Top Three UX Recruiting Fails to Avoid

For nearly a year, Topfolio’s UX Podcast has set out to describe and demystify the growing UX design job market. Through interviews with seasoned professionals, we’ve identified some of the confusion with this broad job title. In fact, Topfolio’s UX recruiting team has yet to come across an agreed upon definition even within the UX community.

After speaking with nearly a dozen experts, there is one takeaway that may surprise many in HR, operations and management:

The complexity of the term UX is negatively impacting three critical phases of your recruitment process: job summary, job sourcing and job screening.

In other words, there is something painfully broken in the way most companies go about finding their UX talent.

If UX design is about improving the experience someone has with the company, why not apply that same logic to improve the job candidates' experience?

Here’s how your company can avoid such missteps in these key recruiting phases.

 01 | Avoid A Job Summary Disconnect:

●      Engage – Does your UX job summary read like a legal contract? Loosen it up and market to the job candidate as if they were a potential customer. What career path does your brand represent to the job candidate? What career pain do you remove?

●      Divulge – Speak their language by removing all tired copy like “work under pressure”. These clichés are simply noise to applicants. Start divulging the good stuff like your UX team’s tech stack, agile methodologies and growth opportunities.

●      Differentiate – Each of your competitors is likely posting the typical job summary. Think differently by perhaps test the job candidate with a UX challenge built right into the job description. This may eliminate the uninterested and attract the more passive candidate.

02 | Avoid a Job Sourcing Dead End:

●      Diversify – Stop relying solely on the typical places to locate talent. If posting on LinkedIn, Glassdoor and Monster yield average to below average results, find a new sourcing strategy.

●      Innovate – Top UX people build communities for top UX people. Identify and build relationships within those communities. Think of ways to build a talent pipeline.

●      Partner – The days of doing it alone are gone as the pace and complexity of recruiting increases. Identifying value added partners that can help source top talent in record time is key.

03 | Avoid a Job Screening Blunder:

●      Escape – Having a non-UX person screen for qualified job candidates is not a winning strategy. Why? A candidate’s UX know-how, style and craft can be easily missed by a HR person or a junior UX professional. Escape the urge to hand this off to unqualified staff.

●      Reimagine – As recruiting technology evolves, so too does the methods for screening candidates. For example, gamification may be an effective method for screening UX applicants before a person gets involved.

●      Decentralize – Even if you can manage the screening in-house, a backup resource or a specialized partner may add unforeseen value. Decentralizing the process of screening applicants may make sense so long as the partner specialized in UX recruitment.

Next Steps: If your UX hiring practices are not getting the consistent results you expect, it may be time to seriously consider alternatives. After getting to this point in this article, you may not be surprised to learn that the seasoned team at Topfolio knows UX and are here to help. We hope you listen in to season two of our UX recruiting podcast and reach out to us if ever you’re in a UX recruitment crunch.