Advice for Approaching a UX Job Search

This article will help you navigate your UX job search with greater confidence and focus by exploring practical, yet often overlooked tactics. It is just one in a series on advice for UX job seekers:

Understand Yourself

A successful UX job search isn’t about finding any UX role — it’s about finding the right role that aligns with your values, preferences, and career goals.

In pursuing your UX career, you need to know what truly matters to you. Just because a UX opportunity presents itself — even in a weak job market — doesn’t mean it would be wise to accept it (unless you are in financial straits and have little recourse, which is another reason financial foresight gives you options).

Use these tactics to help you prioritize your UX job-seeking efforts and move towards opportunities supporting how you wish to engage with your professional life.

Determine Your Professional Values

What do you strive to honor or demonstrate at work? Values may not seem especially important compared to compensation, but a UX job misaligned with your values has consequences you cannot ignore indefinitely. Research by Jeffrey Edwards and Daniel Cable suggests that value misalignment in the workplace gradually reduces trust and open communication with your work colleagues and leaders. Salary and job titles can take you only so far when your daily work experiences disconnect and demotivate you.

For example, is making an impact important to you? A UX-consulting job may offer project variety and a decent paycheck, but you may never see your designs implemented by the clients. The mismatch between your desire for lasting impact and the transient nature of consulting will inexorably create a void within you that no amount of work variety or money can fill.

There are many ways to assess your values, either through self-reflection questions or specific tools. Here are several easy and high-quality assessments you can try:

Each assessment takes a different approach, but all are based on academic research and are free to use. When using these assessments, always frame your answers in the context of your work life instead of your personal life, as there will be some value differences between the two contexts.

Outline Your Job Constraints

In addition to your values, outline your job preferences. Establishing these constraints can focus your job-seeking efforts. Examples of job properties to consider:

• Work location: hybrid, remote, or onsite?
• Minimum compensation: how much salary do you need or want?
• Employment type: full-time, part-time, contractor, contract-to-hire?
• Employer type: startups, small business, large business, agencies?
• Industry or domain: healthcare, finance, consumer apps, enterprise software?
• Job titles and responsibilities: while job titles receive a lot of focus, they are a crude indicator of job responsibilities. Think about job duties you would want or don’t want to do. For example, a job posting for a senior UX designer may not mention any duties to conduct usability testing with users!
• Role type: individual contributor (carrying out hands-on UX work) or management roles (overseeing and assigning tasks)? Caution: exclusively pursuing management roles without prior management experience will lead to a very tough job search. Many employers will not risk hiring an unproven manager to lead their teams due to the high cost of failure. It’s much easier to transition to a management role within an employer.

Although values are generally stable in adulthood, job preferences are more negotiable. For each of the constraints you listed above, rate how willing you would be to make a tradeoff on it (flexible, somewhat flexible, inflexible). For example:

• You would ideally prefer to work onsite only in cities that could geographically support your mountain-climbing hobby. But this is not a hard constraint, and you would be flexible about it.
• You are weary of corporate bureaucracy and desire a small organization’s more immediate impact and accountability. But you would treat this preference more flexibly if your job search dragged on for months.
• You refuse to work for social media companies because one of your siblings was harmed by content on such platforms. You will never budge on this stance.

Seeing and reflecting on your written answers can reveal lurking discrepancies in your career management. It’s much easier to think about your preferences when you don’t have the pressure of a pending job offer bearing down on you. Return to this analysis when you receive a job offer and use it to guide your negotiation and decision making.

Develop a New UX Skill

Are you a user researcher whose poor visual-design skills diminish your portfolio’s persuasiveness? Are you an interaction designer getting rejected from opportunities because employers want usability-testing skills you lack? Skill specialization isn’t a boon in tough job markets, as it leaves you dependent on specific job openings with large UX teams. Diversifying your UX skillset can diversify the job opportunities you could compete in. Consider upskilling in those areas where you have a natural curiosity to learn more and that you frequently see mentioned as a responsibility in job postings.

Leverage Your Professional Network

It sounds like a trope, but it’s true: never discount the power of relationships in your job search. Many UX hiring managers rely (and perhaps overrely) on their professional network to get referrals from people they know and trust when they have a job opening. Professional connections will give you an edge in applying early, offer insight about an employer or its UX team, or ensure your application receives human attention during the screening process.

Maintain a Presence on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is not just a significant platform for recruiting activity, but it’s also a convenient way of staying in touch with professional connections you make throughout your career. It’s a valuable resource for job seekers, and you should use it to some degree. At a minimum, maintain a profile and keep it updated with your latest resume and portfolio content. Confirm that you will receive notifications if someone contacts you.

Additionally, LinkedIn has an Open to work profile tag to advertise to everyone you are job seeking (or, alternately, covertly notify exclusively recruiters). Should you use it? Data analysis by Aline Lerner and Maxim Massenkoff of Interviewing.io found that using this tag could hurt your chances in booming hiring markets. Employers and recruiters may assume you are unprepared if you are looking for work when jobs are easy to obtain. When the job market is terrible and lots of quality talent have been laid off, however, this tag could help you.

LinkedIn’s data also suggests that it can double your chances of receiving messages from recruiters. When there’s a lot of UX talent available and too few jobs, turn it on for all to see to maximize passive advertising. Be more selective with its use when UX jobs are plentiful.

Notify Your Professional Network

Announcing your job search over social media won’t hurt, but those posts may get lost in the noise. To complement those broad messages, send targeted messages to people from your past on a rolling basis and ask them about leads or introductions. Former bosses whom you left on good terms, former teammates, and colleagues who work in areas or employers that align with your values and constraints are all suitable recipients of these messages.

It can be awkward to send these messages if you haven’t maintained casual contact with them over time or don’t know them very well. Still, you must get over this awkwardness (or spend time periodically checking in with the people in your network in the future).

(Our UX job seeker resources has a template for notifying a connection about your job search)

Secure 3 References

Some employers use references to screen candidates. Reference checks are usually an easy screening hurdle to clear, but if you’re unprepared, they can leave you scrambling in panic during the time-sensitive hiring process. Identify and secure at least one reference from your most recent 1–3 previous employers in your work history. Select references with a favorable impression of your work, who are dependable, and who previously managed or mentored you, or collaborated frequently with you. Students and graduates should remember to never end an internship without securing at least 2 references.

(Our UX job seeker resources has a template for requesting a reference)

Attend UX-Community Events

UX-community events are an excellent way to get out into the world and make new professional connections. Prioritize events with these attributes:

• Networking mixers where you can chat and meet attendees
• Resume or portfolio reviews conducted by UX hiring managers
• Mock interviews conducted by UX hiring managers
• Talks related to your upskilling goals
• Attended by people who work in areas or at organizations aligned with your interests

Local UXPA or HFES chapters are great places to start. You can also check Meetup for active UX groups in your area. UX digital communities such as Slack channels, LinkedIn groups, Discord servers, or Reddit can notify you of these networking opportunities.

If you attend in-person events, remember that the humble business card remains a simple way to share your professional information. Alternatively, you can use the profile QR code in LinkedIn’s mobile app or create one for your portfolio website.

Get a Mentor

UX mentorship can be a valuable source of external feedback and support. Junior UX professionals can learn a lot from other peoples hard-won experience. Even experienced UX professionals can find value in receiving a fellow UXer’s coaching on their job search, application materials, or how they’re interviewing.

The best mentors are the ones who sincerely take an interest in your UX journey instead of charging you recurring fees. Check out these popular mentorship platforms:

(Our UX job seeker resources has a template for contacting a potential mentor)

If your job search has been slow and challenging and you feel discouraged, serve as a UX mentor! Help someone more junior on their UX journey and raise your spirits with their appreciation and gratitude. You might learn something about yourself in the process.

Remember Pacing and Self Care

Creating resumes and portfolios, doing assessments, and being scrutinized in interviews are cognitively taxing and can be especially demoralizing when all that hard work results in a rejection notice (if you even receive that notice at all). Fatigue and anxiety will not only impact your quality of life but also affect your interview performance, potentially perpetuating the cycle of struggle. You need to pace and take care of yourself during these activities.

Set Realistic Daily Goals

Your job search may feel urgent if you’re currently unemployed, but your human mind has limits. A seminal research paper by Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römeron found that the optimal duration of practice for classical musicians was only 4–5 hours per day before cognitive fatigue set in. You need to accept that there are more hours in a day than the human mind can effectively devote to a task. Set a goal of about 4 hours of focused attention on your job search per day, then give it a rest.

Take Breaks

A 4-hour daily goal means you should spend less than 4 hours continuously working on your job search. For every hour you spend on job hunting, take at least a 20-minute break to refresh yourself with nonwork. Socialize with friends or family, take a walk, play a game, read a fun book — anything that’s easy on your mind.

A study by Rebecca MacGowan and colleagues found that job seekers who took regular 20-to-30-minute mental breaks after cognitively demanding job-searching tasks were more likely to secure interviews due to having restored their depleted focus and reinvigorated their efforts. A habit of short, intentional breaks to detach from your job search is not laziness; it’s a research-backed approach to maximize productivity!

Set Modest Weekly Goals if Employed

Those currently employed but restarting their UX job search should use modest weekly goals instead of daily ones. Chip away at your job search with 1–2 small tasks that you could do in the evening or weekend. For example, do a values assessment or spend an hour or two gathering portfolio materials. Then, stop and plan to evaluate the results or curate the materials next week. Keep a running list of these tasks with dates in a journal and cross them off as you do them week by week. These small wins will motivate you to keep going when your situation lacks urgency.

Conclusion

Use these tactics to ensure that the effort you put into your UX job search pays off. Reflect on your values, sharpen your skills, grow your network, and pace yourself. You’ll be better equipped to handle the challenges, receive more UX job opportunities, and land a meaningful UX role. Whenever possible, make your job search a matter of thriving and not surviving.

References

Jeffrey Edwards and Daniel Cable. 2009. The value of value congruence. Journal of Applied Psychology 94, 654–677. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014891.

K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer. 1993. The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review 100, 3, 363–406.

R. Lance MacGowan, Allison S. Gabriel, Sebastião P. da Motta Veiga, and Nitya Chawla. 2022. Does psychological detachment benefit job seekers? A two-study weekly investigation. Journal of Applied Psychology 107, 12, 2319–2333. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000967.