Hiring today - Its crazy
I am in an incredibly fortunate situation for my team – I'm hiring!
At time of writing, I have two roles open on my team, and completed another round of hiring less than 6 months ago. And there are * a lot* of candidates looking for jobs right now.
For example, a Senior UX Designer role which was open for 7 days and got 250+ applicants. Or a Manager role getting over 100.
Hiring managers are being asked to parse though a lot of people – and this means that in a lot of cases I have ended up looking for a reason to say "no" faster than I'm looking for a reason to say "yes".[1]
I wanted to share some of the quick heuristics I've been using to move people quickly into the "no" vs "let's consider more" groups:
Determining "No" vs "Let's Consider More":
- Are you in the right location? While Red Hat is a very remote friendly company, I'm still hiring with a certain location in mind, and being outside of a reasonable range of that location is a quick way to screen out.
- Is the portfolio link in your resume right? You will be shocked to hear how many resumes have portfolio URLs that don't resolve, or go to the right site. Please please please double check this in your own resumes!
- Do you show good taste in your portfolio? I am not bothered by people who build a portfolio site from scratch, uses a template (what I recommend for anyone who asks for advice!), sends over a PDF, or points me at a Figma board. But I do care if it shows choices consistent with the skills we ask UX people to have. UX professionals are not all visual designers, or need to be, but I do expect them to have good taste[2].
- Does your portfolio solve the key needs of a hiring manager? The purpose of a portfolio in the hiring process is to see your case studies; understand your approach and thinking; and see what all that thinking ended up with. You can't do this if your portfolio doesn't have case studies; or only has absolutely-drop-dead-gorgeous screenshots with no thinking; or have you go through an entire case study and then just leave you at a navigational dead end!
I would hazard that 40% of applicants are immediately screened out using this heuristic. (Except the location requirement, where I use our recruiting software to filter out these folks immediately and don't have a good estimate on %.)
So please - if you are applying to job after job after job with no success – make sure that you aren't hitting any of these "immediate no" points!
... I should update my portfolio...
After looking at dozens of portfolios from incredibly talented people - and judging them - I reflected on what my own portfolio said about me. I used AI to update my portfolio and website to better reflect some of the requirements I expect candidates to have.
Read more about that here:
Katie Riker
Footnotes
[1] Saying "No" quickly doesn't feel good. I prefer to look at the promise and capability of people, and in my heart believe that the right person for the job isn't necessarily the one who looks best on paper.
[2] Good taste can be very simple, it can be very complex and fancy. It can be incredibly artistic and innovative, or it cannot. But if a hiring manager finds your visual choices ugly or dated, that is a sign that the two of you might not align and be a good fit.