Rocket Whale is hiring a UI Architect/Designer to lead the product design of our headline client’s new flagship web app. After going through many resumes and applications, I wanted to provide some advice to any UX professionals that are looking for challenging work at interesting companies. If you want boring work with boring people, then you need not proceed.
Your resume is a landing page of you from a professional perspective and you should design it as such. The purpose of a landing page is to give high-level details that entice users to dig deeper. Likewise, your resume’s goal is to get a phone call, not to get hired.
As a UI/UX professional, you have the baked-in skills necessary to create a resume with a great user interface. Use these skills to your advantage! If you cannot design a simple, user-friendly landing page for yourself, a topic of which you have intimate domain knowledge, why would I expect that can do this for a much more complex project of which you’ll start with little to no domain knowledge? Your resume is the only design project that is guaranteed to be looked at by the company that wants to hire you!
So how do you go about this? Use the standard customer discovery process. Talk to potential users (HR, hiring managers, etc.) at companies similar to those you want to work at and understand what is important to them. Create an MVP, test it with users and iterate until the design is complete. Measure your success, reach out for feedback when you don’t get to the next step of the hiring process and tweak as necessary. Not only will this give you a resume that stands out, it’ll give you a great story to tell when you interview. Beep bop boop, job search over.
To help get you started, this is what we’re interested in learning about at the resume stage:
- Do your personal and professional goals align with the position we are hiring for?
- Do you have the skills necessary for the position? If not, are you capable of learning them and are you excited to do so?
- Do you have results that back up what you say you can do?
- And, most importantly for a UI/UX professional, can you communicate all of this in a simple, organized, elegant and interesting manner?
Interesting companies (like Rocket Whale!) look for creative people that solve problems in interesting ways. Your resume is a great opportunity to show (not tell) a prospective employer that you can do this right away. Pounce on that opportunity.
Do you agree? Have you had success with an alternate method? Any additional tips or advice? What are you looking for in a resume? Let us know in the comments!
