Dealing with a broken hiring machine

As UX/Product Designers know, it's really rough out there...

If you've been searching for a new UX industry role the past 6 months or even 1-2 years (!), but now questioning whether to leave the field entirely, hey this post is for you. Your deep mounting frustration is totally valid, your expertise & wisdom still valuable, and you're not alone in feeling like the hiring system has basically lost its damn mind. 😆

Indeed, the current hiring landscape within the UX/Tech Industry has become a rather bizarre paradox: You have all this qualified experience, but maybe not the right keywords in the right resumé layout. 🤔 Your portfolio of addressing messy complexity is not in a cool flat minimal aesthetic, or optimized for a TikTok generation of micro-attention spans. As someone said recently on LinkedIn — we’re pragmatic professionals, not popular influencers. Plus now you have to reverse-engineer algorithms, speak “robot” before you can talk to humans (literally, with AI recruiting bots that run the initial screen), and perform some difficult, complicated dance to get someone to truly understand your value to the team.

It’s exhausting. And it’s not supposed to be this way…

To be brutally candid: the ATS game strips away everything that makes us human as professionals. 😖

Your decades of nuanced experience get reduced to rigid keyword matching. You could be paper perfect for a role, but get filtered out because you wrote "managed" instead of… "supervised.” 🙄 The algorithm misses the interpretive nuance of transferable skills and latent capability that any wisened human can immediately recognize.

Algos ain’t so great at the whole “sense & respond” aspect!

But also, let’s not also forget that hiring managers are often trapped in this system, too! 😩 They might genuinely want your seasoned judgment and creative perspective, but they're being tightly measured on "efficiency" metrics rather than finding the right person. They might be afraid to advocate for someone who scored 88% on evals when there's a 95% match available — even though that "perfect" algorithmic candidate might completely miss the mark on cultural addition or “soft skills” of diplomacy, negotiation, etc. all that human stuff.

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So what do we do? Maybe we rage against the machine with our design superpowers! 😉 What might that look like?

📖 Craft your personal narrative to be "fit for purpose." Rather than applying randomly and hoping for the best per some wacky numbers game, create a cohesive story that connects your experiences, challenges, and successes. Sure, you'll need to adjust the rhetoric of the story to match algorithmic language, but start with authenticity. Embrace your unique journey — your pivots, your resilience, your growth. These are your strengths, and selling points. Also, It might be helpful to draw your journey or story out on paper or with colorful stickies and markers, to break away from the prescriptive conformity of a LinkedIn profile structure, that can be limiting.

💡 Harness your curiosity. As designers we’re inherently curious about new possibilities or learning about underlying conditions & dynamics. So apply that to exploring adjacent areas of impact that could benefit from your capabilities. Engage in dialogue & networking with those perhaps at the frontier edges of your known areas of comfort. What emerges might surprise or delight. 🙃

In that vibe, below is an AI prompt to try — or maybe do it without AI first, as way to connect deeply with your true self and see what you come up with! This attempts to intersect aspirations with new areas of impact that tap into your passions and skills — while identifying potential risks or limitations, to help keep things grounded while supportive. Do the results resonate for you?

Let’s run a career exploration thought experiment together. You are my career coach/counselor. I am a (or have been) [role, years, title, etc.] 

My childhood and/or recent dreams & aspirations are: [input]

My superpowers & talents are: [input]

Identify 3 possible intersections & adjacencies of alternative career paths or jobs based upon this combination of dreams + superpowers.

Identify 3 limitations, risks, or other key realities to consider in pursuit of those alternatives.

Finally, what are small, supportive, encouraging next steps to help me move forward with optimism? 

💚 Let empathy guide your mental well-being. Remember that there’s an overwhelmed, stressed human behind every ATS recruiting system: a recruiter under relentless pressure to hire quickly (and also asked to hire multiple simultaneous roles: UX, and PM, and Engineering, due to talent team shortages), a hiring manager juggling contradictory priorities, a team desperate for that perfect candidate while all coping with “AI imperatives” from Execs. 😬 Truly, that’s a lot. So for all that ghosting and rejecting — while it stings and burns — remember to not to take it personally. It’s a consequence of multiple unsavory systemic factors colliding.

The point is, you can’t control this broken chaotic system, but you can control how you present yourself and how you respond to rejection. And also, don’t forget to apply your ultimate UX superpower — empathy — to yourself.

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To all you experienced and talented designers: your hard-earned, battle-tested expertise & wisdom matter more than any algorithm can measure — period. The curious, intelligent, novel, creative problem-framing & solving that got you into this field might very well be what will get you through this deeply broken hiring landscape. It won’t be easy, and it might take a long while. 😔 Hang in there…

Every rejection from the current flawed system isn't a reflection of your worth or capability.

Finally, it’s good to remind yourself: you're not just looking for a job. You're preserving the human element in an increasingly automated world. That always matters. 🙏🏽