How to get hired by the best teams 💡

What are the best teams look for in design candidates? That's one of my favorite questions to ask. So this episode is going to shine a light on some of those traits and what you can do to stand out and to start. One of the things I've noticed across different interviews is that hiring managers are looking for slope over intercept. Here's the VP of Design at Ramp, Diego Zaks to share more.

If you find someone who has the skill set you need now, that's great. But if you find someone who's going to learn the skill set you need quickly, they're the ones that are going to be able to evolve as the company evolves. They're going to learn whatever skill set they need as the company changes. And we expect the company to change drastically every couple times a year.

Soleo hit on this same idea when I asked him about his experience hiring many of the earliest designers at Facebook.

Part of it's just figuring out, like, what is the time to proficiency name a thing you're proficient at. When did you start learning something as simple as that? Right. It's almost as though one's ability to learn new things quickly is like a meta skill in and of itself.

So the question is, how do you communicate that you're someone who can learn new things quickly? Well, if it helps, you don't even have to tell a story about design.

Sometimes you'll find slope just in the simple question of, like, you're really good at guitar. Like, why don't you start playing guitar?

One of my favorite questions is, do you play video games or are you good at video games? What are you really good? What are you One of the best in the world that I like mountain biking. It's great. Tell me about the gear. How do you get good at mountain biking? You just start talking about the brakes and the suspension, whatever. It doesn't really matter what it is. If you like to go deep on a topic, get really good at it, become or aspire to be one of the best in the world at it. You can do that for anything. You can replicate that.

I believe anyone can tell a compelling story that is unique to you and taps into who you are beyond just what you can accomplish with design. It reminds me of something that Amy Lima said when she talked about how she approaches the interview process.

I literally open my intro with, I'm going to tell you a story about the human beyond the pixels. And I just go into, you know, just like the threads of me. I literally talk about my first generation upbringing, growing up with immigrant Parents talking about my hobbies and how, you know, I'm a very person who loves to explore. I'm not talking about my work at all actually. I kind of segue into that at the end. Happy to go into specifics of my most recent roles and projects. But yeah, just kind of wanted to paint a clearer picture of the person you're talking to because I'm a. I'm a person first. Right. But I think that that's just really powerful and yeah, maybe not as common based on the feedback I receive when I kind of take that approach, is that it's refreshing and it stands out.

And I actually talked to the recruiter who helped hire the entire Duolingo design team. She says that before she looks at the work on your website, she clicks through to your about page. So I think it's worth stepping back and thinking about how you can tell a more holistic story about what you bring to the table.

As a designer, everyone has work to talk about. I can imagine. My assumption is that that can get lost, you know, in the sea of applicants who maybe a lot of them have similar backgrounds and similar work profiles. Everyone has a unique story. There's always something specific to you that can resonate and that someone can take away and be like, oh yeah, Amy, I remember her, this is what she's about. And oh yeah, she's got design chops, obviously and has, you know, done XYZ work. But like, this is the person I spoke to and I'm gonna remember that. And my approach is to like, make you remember me.

For me, sometimes the easiest way to stand out is to orient your story around your passion for the specific space that you're applying for. Take Pran from Vercel, for example. She had a very limited design background, but she was able to convince Graphite to hire her as the second designer, even though they originally set out to find someone much more senior.

You can tell when someone is really passionate about a certain area and I think that's kind of what got me in the door at GitHub and graphite, I think more so graphite. I like really show that I cared about this specific area. And I love developer tools. This specific section of developer tools is really interesting to me.

That's how I got the job at Maven too. I mean, I had exactly zero big name companies on my resume, but I went all in on how much I care about education. I wasn't just firing off applications. I went really, really deep. Because when you care deeply, that's what breeds the Curiosity and excitedness to learn what you need to succeed so you can show up to that interview with a specific learning goal that ties back to what that company needs.

What are you learning now? Where are you early in the curve over the next two years? What do you wish to learn? I found that that's often a consistent heuristic for people who have actually put any thought into it whatsoever, that they're like, quick to answer rather than like, let me think of something smart to say. And I think that that's been a reliable signal. It gives you a sense of like their appetite for learning.

Now let's talk about where to direct that appetite for learning. Here's Airbnb's former Chief Design officer, Alex Schleifer, sharing what he look important candidates.

I always look for like a curiosity and interest in tools and in the tooling because that's teaching you that this person has not only curiosity but a learner's mindset and is interested in technology. And at the end of the day, you need people who like are passionate about technology and technology is going to change so much that you need to have people are curious and excited to work with new things. And so I was always like, the more junior, the more like, how do you use your tools? Like, that's a very, I think important conversations for me to have because it gives you signal there's no excuse not to be proficient at the tools.

I find this clip particularly interesting because the common advice that I see from senior designers is that tools don't matter. So I said that to Alex and here's his response.

They're speaking about themselves, right? Like, hey, I still like using Photoshop so tools don't matter. What bullshit. It's like nearly gatekeeping and it's also like way of sometimes masking your own inability to learn new things.

Real quick message and then we can.

Jump back into it. There's been a lot of talk on this show about quality and velocity.

And the biggest hack that I've seen.

Is having designers who can ship directly to production. And now desen is making it so that designers everywhere can do just that without having to write any code. Now everyone's talking about how LLMs can 10x developers, but Desen is laser focused on how LLMs can 10x designers.

It's one of the tools I'm most.

Excited about right now and they're giving away early access to the dive community. So head to dive club slash desen to learn more. That's D S sn. All right. I have a Secret for you. I'm working on a new company behind the scenes, and it's built specifically for designers like you that listen to this show. And I honestly, I'm just too excited about it. So I have to give you a sneak peek. Head to Dive Club Startup to get a little glimpse of what's coming next. Okay, now onto the episode.

Isn't it interesting that at the end of the day, it all comes back to learning new things? And if you're earlier in your career, I think this clip should be really encouraging because the reality is that all of these new tools and technological advancements are leveling the playing field. I mean, I'm coming up on 15 years designing, but tools like Claude and V0 are just as new to me as they are to you. The more quickly the world changes, the less your years of experience matter. It reminds me of Soleo telling the story about learning Cork Express back in high school.

The pivotal moment for me personally was when he pointed out that the team at Time magazine, a magazine I subscribed to, use the same tool that I was using, and they had probably been using it for just a couple years, too. And that really landed in a profound way. He was like, nobody has a head start on this. No one. They might have a lot of prior knowledge that they're going to shoehorn into this new medium, but they don't really have a head start on you. The tools have largely solved a lot of these things for them. I've carried that insight with me my entire career. Look for what's new and emerging, because nobody will have a head start. And you can be amongst the few that write the playbook.

That's why I keep asking people, what skills and traits matter as we enter this new world. And the number one answer has already been woven throughout this episode. Here's Maheen Sahail, who's working at Gen AI at Meta, to share a little bit more.

I wonder if curiosity is it like, I'm actually trying to think, like, yes, you need to be a good prototyper. Yes, you need to, like, technically understand what's happening. You need to be a good communicator. You need to navigate ambiguity. But actually, all of that comes naturally if you're curious. So I think all of that is important. But really, if you don't have curiosity, then I really worry about these other skills and whether you'd be able to execute on them.

Now, you can be as curious as you want, but if your curiosity is kept in the closet, then it doesn't matter. Because the number one way to get hired by the best teams is to act on your curiosity and then share out what you make with the world and then do it again and again and again and again. Because eventually you'll become a magnet for opportunities. Take Sam Peitz for example, when he had no product design portfolio at the beginning of 2024, and now he's turning down high profile job offers because he consistently showed up and shared the type of work that he wants to get hired for.

That's also why you don't really find a lot of the things I did in my branding job. I'm proud of the work I've done, but it wasn't the stuff I wanted to do in the future. So obviously got rid of all of that and took this year basically and used Twitter as my public portfolio of things I want to work on. Because if you share the things you're really passionate about, the right people will find you. And it's not always like a million followers or like 10,000 followers. Maybe sometimes you do stuff that is very niche, but the people that are passionate about these things will find you.

I'm kind of the perfect example of what he's talking about. I mean, for years I wanted to design education products, but I had zero network and honestly a trail of failed startups behind me. But I spent time prototyping a homeschool dashboard and I posted it on dribble. Months later someone found that post and hired me to lead the design of their education product. Now, it wasn't exactly what I had in mind. I mean, I was designing cadaver inspection tooling for anatomy students and I don't even really like science that much. But it didn't matter because that was my foot in the door. And eventually what helped me land the role at Maven. When you trace the journeys of the designers you see landing these really high profile roles, a lot of them have have similar origin stories. Take Mariana Castillo for example. I asked her how she was able to land some of these really high end roles early on in her career and no surprise, this is what she said.

I feel the first answer, the most obvious one, is share your work. That's how Vercel found me and that's how I landed on Pierre as well. Being active on Twitter, sharing my work, that's the best way to get connected with people from these companies.

Just today I had someone text me that you definitely know and say they discovered and hired a new designer solely from the end of year showreel that they posted on Twitter. So hopefully you find that pretty inspiring. That's all for now. And I will see you next week.