype interviews: 5
Number of job offers: 2
My job search end date: February 7, 2020

So what finally worked out in me landing a job? It would take a while to unpack, but it basically can be summarized in the following conclusions:

The 3-Pronged Job Search Approach:

You need to do all three for best results!

Resume-based Approach: Fill out 8–10 job applications per day on LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed, AngelList, etc. and if your resume and portfolio are impressive, you’ll actually get a few interviews this way.
Recruiter-based Approach: Get a recruiter on your team. There’s a giant incentive for them to get you your first UX design job: money. They want a commission. You want a job. Work with them as much as you can.
Networking-based Approach: Use family, friends, acquaintances, and even random connections to get a foot in the door and secure interviews.

So here is my combination of no-BS advice and job search hacks.

Primary Advice:

Resume Advice:

1. Your “free template” resume is garbage. Trash it and design your own resume in Sketch.

Did you use a free, online resume builder to create your resume? Did you find an easy Google Docs template and replace the text with your details? Guess what: anyone looking to hire a UX designer is gonna toss it in the can.

UX Design resumes are not like general resumes. A product manager can get away with using a boring Microsoft Word resume template, but if you try to do the same, you’re giving the impression that you have zero originality. If you do actually have zero originality, do a Google search for “Top 10 UX Design resumes” and get some inspiration from that. Then go build your own resume in Sketch, Figma, or whatever your software of choice is.

2. Don’t have any experience on your resume? Use Catchafire.org or Taproot to land a remote UX job for a non-profit.

Here’s the situation: Your work experience seems completely irrelevant to UX design and aside from that, you only have a 3-month UX design bootcamp to pad your resume. What do you do? You could try to land an internship, but a faster route is to use one of these websites: Catchafire or Taproot. These are amazing resources where you can volunteer your UX skills to redesign the website for a non-profit.

If those sites don’t have any openings, no worries. Make a list of 50 local companies with ugly websites, email them, and ask if you can do a pro-bono redesign of their website in exchange for you including the experience on LinkedIn and your resume. You should get at least a couple takers.

3. Rewrite job experience from “Handed burgers to customers” to “Worked in a cross-functional team for B2C handoff.”

Some people use “cloaking,” writing a bunch of job description keywords as white text on their resume so the ATS won’t churn them out, but you should be able to get the same result just by rewriting your previous experience.

I recommend looking at lots of job descriptions and changing all the words in your past job experience from something like the above example (“Handed burgers to customers” to “Worked in a cross-functional team for B2C handoff.”) Or whatever works for you in your job experience situation. Just make sure to hit as many keywords as possible and you should be good.

Portfolio/Website Advice:

4. Forget about your Behance, Dribbble, and Medium. Get a real portfolio website.

I made the mistake of taking some terrible advice and using a combination of Behance for UI screens and Medium for case studies. Both of those are bad for first-time designers for a simple reason: they’re distracting. With one random link click, a job poster is easily taken from your Behance portfolio to a portfolio of someone exponentially more experienced.

Don’t put yourself in that situation. Your website is your safe haven. Whoever’s looking at it will only see your work. You can use Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Webflow, etc., but make sure you can customize your website adequately. If you can code it, even better, but make sure it still looks good.

5. Search for “Top UX Designer Portfolio Websites” and compare your website to that. Then revamp it accordingly.

If your portfolio website is terrible, game over. People won’t tell you how bad or unimpressive your website looks, so it’s up to you to look at top UX portfolio websites and see if yours is equally impressive. If not, revamp yours until it looks and feels comparable.

Most designers have the same sort of big headline saying “Hi, I’m Joe. I’m a UX Designer.” or “Hello, I’m Susan. I work in creating user-friendly…” followed by a nice scrolling experience and thumbnails of their work, leading into case studies. It’s a pretty standard formula, you could try to do what people expect so that the focus shifts to the quality of your work, but either way, try to be original and only use other designers’ work as inspiration.

6. Post 2–3 UX-related side projects to add some variety to your portfolio website.

If you look on Pablo Stanley’s website, you can see he’s involved in Humaaans, Buttts, and all sorts of other random side projects. Some people say keep your portfolio focused on just your top work, but honestly, that’s what everyone else does, so why not show off a random UX research study you did for fun? I included an asset library project and some isometric illustration work and it definitely helped my case.

LinkedIn Advice:

7. Ask 15 friends to write a recommendation for you to post on your LinkedIn profile.

Nobody wants to hire an isolated hermit with zero experience of human interaction. UX design is very collaborative, so when people see that you can interact well with other people, it leaves a good impression. An easy way to show this is to go on LinkedIn and send Recommendation invites to past coworkers and even fellow bootcamp graduates for them to put in a good word. Make sure to write them a recommendation in exchange.

Recruiter Advice:

8. Go on LinkedIn, find tech recruiters or larger staffing agencies and get into their system.

How can you find a recruiter or staffing agency? Easy. When you start to realize “Hey, TEKSystems sure has a lot of jobs posted,” that might be a hint that they’re actually a staffing agency. The more you apply to their postings, the higher the chance someone will reach out and pull you into their system.

Networking Advice:

9. Go to boring (non-UX) tech events on Meetup or Eventbrite and meet some developers & engineers for referrals.

If you go to UX Design events looking for a job, well guess what… you’re one of 50 UX designers all walking around and bumping into each other. If you plan on networking, be smart about it. Go to some random web developer event, nod your head as they talk about Vue.js, PostSQL, or some other nonsense, and gush about how much you want to understand the developer mindset for better team communication, then set up a coffee date with a developer and see if that turns into a job referral.

10. Need a quick referral? Find a Sales Development Representative or Account Executive at the company you’re interested in.

If you message a hiring manager on LinkedIn asking for a referral you’ll have to get to the back of the line, cause that’s what everyone else is doing. Or if you message the UX design team themselves, then you’ll probably get a similar response (unless you invite them for coffee to connect first). But if you want a quick referral, find someone from the company you’re interested in who’s working in Sales and they might be open to giving you a referral without even meeting you. Why? Because they get a commission for referrals and are proactive enough to follow through on your request.

11. Talk to some business acquaintances who’ve conducted interviews before and find out what your hiring red-flags are.

You may not realize it, but some of the very things that make you seem cool to your friends may actually make you a walking red-flag to employers. For example, I’ve personally traveled to 20 countries in my life. I gained many wonderful experiences during my travels. But I don’t tell this to employers.

You know what employers hear when you tell them about how much you like to travel? All they hear is “Hello, my name is Joe. I’m a major flight risk. I can’t stay in one place more than a year and I‘m going to ditch you guys in 8 months for a better job.” When you take a step back and see it from their point of view, it makes sense. So if you’re a flight risk, a culture misfit, or anything else, identify that before the interview so your answers can be reassuring.

Also, if you see them trying to lead you into a trap, don’t fall for it. If they ask a question like “So how long do you expect to work here?” and you answer “10 years,” then it’s game over; you’re trying to defend yourself. Don’t answer their question, stick with your story and respond “Well I’m at a new stage in my life. I’m focused on settling into a role long term cause I want to start a family.” This kind of answer will keep you in the game.

12. Ask yourself the question “Would I hire me for this UX job?”

If your LinkedIn headline says “Looking for new opportunities,” that’s an incredibly obvious way of telling the world that you’re unemployed and desperate. If you have weak job experience, an ugly resume, a boring website, no references, and generally seem unable to do the job, then be honest with yourself: no, “you” the employer probably wouldn’t hire “you” the designer for this job.

Get some sort of charity UX work and change “Looking for new opportunities” to “UX Designer at _____.” You won’t have to beg people to hire you; instead they’ll think “He already has a job. How can I steal him from his company and make him work for us?” Make yourself seem exclusive and in-demand, then the companies will want you.