What Should a Hiring Manager Remember About You?

Many designers I speak with are facing lots of rejection, so naturally they react by applying more broadly. More industries, leveling down or up, various types of roles, companies large and small. After months of searching without much traction, it’s understandable to start considering things you might have ruled out earlier.

This makes sense initially. If I widen my search, I increase my visibility and chances of landing somewhere. And if I describe myself as versatile enough to do a lot of different things, more companies should see me as a potential fit.

But the issue is that in competitive markets, hiring teams tend to move in the opposite direction. Since there are many more candidates to look through, they can be more selective. They can look for someone who has already designed something extremely similar to what they need, rather than someone who would need time to learn the domain or grow into the role.

Call them plug-and-play candidates. Someone who has already done the job rather than someone who potentially could.

From an employer’s side, there’s less betting on potential and more confidence in past performance. And from a candidate’s side, I think the response should be to make that past experience easier to recognize.

That doesn’t necessarily mean applying to fewer industries or only one type of company. Your search can still be reasonably broad. But your positioning should be more specific about the kinds of work you’re particularly good at and where that experience is relevant.

One problem I see with experienced designers is that the longer their career gets, the harder they can become to describe. Ten years of work might include different industries, company sizes, products, customers, and responsibilities. So naturally, people try to fit all of that range into their positioning.

“I’ve worked in fintech, healthcare, education, B2B, B2C, startups, and enterprise.”

It sounds versatile. But I’m not sure versatility is always the most useful thing to lead with.

If I’m a hiring manager, I’m still trying to answer a pretty simple question: “What is this person particularly good at that maps to what I need?”

“Senior Product Designer with 10 years of end-to-end UX experience” tells me your role and how long you’ve been doing it. But it also describes thousands of other experienced designers. I still have to look through your work and figure out what makes your experience relevant to my team.

Compare that with being able to say, “This person designs complex enterprise workflows,” or “This person knows developer products.” Maybe you’re someone who has taken early-stage products from 0 to 1, or someone who understands healthcare and regulated environments.

Those are much easier to place and are more memorable. They give someone a clearer idea of what you could help them do.

Sometimes the stronger thread isn’t the industry at all. Maybe across fintech, healthcare, and education, you were always designing complex enterprise systems. Maybe you were consistently working with operational teams managing high-stakes workflows. Maybe your strength is taking messy, data-heavy problems and making them easier to understand.

You don’t have to leave out those industries. But the connection between them may tell a hiring manager more than the list itself.

This matters because hiring involves a lot of uncertainty and derisking. If one candidate has broadly relevant product design experience and another has spent years solving the kinds of problems the team is dealing with, the second person gives the company more specific evidence to work with. That doesn’t necessarily make them a better designer. It makes it easier to understand how their experience would translate to the role and derisk an offer.

So if you’re trying to make your positioning clearer, I’d start by looking across your strongest projects. What kinds of products or initiatives were you working on? Who were the users or audience? What problems did you repeatedly help solve? Look for the experience you can support with examples and results.

Then look at whether that experience is easy to recognize in the materials you’re sharing. Does your resume summary name it? Does your LinkedIn profile give someone the same general impression? Are the first projects in your portfolio relevant to the work you want to keep doing?

It’s possible to have years of relevant experience and still make someone work too hard to find it.

Your positioning doesn’t need to summarize your entire career. It just needs to make the most relevant part of it easy to notice and remember. That can still leave you with opportunities across different industries and types of companies, because similar problems show up in different places.

A question I’ve started asking more often to designers is:

If a hiring manager remembered only one thing about your background, what would you want it to be?

Then look at your resume and portfolio and ask whether that’s actually what comes through.

— Chris
The Design Co.

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Need help figuring out how to stand out and be more memorable to hiring managers?

Figuring out what your experience signals, which roles it fits best, and whether that comes through clearly is one of the main things I look at in a Job Search Audit. If you’ve been searching for a while and aren’t sure how to position yourself, reply to this email or grab a spot here.

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