The Truth About Getting Design Jobs in 2025 (Ex-Designer Turned Recruiter Reveals All) | Hang Xu

So how bad is the market really?

Can I curse on this podcast?

Yes.

Um, I feel so fucking sorry for you folks.

it feels like your ability to do visual design and design craft has way up in demand I feel that most designers who are very good at doing the job or doing the work of design are actually really bad at getting hired or going through the interview process because it's two very complete different skill sets.

Hi, thank you so much for clicking on this episode.

I'm glad you're here.

The job market is absolutely brutal right now.

We can all admit to it.

Most advice you've been getting so far aren't from the people who have been on both sides of the table.

And that's why I'm so excited to share my conversation with Hang today.

Hang is a former senior staff designer turned celebrity design recruiter.

Who's honest LinkedIn post has been shaking up the design industry.

In this raw and honest discussion, Hang reviews why even exceptional designers struggle to get hired.

What recruiters actually look for in those crucial first three seconds and the uncomfortable truth of junior design roles in 2025.

If you're a designer trying to navigate this market, you need to hear this.

Let's dive in.

Hi Hang.

Thank you so much for joining the show.

I'm so excited that you're here.

Oh, thank you so much.

I'm excited to be here as well.

So, it's gonna be a really good show, I hope.

I know that you were a designer before you started, I wonder what has made you switch career and decided to go in recruiting instead.

Yeah, I just had like a string of bad experiences as a designer.

And I think a lot of it has to do with what the design maturity levels of those companies I worked at during the time.

And for me, it just felt like, I always assumed that as I became more senior, then people would take me more seriously.

I would have more control over the design strategy or the product strategy.

And that truly wasn't the case for a lot of reasons.

So as I leveled up, I just, kind of hit a brick wall over and over again.

And looking back, I probably should have gotten much better at just kind of understanding what the environment was like, what the culture was like, and working around that, but at the time, it just felt so difficult.

And I had a few bad experiences at work that were kind of personal as well.

so eventually I realized that this isn't the kind of work I wanted to do as a designer.

Didn't want to spend 80 percent of my time trying to convince all the other stakeholders of how we should be doing certain things.

And I felt like recruiting was an area where I've had a lot of personal feelings about, like it could be improved.

Looking back in hindsight, that was a lot of hubris.

That's a lot of egotism involved for somebody to say something like that.

Like they can just from the outside looking in, I can do that better, even though I have practically zero experience.

And I assume that just from the interface that I had with other recruiters, I had an idea of what they were doing behind the scene.

And that's not true at all.

You know, as a problem solver, I really would like to come into this space and then make things better for other designers by acting in a very different way and doing things in a different way.

And what I've learned is that the reason why recruiters operate this way isn't because of them personally.

Oftentimes they're working under a fairly exploitative or not great system.

And they're being pressurized to do certain things that maybe they don't even agree with.

At the end of the day, I think for me, it was a learning experience, a hundred percent.

also I entered it at a pretty bad time, like I think two weeks before I started doing it seriously.

That's when Uber and Lyft announced massive layoffs.

So that's kind of like the start and everything kicked off.

And it's been a rough few years because from outside recruiting perspective, it's very similar to how designers as candidates are navigating the system.

Yeah, I remember that time.

That's when you started.

I'm good at picking, the right time to do things.

Great.

Just make things more interesting.

Yeah.

Now that you're on the other side, you're recruiting designers instead of talking to recruiters to find a job.

Have you realized any big job hunting mistakes that you have made as a designer and only to realize after you become a recruiter that those are holding you back?

Yeah.

So many.

Oh my God.

So many.

Right.

Because most people see recruiting as a very straightforward process where a recruiter searches for a designer and then pitches them a role and gives them the detail, gets on the phone calls, basically validate them or, you know, what's that?

Word they use, intake, and then they would send the portfolio and the profile over to the hiring manager.

And then they would kind of guide them through the process from beginning to end.

And then they would help negotiate with the designer.

some of my assumptions were correct.

Like I always felt like recruiters really weren't on the side of the designer in many ways.

Because of just how they were paid.

Like they're not being paid by the candidates.

They're being paid by the hiring manager.

Most recruiters talk about salary negotiation or offer negotiation, they kind of put themselves in the middle.

It's like, we're helping bridge the gap we're being the champions for the designer.

But the reality is that I don't think that's truly the case.

That's what they typically say, but the reality is very different because of how the money is flowing from one side to the other.

So I felt like I was kind of correcting that doing all this stuff.

And then the things that I was completely, ignorant about is just how recruiters typically view portfolios and view designer candidates based on the candidacy.

I think designers typically try to talk about their experience in a very chronological way, as well as kind of boil the ocean way, like I've done all these amazing things.

And that what makes me a great candidate.

And I feel like that is accurate in terms of can you do the work, but they're not really taking into account how recruiters navigate the system and what their workflow is like.

And if you understood how recruiters worked and how you interface and navigate this process with them, you realize that they just have very little time and to really understand what it is that you do as a designer and how they try to match you with the role that they have and how they communicate your candidacy to the hiring manager is entirely different than what you would expect.

The end result is that I feel that most designers who are very good at doing the job or doing the work of design are actually really bad at getting hired or going through the interview process because it's two very complete different skill sets.

Most designers really need to put on their design thinking cap and think about the user experience of recruiting and hiring as they build their portfolio, because they see it as kind of a storybook for themselves, as opposed to a marketing advertisement for their own skills as a product.

And when you see it that way, then you realize all the things, all the ways you describe yourself is completely wrong in a way.

And what's shocking to me is especially content designers or content strategists.

They're the ones who, in my opinion, should be the best at doing something like this.

They're often the furthest away from being able to connect the dot between the skills that they have, the work they've done.

And then.

Speaking to it cogently to the hiring manager and the recruiter and showcasing it in terms of evidence.

Interesting.

So sounds like recruiters have very little time.

So you want to communicate how you're a good fit for the specific role immediately, rather than boil the ocean and talk about how amazing you are in all aspect.

Just focus on attributes that the recruiters are looking for.

Yeah, I think, as a designer, you're always thinking about the user, you're like, what kind of user problems are we solving?

Who is this user?

Who is this person?

What are they facing in their lives?

How do they go about their work?

What are the jobs to be done?

we never apply this framework to recruiters or hiring managers.

we don't actually understand what this business is trying to do through the hiring of this designer and the stakeholders within this process, right?

It's not just a business that's hiring.

It's the hiring manager, the, partners, the stakeholders, and they all have different agenda.

And if you don't understand what those agendas are, you're going to have a hard time communicating to them in the same language.

The thing that is, you know, what I keep referencing to designers over and over again, is this Venn diagram of this is what you've done in your career and what you do well, and then the second circle is this is what you would like to do in the future.

And maybe that's same or different than what you did in the past.

And the third circle is this is what the market is in demand for.

Like, what are they willing to pay you for?

And you're trying to match up these things.

the sad thing is that most designers.

don't have a good idea of why companies are hiring designers.

And it's not just to output design work, it's actually to solve real business problems and product problems, but they understand it in a different way than designers do because designers typically see everything in the framework of design.

This is the business problem that we can solve by design they don't see it that way.

So you have to speak to it in a different way as well.

I think most designers kind of don't spend the energy or time to do so.

And they just put in so much effort and time in the process of looking for work without ever doing the user research that they seem to love to do So how do we do user research?

How do we figure out what the company is actually hiring for?

Because to be honest, if you read job descriptions, I'd say the overwhelming majority of them are not helpful at all.

They're kind of boilerplate and they want everything.

So how do you find out?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So job descriptions typically don't tell you a ton of information.

Sometimes they do though.

If you read through a lot of job descriptions, you start to pick up certain patterns.

And then once in a while you do see a good job description where they kind of lay out the main reason why they're hiring a designer and you can really speak to that during the process.

And it's funny cause like this gets into the whole ATS part of it, where people try to feed the job description into say an LLM and then they'll output a cover letter, a resume, and they believe that's going to help them land the job.

But that's a different topic.

So how do you do this user research?

This is the same conundrum that we face within companies.

When we talk to salespeople and they're like, I'm going to do user research in my sales calls.

and you're like, nah, I don't know how that's going to work out well.

Because there's a power dynamic difference.

you're talking to somebody as you're trying to sell them something, they're going to be pretty guarded because they know you're trying to sell something to them and they don't want to give you certain information because they don't want to be sold to are ripped off.

Right?

There's always that innate fear.

It's like, they're afraid that they're going to a use a car salesperson.

So the same thing applies to hiring.

So if you're talking to a hiring manager for a role and you're asking them these questions.

It's not going to be super helpful, right?

Because they're also at the same time trying to evaluate if you're the right fit for this role.

Some hiring managers are trying to gatekeep information.

They're like, I don't want you to tell me what you think I want to hear.

I want to figure out if our goals are aligned without that power dynamic in the background.

And then some hiring manager, very transparent, like, Oh, we need to see this and this in order for us to hire you.

But overall, most likely you're not going to be able to sit a hiring manager down and say, what are you truly looking for?

And have them give you super straightforward answers.

Cause first of all, they don't owe you that.

There's no reason for them to really break this down for you.

And sometimes they don't even know that.

Thirdly, again, they're trying to evaluate you.

So it's doesn't work.

The power dynamics is off.

Same with recruiters.

So ideally, if you are really serious about your job hunt, you should be first figuring out where is it you want to go, where do you want to work?

What kind of role do you want?

What do you want to be building?

And then I would probably identify hiring managers that are currently working in those areas, but are not actively hiring.

You're saying, I'm really interested in what you're doing here.

I just need to understand how you hide your past designers.

And I'm willing to pay you however much to, you know, pick your brain or like learn from you.

And obviously a lot of hiring managers, probably wouldn't do this.

But eventually you'll find a few that are willing to do it either for free, or you pay them a few hundred dollars.

And I think that's perfectly worth it.

And you should probably be doing the same thing to design recruiters.

Because it's so different across the board.

So the way Amazon hires and what they look for, it's very different than say, a B2C company, like Tinder, right?

So if you want to work at a B2C dating software company, then you should be looking for Tinder or plenty of fish and finding folks there to speak to.

And if you want to be working on backend stuff or e commerce, you can, look for those specific areas.

You're trying to remove that power imbalance.

And give them something in return and having them sit down and give you more pertinent information as to how they hire historically speaking, as opposed to how you fit in, perhaps, so you should be asking questions like, who's the last designer you hired?

Or not really who, but what was the role like, what's the process like, what made that candidate so amazing that you had to hire them right away?

Talk to me about some of the candidates who didn't get the role, what made them, what caused them to fall off the ladder?

And then once you get that information, you should then, talk about your own candidacies.

Like how do I fit in roughly speaking?

So it's very much a consultancy service.

And I think not enough designers are doing that because that could be extremely helpful for folks.

Because once you go through the interview process, even if you get rejected at the very end, oftentimes they don't give you any feedback.

So you're kind of left guessing.

That's a very interesting perspective.

I have never thought about doing that.

I do like the suggestion on going to the source, find a hiring manager who has hired.

They probably will give you a better perspective on exactly what they are looking for.

when I was.

doing my version of informational interview.

I went for the designers that I want to be in the future.

I asked them, what makes you get hired by Meta, for example, and I think that's a secondhand information because they are still only assuming this is why, but it's not coming from the source.

It's probably harder to talk to hiring managers about this.

Whereas designers who worked at Meta or Amazon, whatever company you want to work at, are probably more willing to give you information around how they succeeded.

Even though I felt like I was an experienced designer, I was completely oblivious to this other side of things and took me about two years to like really understand that the way I was navigating was pretty off.

If I just shifted my thinking a little bit, would have saved myself a lot of time and effort and pain through this entire process.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So you alluded to this earlier about the market condition.

So we hear horror stories, layoffs, hiring freezes, ghosting, and candidates been on the market for months, if not for a year.

So how bad is the market really?

And have you seen any recruiting data to give us a better snapshot on the market condition.

Yeah.

it's kind of upsetting that there isn't more data around this because this is something that is super important to a lot of people, right?

People are making decisions on their career based on financial future based on how soon they can potentially land a job.

And we have virtually no data on this LinkedIn doesn't release it and, you know, other job hunting sites don't release it either.

And the closest one I've seen is by Kathryn Brookshier, who is I believe a user researcher, pretty high up at Indeed.

And I think a year or two ago, she released some data around the number of UX design roles.

and you can see how it rose and fell dramatically in the last few years.

So it's been extremely volatile and we're still in the process of picking back up again.

Like things are getting better month by month, but at the same time, it feels like there's a big backlog of people who have been laid off.

Who are really struggling to find a job and who have spent a lot of time working on their candidacy, on their portfolios, on their interview skills.

And they're competing against designers who are recently laid off or recently looking.

So it's hard to say, I don't feel confident even as a recruiter to say market is this good or this bad.

I can say that from the outside looking in, as an external agency recruiter, which is very different from an internal recruiter.

It feels like things are picking back up again, but it's still really wonky.

And also there's kind of a lag culturally speaking of how people treat candidates and how they navigate interview process.

it's based on what the market in the last year or so.

it's strange, like we don't react perfectly.

the market is not perfect.

And we are kind of doing things based on how we viewed the market, how our own feelings around it in the last several months.

So that changes people could be really picky right now, even though maybe the market's picked up a little bit, they're still expecting a lot out of designers or out of every candidate.

Yeah.

Have you noticed any roles that are, available or in demand more than the other?

So I have my own theories around this, but again, no data they're just.

Nobody's really done the work on this.

And I know user researchers and a lot of UX people are like, where's the data?

Where are you coming up with this kind of stuff?

Right.

And it just drives me nuts.

It's like, why don't you go look for the data?

Like if you, this is so important to you and you actually want to see the data, why don't you go look for it yourself and do that research?

Cause I don't really have the time to, it doesn't really help my business or help me to do something like that.

But it feels like, and I know people hate that.

When I use that caveat, like it feels like, right, it feels like your ability to do visual design and design craft has way up in demand.

And designers who typically don't do a ton of visual design craft, like say strategists or researchers or content designers or content strategists.

Their demand has fallen precipitously.

And a lot of them are now considering other roles, like say product management, are they thinking of re-skilling or maybe moving out of tech industry altogether?

It feels like there's more demand for the super senior ICs, the ones who are considered founding designers, player coaches, and then everyone else are losing ground really.

That's obviously not not accurate across the board.

I think if you're an internal recruiter at a larger company, you're still going to be asking for a lot of strategy, asking for a lot of, ability to do things like stakeholder management or research, but for outside recruiters who typically work with startup founders and early stage startups.

It's like, you do need to have that craft ability.

so what does it mean for the mid level or even junior designers that are following their dreams, in this market, what are some of the strategies or tips you can give them?

Can I curse on this podcast?

Yes.

Um, I feel so fucking sorry for you folks.

it's bad.

and I think one part of the issue is that There is no sustainable pipeline in place for junior, mid level designers.

the reality is that.

If you were to take the average junior designer and mid level designer and put them in time machine and, move them 10 years back, they would be probably senior designers because the amount of effort and expertise we're asking for these days is through the roof, in my opinion.

So there are no roles and we have this weird expectation that instead of companies training their talent pipeline, we're kind of offloading that to senior designers to help others in their own free time through volunteerism.

There's a whole mentorship culture going around, which is great.

I love helping other people, but it also feels like we're helping them because corporations and businesses have abdicated this responsibility to their own workers and just said here, senior designers, I know you're already overworked.

We're working you 40 to 60 hours per week.

You have families and everything, but you also need to help these other junior designers we're still going to continue hiring folks like you, and because the market is bad enough, we can make that luxury happen for ourselves.

what do you do if you're a junior middle level designer?

I do think right now, it's really important to get a good understanding of what the marketplace is like.

I would never encourage people to quit something if they're really passionate about it, but I do think it's important that people understand, roughly speaking, what the price is of gaining entry to something and what that might mean to their mental health, their relationships with their family and their friends and their other opportunities along the way.

Because too often, and I think this is kind of the same issue with colleges as well.

It's like, we should do this.

You should go to college nobody really talks about just how much colleges cost and your opportunities outside of college.

I mean, now we're talking more so, but when I was going to college, parents were just like, you're going to college.

we don't care how much money it costs.

And it was like 40, 50, 000 per year.

It took me 10 years to pay off my loans.

And I didn't even, you know, major in anything to do with UX.

So that was a terrible decision on my part because nobody had a conversation with me.

Animation majors.

And is this what you really want to do with your life?

And are you willing to sacrifice this, this, and this to be successful as an animator?

And I kind of wish we did that.

And I think the reality is right now, people are so focused on.

Either helping through a mentorship charging people for coaching without really thinking about where does this person fit in where do their career aspirations fit in their goals of breaking into this industry?

And I think that's the tough conversation that nobody really wants to have because it's just so emotionally loaded, and nobody wants to deliver bad news, when in reality, we just really have only bad news for folks right now.

That's not great.

It's incredibly hard, but it seems like you're saying right now because the market is so bad, there's very little thing you can do if you're not already senior.

Yes, and I think this is a really unpopular or maybe a bad thing to say, but I have major concerns with say a platform like ADP list, not just that they're VC funded for profit.

And they're kind of like extracting value out of people through the purpose of volunteerism.

But the fact is that matter how much mentorship you do, and no matter how much you help designers level up, the reality remains that there are only X number of roles available.

That doesn't change and it just becomes an arms race at the end of the day.

Really we should be focusing on how do we increase the pipeline?

Like how do we make more opportunities available to other designers instead of figuring out?

How do we make everybody better at something?

And I feel like the United States or maybe the Western civilizations really focused on like meritocracy and like if you want to succeed, you had to pull yourself by your bootstraps and everything, but fundamentally speaking like a lot of this is deeply unfair.

Instead of focusing on the really important problem that, you know, designers love focusing on real problem.

In this case, we're kind of spinning our wheels so we can feel good about doing something instead of tackling the real, but much more challenging, if not impossible problem out there.

So that's the tough part.

How do we navigate this?

The analogy I typically use is imagine that there are a hundred families with our homes.

And there are only 10 homes available to the a hundred families.

What should you be doing?

Should you be building more homes?

Or should you be helping the families to outcompete each other for the 10 homes?

And I think, I feel like we're stuck in the cycle of like, I'm going to pick a family that I like because they reached out to me.

They were nice to me.

Are they willing to pay me?

Whatever it is.

And I'm going to help them beat out the ninety nine other families for this home.

Instead of thinking about how do we make this more humane and more sustainable and let's increase the supply of 10 homes to a hundred homes.

Because it is the wrong thing to do to have people without homes to be homeless as opposed to thinking or saying that if you don't have a home it's because you're not good enough and you need to level up through mentorship.

Yeah, that's a great point.

And I think the UX industry or product design industry has for a long time not been very friendly for junior folks.

Like I remember, I'm on ADP.

So I do mentor a lot of junior designers.

And I remember have to say to all the boot campers, You know, your first job, just get whatever you can get.

And you just need one year in that job to have real experience.

And then you can go anywhere you want.

So there's rarely any positions for, people without real world experience.

And that's a chicken and egg problem.

Like if you don't give me an opportunity, how am I going to have a real professional experience?

look, I partake, I participate in mentorship as well.

And I think the thing is, it's just really, really hard to increase the pipeline to open up headcount.

I think even if you are at the VP or design executive level, it's still really, really hard to get that kind of budget approved and to make that a more junior level role, as opposed to more seniors, which is what the business wants ultimately, because they want that output.

So I recognize that it's not an easy thing.

I'm not advocating that we do nothing instead.

It's like, it's still better that we do something.

It's just that this is a really, really tough problem to solve across the board.

Appreciate the honesty for sure.

And I remember you recently did a live stream with Ryan Scott and you stack ranked all the company based on their brand prestige.

Clearly if you work for open AI, you're like you have all the prestige But for people like me who work on unsexy B2B sass.

That's actually by choice.

I find it more interesting, but nobody has heard of all those sass companies and you just don't have the halo around you.

So how could someone like me, convince a recruiter like you to maybe even consider me?

Maybe Not having a recognizable company name in my resume is not necessarily a bad thing.

Yeah, it's not that the whole exercise was done in fun in terms of this is like how recruiters might try to gauge how far you would get into the process within a few milliseconds of looking at your resume and the interesting thing is

that people who are like super against this also the ones who would very much jump at the opportunity to work at a FAANG or at a company that raises their profile so that they can get more job opportunities or interviews in the future.

So it's ironic in that sense, but I want to be clear that this is just like the early on thing.

We're the first thing that just the 1 percent of the entire journey of getting hired.

And just because you don't have that extra, advantage doesn't mean that you can't get the jobs that you want down the line.

And it's really just about focusing on your other strengths.

So yes, somebody who's worked at the best companies out there are the most famous, popular companies out there might potentially get more initial interviews or get responses when they reach out to recruiters and hiring managers, but it doesn't guarantee that they would do well at the job, for example, or even get through very far in the interview process.

So designers who typically don't have that pedigree already, there are a lot of things you can do, right?

one thing is you can improve your portfolio.

still relatively cheap or inexpensive or quick for somebody to click on a portfolio link and look at somebody's work and evaluate them based on that.

Other things you can do is to really get your messaging down really well, when people look at your LinkedIn profile or your initial message, they're assuming certain things about you.

They're trying to understand or gauge who you are as a designer, as a candidate.

And if you can help them bridge that gap of not understanding who you are and understanding that you are the right fit for this role, then you're going to give yourself a massive advantage.

And honestly, like a lot of FAANG designers, just like, you know, maybe they've relied a little bit too much on their logos.

They don't have the best messaging or best taglines to describe the value proposition that they bring to a company.

So it's, you know, I think at some point the field is level and you do maybe have to make a little bit more effort early on if you don't have those logos, but you can absolutely, be highly competitive by focusing your energy and time on other areas that you do have control over.

we should work harder.

No, well, not really work harder.

Yeah.

advantages and probably have a pretty good idea of your unique value proposition.

Like what you're able to bring to a company and if you're able to communicate that either through visual design work, not like visual design, but like through your portfolio or through the way you write out your descriptions on LinkedIn and your resume, those things can all absolutely help.

And to be honest, if Yeah.

space, then oftentimes they're not really looking for those logos.

They're really looking for the candidates that have solved similar problems that they're currently facing, or they've solved more difficult problems that they're facing right now.

Would you say for your portfolio or the visuals of your portfolio matters more or have more weight against the decision on if you are getting the interview or not.

It depends on which role of course, but generally speaking, visual design craft doesn't hurt.

Like the better the visual designs are, the more likely you're going to get through their early process.

So I tend to think of the hiring process similar to a sales funnel and each step along the way, because you get through different stages, right?

Like first you submit your application, a recruiter reaches out to you, and they're spending just a few seconds to see if you're the right fit or not.

And they feel like you're a good fit.

Then they bring you to the next round, which is typically a 30 minute intake call with the recruiter.

they feel like, okay, they're validating who you are.

You are who you say you are.

And the work you've done on paper looks legit.

And you're able to speak to that.

Then they feel comfortable introducing you to the hiring manager, which could be a 45 to a 60 minute call.

And in this case, the recruiter is putting their reputation on the line a bit.

Because you don't ever want to submit a candidate to hiring manager.

And they're just like, who did you, this is not who I asked for at all.

you're wasting my time.

Like that's the worst feedback I can get as a recruiter.

So you're, you know, you're qualifying this person step by step.

And once a hiring manager, qualifies the candidate, they then introduce them to the rest of the team, their partners and engineering product.

So can see the time investment and reputational investment goes up almost exponentially each step of the way.

So as you're going through this visual design, as you can imagine, it's very easy or quick to grok.

You see it.

And within like three seconds, you're like, Oh, this is good.

Or this is like, not great.

And everything else takes longer.

It's like, how do I qualify your ability to manage other people that would take many, many minutes, maybe hours to figure out and your ability to work with stakeholders, your ability to communicate your ability to strategize on the product.

This all takes time.

So the reason why visual design is so important right now is because recruiters and hiring managers are being flooded with many times more candidates than they were in the past, and they're using the quickest filter hone in on the candidates they want.

And the reasoning is just because you're good at visual doesn't mean that you're bad at everything else.

It just means that you're also good at this, right?

I liken it to using Yelp are one of those, raters out there to figure out if you want to go to this restaurant or not, like if you're trying to figure out the best restaurant in your own neighborhood, one way to go about it is to eat at every single restaurant, but that would take up so much money and time that it's not realistic for you to do so.

So you might go on Yelp and the first thing you might do is to sort it by ratings.

and then you look at, you open up the page for all the four stars or higher reviews and you look through their photos.

So that takes a little bit more time.

And then you narrow it down to your top five restaurants you want to try out.

So you dine there and then you decide which is the best one.

So each step along the way, you're increasing your investment in time, energy and money up to the point where you feel like this is the top one for you.

So of course you're, you're going to miss out some hidden gems that maybe don't have the best reviews for whatever reason, but actually their food is like very much in match with her palette.

That's definitely, that's definitely going to happen.

And the same thing is happening with candidates.

One of the biggest misunderstanding that I think candidates have is they believe every hiring manager and recruiter is trying to find the top best or the the best candidate out of the pile.

And that's just not the case.

Like, you cannot find a needle in a haystack.

It would be so exponentially expensive it's not even worth it to do something like that.

Instead, they're trying to find the best candidate within the time allotted to them.

the top candidate is probably going to almost definitely not going to be the best.

It's going to be like the top 5 percent tile perhaps.

that's usually good enough.

Yeah, it's almost sound like if Yelp is the way to go, you should at least get some sort of recommendation or referral.

Do you think if you have an internal employee referral through like your company's system, would that be helpful.

I think certain companies really care about referrals.

I think for Google, for example, if you get a referral through a Google employee, I don't know if that's still the case in the last two years, but I know in the older days, if you have a employee referral through Google, you're guaranteed pretty much a call with the recruiter at the very least.

And then for Amazon, it's the opposite.

You can have Amazon referrals, and then you wouldn't even get a call with the recruiter at all.

So it depends on the company.

of course, it also depends on who's referring you and how much they care about this referral.

And also if the company even has a formal referral system, because a lot of startups don't have a referral system in place.

It's just like, Oh, by the way, I heard about this candidate.

Do you want to interview them?

No.

All right.

you know, this is all done over Slack perhaps or over email.

So it all depends, but you know, going back to the Yelp analogy, I do think that.

You have to look at Yelp as an aggregator, you know, their businesses, they aggregate restaurants together the restaurants who typically do well business wise often have a Yelp or Google maps presence and they get ranked highly.

They get seen by more eyes.

So even though they don't have the best food or the best experience, they are doing such a good job on the marketing side of things that.

They are successful as a result.

I do think candidates and designers, especially should be thinking about it in that way where they don't need to be the best designer possible but they do need to get more eyeballs on them and more opportunities available.

And you can do that through any number of ways, like either content creation or, you know, just networking with people and just having more conversations.

And I don't think enough designers.

Lean into that because they feel like it's maybe icky or it's too much work and they rather do the honest work of design, as opposed to, marketing themselves.

Definitely.

So you mentioned this word value prop a couple of times.

What is a good value prop?

Can you give an example just for people who might not have been thinking about their career this way.

It's actually shorter for your unique value proposition.

And this is not, you know, a unique idea.

I think if you look at businesses and everything else that, that is competitive in the world, it's really about what do you offer that other competitors cannot offer?

And again, it's like a three circle Venn diagram.

So basically everything in life is IKIGAI or the same right?

And in this case, it's what you're really good at as a first circle.

Second circle is what other people are really good at.

And then third circle is what companies want.

So it's same as what I talked about earlier and your unique value proposition means that you're doing something that other companies want and need.

And you're doing it at a higher level than your competitors for the price point that you're willing to offer.

And then you have to be able to communicate that effectively to, to hiring managers and recruiters.

And I think a lot of designers don't do a great job of that because they talk about themselves their web pages in very formulaic ways, like.

I say, most designers say, hi, I'm hang.

Nice to meet you on their website.

And they say, I'm a, user driven design sent a user centric designer with the empathy for users or something.

Or I create good user experiences.

Like that taglines is go on and on.

And it's not great because one, I already know who you are from going to your website.

And you're not really differentiating yourself from other designers.

Most of the hiring managers aren't hiring for empathy.

Unfortunately, they're not hiring for people who create good user experiences.

Instead, they're thinking about it in terms of need a growth or acquisition designer so that I can solve this growth problem.

We're having currently where our users are not they're not converting over to the higher tiered service that we have instead of they're churning, 30 percent of them.

That's a very specific problem, but it's not a unique problem.

And I think designers should be thinking about it this way and think about what are the common problems of companies I want to work at and figuring out specifically which part of it they're having pain in, and then speaking to that, so you can't just say, I'm a growth designer.

You have to talk about what you do within growth that separates you from all the other growth designers out there and the kind of problems that you're solving that is not unique, but also challenging enough that other companies would be deeply attracted to.

Okay, so I'll give you my example.

I don't have a website now.

But if I were to have one, I'll probably say I am a data informed designer.

I don't want to be boxed in growth.

I think what I would mention I have a decade of experience in B2B SaaS, focusing on creating simple solutions of very complex enterprise tools.

Is that enough?

Or should I niched down a little bit more?

How do you feel about that?

this is so deeply personal.

It's okay.

so one thing I noticed is that is what you do currently.

you're in growth Mm hmm.

you probably have done growth design for several years.

But at the same time, you're saying you don't want to be boxed in.

So you're open to other opportunities outside of growth.

And that kind of goes back to the Venn diagram of this is what you've done.

And this is what you might want to do in the future.

And I think a lot of times designers have a conflict there where they're opening themselves to other opportunities.

But when a market is super tight, like it is right now, you don't really Mm You have to be really specific about what you want in order to land the role that you actually want.

And this kind of goes back to designers wanting to win.

Like they want to hear responses, they want to get job offers, but they're trying to up their percentage as opposed to making sure they win at the end, which is to get the job offer.

So I would have a lot of questions for you.

I would say, you know, if you don't want to do growth and you're saying you're open to all the opportunities, what are these opportunities?

Is it outside of growth?

What part of it is most attractive to you?

And then when you talk about simplifying complex B2B technologies and creating simple user solutions to them.

I think that's a really attractive or valuable proposition.

I would probably ask for more specific examples of how hmm.

Mm hmm.

that and potentially tying in some numbers.

I think that's a great proposition.

My question then would become how good are you at doing this?

Because you're not the only one who simplifies complex user interaction to simple ones, right?

So if you were to give examples like, Oh, I simplified this at this well known company, which led to this kind of business improvement, then I would feel like, okay, not only are you able to do this, but you're able to do it at this level.

So about it, it's kind of like, I don't know if you watch sports, like I watched the NBA sometimes.

So if somebody says I play in the NBA, I would be like, okay, you must be really damn good.

You're out of your one out of the 300 best basketball players in the world, most likely.

And then if you were to say, I not only am I an MBA, but I'm a starter for one of the best teams, that's awesome.

And then you say, I'm also an all star player and I average like 30 points per game over five years.

I'm like, well, that's really, really amazing.

But the more information you give and more specific you are, it can give people the confidence that you are the right fit for them.

Because every hiring manager knows exactly what they're trying to solve for.

And they're trying to make between what you offer how that would fix my problem.

So speaking, if you were to say, well, I simplify this, I was like, okay, yeah, that's kind of most of my problem.

But my problem is actually more specific.

And if you can be that specific, then you would be higher on my list of candidates.

However, a give and take with that because as you get more specific, you also lose out on opportunities that are adjacent in some ways, because for whatever reason, hiring managers and especially recruiters don't really have any imagination with this, or they don't really have the time energy to let their imagination take them and make that connection.

So you kind of have to balance that, but I think your value proposition is great.

It's, it's good.

Thanks.

So it sounds like this is very similar to business value prop.

You want your value to be specific, but not too, too specific.

Like, Oh, Gable is only for banks.

So that way you only, you're looking at banks as the only sector.

But then you want it to be broad, but not every company.

So that's like a balance.

And you had a good point on the market condition.

So it sounds like you can be a little bit more aspirational in good markets, where there might be abundance of roles and they're just handing out designer roles, right?

Like a few years ago, but now you might want to really niche down and be really specific.

Talk about like the specifics you've accomplished within that niche you selected.

don't like telling people what's a good or bad time to do things necessarily.

I would just say that it's harder to transition into things you've never done before right now than it was, say, three years ago.

So if you're an IC and you want to be a people manager or you're a designer who wants to be a product manager for the first time, it's going to be harder than before, which is kind of obvious, right?

I would say three years ago when was a very candidate friendly job market, hiring managers and recruiters were trying to adapt more around the candidate's experience, and they're thinking about it more creatively.

They're thinking, okay, this designer, like we're a B2B.

Corporation and we work in fintech and banking and this designer who's applying to us mostly B2C and they mostly worked in healthcare.

How does that fit in?

Well, I guess they're both regulated space, so they probably have to understand regulations quite a bit.

And you know, good user experience is good user experience and their interaction design is very strong.

And it seems like they understand the complexity of healthcare enough that they can, they can adapt within banking.

So yes, they'll probably have to ramp up a little bit, learn about FinTech and financial regulations, but they can probably make that adjustment.

So that's like three years ago, they're making that mental leap.

They're making that logical conclusion nowadays.

It's more like, okay, do you have banking experience?

Well, I've got this other 20 candidates with banking experience.

So I'm going to spend my time learning about them because know if I want to commit that other hour or two to understand your background now, of course, there are also a lot of designers or design hiring managers who work in fintech were like, okay, I don't like the design in fintech.

So I'm looking for outside of fintech to get a fresh set of eyes.

And that's definitely there.

But I would say there's definitely a larger group of people who are looking for an apples to apples comparison right now.

which is not ideal.

Yes.

If you were to, give designers job seeking or not one piece of career advice in 2025, what would it be?

I would say universally most designers especially candidates are not putting in enough effort to monitor and understand and improve their mental health.

And they're allowing it to deteriorate because they think that it's something that you could put off you pay off this debt later.

And it doesn't really work that way.

And I think oftentimes designers they're not seeing the forest for the trees.

They're just over this one area.

It's like, do this, then I will get a job, whether it be understanding AI or improving craft or visual design or something else.

And I think we're all struggling to better understand this chaos, trying to navigate this ambiguity and all this stuff that's happening in our world right now, politically especially.

And we just kind of forget this other thing that It's so embedded in everything we do, which is our mental health.

And I do think generally speaking, maybe all tech workers or maybe just our society currently, we just don't really focus enough on it.

Because it's just so important and it has such a deep effect on the work that we do.

Well, thank you so much, Hang, for hanging out with me today, and I know the market is really, really tough for a lot of folks, so I really appreciate you coming on here and share some of your insider knowledge.

Oh, thank you so much.

We really ran with it and I feel like we did a decent job at going through all the topics.

I deeply appreciate the preparation that you put into this as well.

I really enjoyed this and this was a lot of fun.

Hi there.

Thank you so much for watching, and if you like this video, you might want to check out my playlist on how to get a job in design.

I'll see you there.