How to Get a UX Design Job: Create a compelling portfolio, submit a stand-out application, and ace the interview to land your user experience dream job

by Lisa Murnan

  One easy way to customize your resume quickly for individual job postings is to include a skills section and add/delete/rephrase the relevant keywords there. But according to ATS experts, the content inside each job description is weighted higher than skills listed in a separate skills section. And your most recent work experience is weighted the highest, so if there’s a way for you to legitimately work those keywords into your current job description, do it.

  It could be as simple as rewriting your bullet points from something like this:

  “Conduct user research, perform heuristic reviews, create wireframes and prototypes, create visual design assets, study metrics to understand user behavior.”

  To this (changes are highlighted in bold):

  “Conduct user research, perform heuristic reviews, create wireframes and prototypes in Axure, create visual design assets in Adobe Photoshop, study Google Analytics metrics to understand user behavior.”

  When you’re trying to decide which keywords to use in your resume, choose based on this order:

  The hiring employer’s keywords

  UX industry standard keywords

  Your current/most recent employer’s keywords

  My friend told me a story at lunch the other day about how her husband (we’ll call him “Brian”) has become a master at manipulating his resume for the ATS. Brian, who was laid off from his IT job a few months ago, starting using a web app called Jobscan (jobscan.co) to compare his resume with job descriptions and get a “match rate” score (based on keywords, job title, etc.). As Brian started customizing his resumes to match the job descriptions more and more (with his goal being a match rate of 80% or higher), he started getting an increasing number of inquiries from recruiters who wanted to set up interviews, even with companies he had no previous connection with. My friend said the results have been amazing, and Brian has even started doing it for her resume as well (with the same results). I have no affiliation with Jobscan, but it sounds like it’s worth checking out (or maybe we should all go straight to Brian!).

  Don’t try to trick the system by adding the same keyword over and over again in white text. (Webmasters used to do that a long time ago to rank their pages higher in the search engines, before Google took all the fun out of it. We’d put a huge chunk of keywords down at the bottom of the web page and make the text color the same as the background color so that site visitors couldn’t see it. Some webmasters would even include totally irrelevant keywords like “sex” just to get their site to show up in the search results!). Some ATSs convert everything in your resume to plain black text and if that happens, you’re busted, cheater.

  Also, I’d save a copy of every resume you submit (and the corresponding job description) so that you can keep track of how you worded everything.

  FORMATTING THE ATS-FRIENDLY RESUME

  I can’t tell you how painful this part has been for me. I’m on my fourth iteration of the ATS-friendly resume because it has been so hard for me to remove all the formatting that would make it easier for people to read.

  Although ATSs are getting more and more sophisticated, I’ve decided to go hardcore simple with this. First, because a person is not going to see this version of my resume, so it doesn’t need to look pretty. Second, because the end user is a robot. And as UXers aren’t we always taught to design for our users? Third, because the simpler the design, the easier it will be to customize for each job posting.

  PERSONA

  ATS Robot – “Robot”

  “Robot is on-line.”

  Overview

  There are hundreds of ATS platforms on the market, the most popular being Taleo, Homegrown, Jobvite, iCims, and Greenhouse Software.

  Over 50% of employers (and 90% of large companies) are using ATSs, which represents 70-80% of job ads.

  Major job sites, like Indeed, LinkedIn, and Monster, integrate with ATSs on the backend.

  Goals

  Parse out data from resumes into logical groupings

  Allow users to search data and provide ranked results based on keywords entered

  Destroy Robinson family

  Pain Points

  When people spell “Adobe” wrong

  UX Knowledge

  n/a

  Interaction with You

  Sucks your carefully crafted resume into its system and dices it up however it wants

  ATSs have the easiest time parsing plain text or Microsoft Word files, so create your resume in Word if you can. ATS software companies claim that they can parse PDFs just fine now (there were issues in the past), but why risk it if you don’t have to?

  If you do use a program like Adobe InDesign to create your resume and have to save it out as a PDF, make sure that you can copy/paste the text from your resume into a text editor like TextPad or Notepad before you submit it anywhere.

  My friend Julie told me a funny (but slightly terrifying) story about a friend who was baffled because she had been applying for jobs and hearing absolutely nothing back. When Julie reviewed her friend’s resume, she discovered that it had been made in Photoshop, exported as an image, then saved as a PDF, which flattened everything and made it impossible for any ATS to scan. Don’t do that.

  Your ATS resume should have no document headers or footers (like in Word). No fancy fonts (I use Arial). No colors. No tables. No columns. No horizontal lines separating sections.

  Bullets are a-ok, and I also use bold for section headers just in case it helps the system recognize them as headers.

  Instead of adding extra space or aligning certain elements to the right (like the start/end dates), just stack the content like this:

  Work Experience CompanyName Denver, CO UX Designer 11/2014 - Present * Bullet point 1 * Bullet point 2 * Bullet point 3

  Use standard resume headings, like “Work Experience” and “Education,” so that the ATS knows how to parse out your resume content. My resume has the following sections, in this order:

  Summary

  Work Experience

  Education

  Skills

  Note that the first section is a summary, not an objective. A summary is a nice sentence or two about who you are and what you do, while an objective is a sentence or two about what you want to do. At this stage in the game, companies don’t care about what you want to do. They want to know what you can do for them, and if you’re qualified for the job.

  The Pretty Resume

  Yay! Now you can take all the content from the robot resume and make it look nice for a human being again.

  Your pretty resume should be clean and, well, pretty, but not over the top. It doesn’t need to show off all your mad UX skillzzz – that’s what your portfolio is for. While researching resumes for this book, I actually saw one where a UX designer put a giant pink unicorn graphic as a design element at the top of the page. Please don’t do that. You’ll stand out, for sure, but not in the right way.

  I recently talked with a recruiter about resume formats and she said that she appreciated resumes that were visually pleasing and easy to scan. “Ironically,” she said, “sometimes the UX resumes are the hardest to navigate.” She said that charts that tried to visually show various skills and expertise were particularly confusing, and she recommended that candidates just provide a list of skills instead. She also said that she was seeing a lot more photos on resumes these days (especially from millennials), although photos “used to be a big no-no.” She said she just overlooks the photos now. (The way I interpret that is that including a photo on your resume isn’t doing a bit of good, and may even be hurting your chances.)

  My pretty resume has a simple layout and minimal formatting. Since I’m old, I have a lot of content to cram on there, so I use the traditional resume format where the content takes up the whole width of the page and flows in sections from top to bottom. I’ve seen some resumes that divide the page up into two vertical columns (in a 2/3 to 1/3 ratio) – one column for job experience and the other for education information and lists of thing
s like skills. This format is great for somebody who has less experience and needs to fill the page a bit.

  I use a sans-serif font for the headers (including my name and contact info at the top) and a serif font for the body content. I use one accent color (blue) and it’s only for my name and the headers (Summary, Work Experience, etc.). The blue helps the headers pop out on the page without being too distracting.

  I would only create customized versions of your pretty resume on a need-to-have basis – you won’t need one unless you make it past the ATS and get to talk to a real person. They may ask you to email them a copy, or if you get in for an interview you’ll want to bring printouts of your resume to hand out.

  Make sure there are no discrepancies between the content in this resume and the ATS-friendly resume you already submitted.

  A Note About LinkedIn

  Your LinkedIn profile is essentially your third resume, but it’s even better because you can use their “Summary” area to write an engaging bio, include links to media (websites, videos, etc.), and talk about any volunteer work you’re involved with. LinkedIn also has a “Recommendations” section where people can endorse you. You can’t fit all that stuff on a traditional resume!

  These days, I get contacted by recruiters on LinkedIn all the time. I noticed a big increase in recruiters viewing my profile and messaging me after I did several things:

  Turned on that little beacon letting recruiters know I was open to hearing about opportunities (on your profile page’s Dashboard under “Career Interests”).

  Updated my “Experience” section with all my jobs and consulting work, and linked to current and former employers who had a page on LinkedIn so that their company logos appeared next to my job descriptions.

  Rewrote my job descriptions so that they focused more on my accomplishments, and replaced the original job description language with more modern terminology from today’s job postings.

  Took the time to craft a good summary, and at the bottom of the summary I created sections for “Expertise” and “Tools” and listed out every skill I had that matched the common ones I was seeing in all the UX job postings.

  Added all my relevant skills to the “Featured Skills & Endorsements” section. Even though skill endorsements from your network aren’t actively promoted/solicited by LinkedIn anymore, adding skills to that section helps recruiters find you in searches.

  Recruiters are searching for candidates on LinkedIn the same way they are searching through an ATS. They are plugging in keywords and locations and seeing who pops up in the search results. Obviously, your LinkedIn profile has to be a little bit generic, because you have no idea who is going to look at it, but be sure to populate your profile with all the right UX keywords and phrases and make sure every section is filled out.

  BULLET POINTS

  Although I include bullet points in the resumes I design in Word (the ATS and pretty versions), bullet points look junky on LinkedIn. LinkedIn doesn’t let you bold, italicize, or format text on your profile (WTF, right?), and the only way to include bullet points is to just copy and paste bullets in as characters, which means if the text wraps it doesn’t indent like it would with a real bullet. You might as well just stick asterisks in there.

  I reviewed around 30 influential UXer’s profiles and only three of them were using bullet points in their job descriptions. It took me a little while to notice this, but once I did I couldn’t unsee it. That’s when I realized that skimming through a few brief conversational paragraphs was far easier than trying to scan through a hodgepodge of wrapping bullet points. I immediately changed all of my job descriptions on LinkedIn to paragraphs.

  EXPERIMENT

  Since these are just my own observations about LinkedIn, I recommend experimenting with your own profile and how you engage with others and see what happens. Turn it into your own little user research/usability project. You can easily measure your results with profile views, “likes,” messages, referrer links to your website/portfolio, etc., and adjust accordingly.

  Portfolio

  Just like the poor cobbler’s children and their shoes, a lot of UXers have crappy or nonexistent design portfolios.

  I get it. The last thing I want to do after working on other people’s UX projects all day is design my own portfolio and website. My brain is tired, plus I have to use all sorts of different skills like trying to make PowerPoint and WordPress themes bend to my will.

  But a portfolio is critical. It’s a requirement on almost every job posting, and recruiters that reach out to you will ask for it. And it’s probably the thing that can set you apart from other job applicants the most. It’s your story.

  And when you think about it, it should be pretty straightforward, right? I mean, these were all projects you worked on so you already know all the details. And you’re a UX designer. So finding a way to put it all together and make it look nice isn’t rocket science.

  Portfolio Format

  I’ve researched this out the wazoo and keep hearing conflicting points of view from recruiters, hiring managers, and other UXers.

  Since there are benefits to having both an online version of your portfolio and a PDF version, I believe you should have both.

  ONLINE VERSION

  The online version can be more high level – perhaps you focus more on your process in general, then drill down into one or two case studies. (My online portfolio doesn’t even have case studies – I just use a long-page format where I talk about my process and include photos and screenshots from various projects throughout the years.)

  Sometimes online job applications ask you for the link to your portfolio and provide a field for you to type it in. There’s nowhere to attach a PDF. Or a recruiter or potential client is checking out your website and want a taste of what your deliverables look like and how your process works, but they’re in that research stage so they’re not ready to talk to you yet.

  My portfolio lives on my own website (lisamurnan.com). I like it this way because I have total control over how I present the content (as long as I can figure out WordPress). I can also hook up Google Analytics and see who’s viewing my portfolio. When you send recruiters and hiring managers to other websites like Behance or Dribbble to view your portfolio, you’re taking them away from your home base (where they can also view other designers’ portfolios) and you’re totally at the mercy of that other site’s user experience, which might not be as usable as something you could design yourself.

  If you don’t have a website and you’re feeling overwhelmed by this whole portfolio thing, create the PDF version first then put it online somewhere like Dropbox so that when you’re applying for jobs and they ask you for a link, you have a URL you can send them to versus an attachment.

  PDF VERSION

  The PDF version of your portfolio can be very detailed and contain more case studies and screenshots. It can also be customized for whoever you’re sending it to and whatever job you’re applying for.

  Analyzing job descriptions will give you clues about how to customize your PDF portfolio. And if you’ve built up a collection of case studies ahead of time, you can mix and match them to quickly create a portfolio that aligns with the job description. You never know when that next opportunity will come along and what type of specific experience that company will be looking for. Does the job posting mention that financial services experience is a nice to have? Include examples of financial services work you’ve done. Are personas specifically mentioned? Include case studies where you created personas. Do they want somebody to design mobile experiences? Include a smartphone or tablet example.

  Sometimes a PDF version of your portfolio is also going to be more convenient than the online version, like when you have a technical interview with another UXer. They’re going to want to walk through several case studies in your portfolio in great detail and ask questions. You can email them (or the recruiter) the PDF version before the interview and they can print it out or zoom in on the screenshots
. If it’s an interview with a screen share, you can also pull up the PDF version and present it that way.

  Portfolio Structure

  Hiring managers and other interviewers are using your portfolio to assess your process and the reasoning behind your design decisions more than anything else. So just putting a few glossy screenshots of the finished product in there isn’t going to cut it. Most projects are a team effort and it’s impossible to tell from a screenshot of the finished product what part you actually had a hand in. You need to make clear what your role was and show them all the messy work that led up to that beautiful screenshot.

  One great thing about UX is that you’ve got leeway to design a UX deliverable the way you want, based on what you think your audience needs. For example, personas all follow the same general principles, but your personas could look totally different from somebody else’s personas and that’s okay as long as yours are conveying what they need to (and they still look nice). The same goes for your portfolio. It’s your portfolio and you’re a designer, so make it unique to you. Show your personality.

  I created the print version of my portfolio in PowerPoint then saved it as a PDF. I never thought I’d enjoy using PowerPoint, but I have to say that I really like how my portfolio turned out. Use whatever makes you happy, as long as it generates a nice-looking PDF that prints well.

  My portfolio is structured like this:

  Cover page

  A little bit about myself… (1 page)