055: How to Get Your Foot in the Door with Andy Budd

Jason Ogle: I want to talk about landing a job in UX. Defenders, you know, my main audience that you are my main audience and especially ones who are trying to get a job in the field, and ones that are even newer, maybe you have a job but you’re just kind of getting your feet wet. I think that this will still be relevant to you, and honestly, even seasoned designers because, you know, last time I checked, employment is at will and that’s pretty universal. So, at will does not just mean yours. As many of us know, it a lot of times it will mean our employers, because of maybe hard times or maybe just not a good fit, etc. So, this is going to be – this is not just for again, Designers looking for a job. This is for all of us, because we never know when we’re going to need to learn a job again.

So, I think this is going to be really interesting conversation, and I’ve asked Andy to be here today to really talk about what he looks for in hiring Designers and you know, like characteristics, skills, and all those things. So, this is just completely off the cuff. I do have a few questions written down here, but this is just a – this can go anywhere it needs to. So, I guess I want to kind of, maybe we can look at this as sort of like, you know, looking at it as like before the interview, during the interview, after the interview, that kind of thing. Does that sound good, Andy? I’m kind of going in that sort of structure.

Andy Budd: Absolutely! This is your rodeo, so whatever you want to do, I’m here.

Jason Ogle: Okay, awesome! So let’s just say, you know, of course, in the beginning, we have to actually find a place you want to work at, and then of course the next logical step is applying. So, in applying for a job, what are some ways that Designers can get their resume moved up in the pile? Like what are some things that you’ve noticed Andy, you know, in your long career and experience doing this stuff and hiring Designers. What are some things that’ll help a designer kind of stand out on their resume?

Andy Budd: Okay, well, first off, I’m going to be the annoying guest actually says, I don’t think that’s actually the place to start. So, but in a really, really good way, I think there’s some statistics that I’ve seen that says something like 70% of all jobs, I’m making this number up, it’s about 70% of all jobs don’t even get to the advert phase. So many people were employed before an advert gone out, before CVs or resumes had been taken in, so much of it is around word of mouth in your network. So and actually that is so true of my hiring at Clearleft. I would say a good third of the people that we’ve hired at Clearleft, we’ve hired because they were already working with us. They already freelancers, and they were amazing freelancers, and [inaudible 00:02:58] an agency got to try before we bought and we had a problem, we had a client that we needed a support with, and we knew people from the industry, from the community, from going to events, from going to meet ups. And we knew people because they were friends of friends. And so, if you are – an organization is wanting to hire the best people. The best people almost never hit the job market because they will say immediately I’m looking for work and one of their friends would go, well, my friend over here is hiring.

So, I think the first step is to curate and cultivate a great network of people. And that’s one of the reasons why I love going and attending conferences. I love going and speaking at conferences. I like going and organizing conferences because conferences are where really smart people gather. And so, I think my first advice, like say it would be to curate your network of people. If you are thinking about moving on, if you’re thinking about looking, let your network know. Certainly, like I say, you know, I think being a freelancer and trying before you buy is a great way of doing it, and it also works for the employer and the employee. If you’re somebody looking to hire you get to see what this person is like, you know, in a kind of like a low engagement way. You know, you might just get in you want to do a piece of pitch work for week or be the second or third person in a design sprint team, or however it is, you get to see how they work and they tick. And from the other person’s view, they get to see how you work as an organization. How will you treat them? Like, are you somebody that kind of like, you know, an interview, he says, you know, life in this company is going to be amazing, but when you actually get in there, you’re treated like a second class citizen.

And so, that would be my first step, which would be basically beat the system, try and find yourself a job without even worrying about going through the interview process, because if you can do that then you’re golden. And this is actually some of the advice that one of my friends, a chap called Blair Enns gives Agency Founders. Like you know, if you get to the point where you’re pitching against three or four people, you’re pitching against three or four people. You’ve got a one in four chance of winning. If you get in there before the company even knows they need that job done, it’s just you and that company and you’ve almost got like a 100% chance of winning because if you knew the thing needs to be done and you help them figure that out.

So again, from an employee point of view, you know, getting there before the job even gets advertised. If you are looking for work, you know, one of the easiest ways is just to pick a company that you really liked the look of, you know, they might not have a job advert out there, but find somebody senior there, find a friend that you know that can give you an introduction on LinkedIn, go to an event that you know these people are going to be there and kind of talk to them and source them out, and you might be lucky and have that conversation. They’re going on, what we thinking about advertising, you know, in two weeks’ time because we’ve got this work coming up, but I actually now you said it, let’s just, you know, let’s fix, you know, you look amazing, let’s forget about the job interview and just come in and do a little trial with us. So, subvert the recruitment process will be my first tip.

Jason Ogle: Hmm. I like that a lot. And I’m so glad you said that. And networking is critical and especially in the field of design, and it’s true that if you’re connected with the right people and with the right, the companies that you’re interested in, even if you know somebody at a company that you’re interested in working at, that’s really huge too. And I think about – you talked about conferences, those are definitely great ways to meet other people and pass business cards around and stuff. Did we still do that? Do we still pass business cards?

Andy Budd: I still, I do occasionally. I tend to take more business cards someone given and then I discovered those business cards a year later. I wonder what the hell was the conversation I was having. So yeah, this is also a tricky thing, but the other thing I’d say again is before it gets to the recruitment stage, what you want to do, I think as a prospective candidate is you need to do two things. I think you need to have a really, really great resume, and that resume could be a printed thing that you send to people. It could just be like a really, really great LinkedIn profile, you need to have a great portfolio. And a great portfolio and a great resume can open a bunch of doors. So, if you see a company that you’d like to look off before job even lands, just email them, email the head of design or their head of technology or the MD even and say, hey look, I love what you do. People want to be flattered.

If you just say, you know, dear insert name here, you know, I’ve seen so many emails where it’s clear that the person contacting you don’t know who you are, don’t know what your company does, maybe get your name wrong and your job title wrong and that immediately goes in the bin. But if someone contacts you and says, look Andy, I love what you’re doing at Clearleft now, I know you don’t have any jobs open at the moment, but if something comes up, please do let me know, here’s my details. And I will go and I will look at their resume, I’ll probably go straight to their portfolio actually. And if I like the look of what I see, I will then forward that to my team and say, look, you know, I knew we didn’t have anything at the moment, but keep an eye on this person and if something comes up, get in touch with them.

Or maybe even like, just go for coffee, go for coffee, meet this person, sound them out, because if we’re not hiring now, we will be in 3 months’ time. And so, a big part of your role is running a company and building a team is having a group of people that you are looking out for. Basically as a hiring person, someone that hires, I feel like I’m a talent scout. I tweeted something earlier today, actually, I’m not wanting to be too self-referential, but basically, I think there were three components to running an amazing company. “You built an amazing team that are happy, happy teams create happy customers, happy customers deliver business value.” And so you need to be constantly on the lookout for the best people possible. And so, your talent scout and you know, quite often we will hire people even if we don’t have a role for them now because they are so good, we know that we can find stuff for them in the future.

So yeah, you know, like a crazy low number of jobs actually go on the, on the market compared to the number of jobs that are done through that way. But in terms of what we’re saying, so I think the portfolio and the resume, which is an important thing to get aligned. So first off in your portfolio, I want to see amazing examples of design work obviously, but what I don’t want to see is only the finished product. The finished product, the glossy visuals or the glossy prototypes or wire frames, if you’re more of a UX and the UI type person, they’re lovely, but I don’t know whether that was you that did that or a big team that did it or what also I did or what the context is. What I’m looking for in a portfolio is the ability to tell a story.

So, I want to understand what the problem was he was solving. I want to understand how many people worked with you on the team, how many people were on the client’s side. I want to see the journey. I want to see the early dirty mockups you did. I want to see you explain what didn’t work and what the client pushed back on and what you did to solve that. I want to see the usability test result to your like or, we really thought this is going to work and it failed spectacularly, but at last minute, I did this and this, and we solved this problem. And it still comes back to something that my math teacher used to tell me, you know, at school, which is, if you study math, you do a math exam, you get half the points for the right answer, but you get the other half points for showing your workings, because the showing the workings proves that you understand what you did. If all you do is come up with the answer, you might have just done it through blind luck.

And I think the same is true even more so with design. You might just be a gifted mimic. You might be someone that puts beautiful visual things together or he’s just lucky maybe follows trends. And for me, looking at your portfolio, I don’t know. So, I want to get into your head, I want you to tell a story that I can go and make sense of how you got to what you got to. And you know, the reality is the actual end result might not look great, but if you can convince me that it was the right thing for that situation, on that budget to solve that problem with that client, that is the most important thing to me, and so telling their stories. And I would as long as I have 3 or 4 brilliantly described journeys than dozens and dozens of beautiful nicking drivel shots.

The other thing I would say, is also, you know, again, it’s great to have a curated portfolio. I think if you are a UI Designer, you know, you can show sketches and you can show, logos and sort of concept work. I think if you’re a classic UX Designer in the ways I perceive UX design, which is more conceptual, you know, people that are doing interaction design and strategy but maybe not doing UI and this is maybe a slightly more old-fashioned view of what UX is and I think the terminology has changed and some of your audience might be going, we know, I think UX Designers do the UI design as well. I don’t really get into that kind of conversation today, though, I’d be happy to at another time if you want to jump into what is UX, what is UI, what is product?

But people that are not working in a visual media, people that doing prototypes, etc., etc., it’s even more vital that you tell that story. And so, take a camera with you or your phone and when you’re doing that, you know that designing games exercise in your workshop when you’re doing that sticky note exercise, a prioritization exercise, I need you to take pictures, because the other thing I do is I look at all the claims you have on your CV or your resume and you see all of these resumes, it has a big long list of like, I could do this, I could do that and I can do that. Now, you could just be lying, you could have read a book about usability testing. Let’s say, and you could never have done a facilitator to usability tests and if I see anything on your CV, you cannot evidence in your portfolio that you’ve done. I will just discount it because there’s a lot of people out there that are just, you know, they can be lying on their CVs, you know, as I’m sure we’ve all done in, you know, on occasion.

So, if you say that I can do user journey maps, I want you to show me a picture of a user journey map. Frankly, I want you to show me two or three because not we use journey maps had done the same. If you say that I’ve done animated prototype, I want to see animated prototype. If you can say that you do the usability testing, I want to see you running a usability test. If you say that you can facilitate workshops, so you’ve done a design sprint. I want to see the evidence because otherwise it’s just hot hair. I’d say for me, the resume is just a list of claims you’re making that you need to evidence.

The other thing, which is again is the dirty secret about resumes is people do not hire you because of the resume. People use a resume to find an excuse not to hire you, as a weirdly because you, you know, let’s say you are hiring manager, let’s say, you know, clean up the hiring and I get 30 resumes from 30 Designers and all of these Designers are saying how amazing they are. What I’m doing is I’m looking for bad smells, I’m looking for evidence that the thing that they’re doing. It maybe they haven’t done or maybe there’s something about diversion made, doesn’t kind of like stand up, you know. And so, really because you’re really busy, you get all these resumes too, you know, sadly you scanned them relatively quickly and you’re looking to things that don’t make sense.

And so, in some of the odds, you know, a tighter resume, you know, like simple things like, you know, you say that you’re a stickler for detail, but you spell detail wrong, you know, bang, you know, you’re clearly not doing it. You say that you’re kind of like, you know, you stick with company, you know, you’re someone that’s really passionate about sticking with companies for a long time, but actually your resume is you know, you’ve bounced around 15 different jobs in the last two weeks. You know, you’re looking to try and find evidence. The behavior they’re claiming actually doesn’t exist. And so, yes and most people use resumes as a filtering mechanism. And what ends up happening, you had 20, 30 resumes, you ditch 20. You know, let’s say you get 30 resumes, you would ditch 20 of them just based on the things that don’t kind of add up and the resume and you’re left with 10 people. Then what you do, so for those 10 people, you will probably have an initial screening call.

The initial screening call you know, whoever does it will usually be like half an hour call. Just say, ask people to walk through their resume and walk through their portfolio to just to kind of make sure that kind of everything stacks up. And you’ll probably look at some of the resumes and go, well that person has bounced around in kind of like three jobs in the last two years. We want to hire people, you know, people that come and work with Clearleft, maybe last, you know, stay here on average for 5 or 6 years. So I kind of want to understand why that person’s bounced around so much. And if that person has a really credible answer, that’s great. If that person doesn’t have a credible reason for why they bounce around, then again, I might dismiss that as somebody that is not – and there is exactly wrong with there’s, I think what we instead of jumping around and kind of progressed in your career, but if you’re looking at someone that has staying power you know, things like, you know, 7 jobs in 10 years, it’s not a really good indicator.

The other thing I kind of want to say is I want to see some kind of career path. I want to understand why somebody went from one job to another to another. And I want to see that those jobs getting better. I want to see them kind of growing some way. And every now and again somebody has a crappy job and they have to leave because they had a horrible boss, so it didn’t work out for them. So obviously, I’m not going to be crazy critical, but you know, if I see a bunch of people that have only ever worked at like mediocre agencies, I’m going to wonder why they feel that they should come and work at Clearleft. Civilly, if I’m working in a tech company, I’m working at Google, I want to see somebody that has kind of grown from like, you know, a small company to medium-sized companies to a bigger company. Because I know that if you come and work in a Google, you know, and you’ve just jumped from like a 5 or 10% agency, the skills you will need, they’re going to be vastly different. And that’s not an absolute, but that just might be one thing that I’m looking from your resume to tell a story, and if I have a challenge, if there is something doesn’t feel quite right, I want to kind of delve into that.

And then obviously once we’ve gone through that kind of like initial kind of dating process, then you know and people who got through the first and second filter, which is the resume path and then the sort of the phone interview path, then we’ll kind of invite them in to have a conversation, but I probably jumped into a whole bunch of things there, so I’ll stop and take a breather. And if there’s anything then you want me to kind of expand on or moving into a direction, let me know.

Jason Ogle: Oh, absolutely! That’s all so good, Andy, and you we’re kind of tracking just fine here. My biggest takeaway and all of these Defenders is that we don’t tend to do this recording and documenting as we go. We tend to try to do all this after the fact. And so, my big encouragement for you, you all listening is to record your journey over time as it happens. And don’t wait until you’re out the door to try to remember everything because it’s super hard and it makes your portfolio building process, and even resume building process. Kind of a lot more arduous than it needs to be. Would you agree with that?

Andy Budd: Oh, absolutely! I’ll say no. I think there’s two and if the caveat, but two other things to kind of consider. I think the first one is, again, even though it’s easier if you are a great designer and you put together as the most amazing portfolio, it can be really, really engaging, but that also takes time. I don’t mind if you basically send me a dropbox folder with a bunch of assets in it, as long as you can talk me through. So what is great that story is crafted, you know, I would rather jump on a phone call with you, or have coffee and you open up these boxes, you know, the dropbox folders and say, well actually, you know, this is, you know, these are pictures from the usability testing. These are the design principle was we came up with, here’s an early prototype.

So, the story telling can be done in person. So don’t worry that you need to spend months crafting the perfect portfolio because we’ve hired people just on a really good conversation. And actually there’s something nice around knowing that someone is such a good communicator that they can just tell a story from a bunch of random, you know, bits of paper and a twigs and bits of string, because actually a lot of what you do, you know, again, like being a designer, it’s kind of like being an iceberg.

There’s a small amount of the stuff that you can see, but actually a lot of the depth is hidden under the water, and a big part of what I’m looking for in design is the ability to tell stories. You know, I love hiring people that are writers who are bloggers, who are speakers, because a lot of my job as an agency, but also think in-house is to bring people along the journey. As an agency, I need to bring my clients along. I need to bring the B.A., I need to bring the marketing manager, I need to bring the CEO. The same is true internally. If you’re an internal design team, you know, you can’t just brute force design solutions, you know often Designers don’t have the power and the equity in the seat at the table. So you need to explain to people, you need to sell to them why this is a good idea and why is this so is their problem? So if you are good at selling to them, then you aren’t gonna also be good at selling to me in an interview.

But also because of that, that goes to my second thing I was going to mention, which is you need to be putting this stuff as you go, not just for your own benefit, but if you’re trying to sell design to the rest of your organization, you needs to be taking pictures yourself, you need to be taking pictures of the whiteboard exercise because you need to think back and you need to reflect. You need to be collecting all this stuff. All this material is part of the design process. And if you’re saying, oh well, I didn’t capture it, that again is a little bit of a warning sign because it means that you didn’t think it was valuable, you didn’t think it was necessary, not just to save it for later to show me, but you didn’t think it was necessary to use it at the time, and then that makes me start to think, well maybe your just cargo coating, maybe your creasing personas with no actual use intention of using them and you’ve done the thing and then you sort of throw it away and you move into the next thing.

So, design leaves a trail of content and paper behind it and it wake. It’s not the purpose. You know, we’re not doing design to create these things. We’re doing design to ship a live product, if you are in the digital product space, but you can’t help but create all of this stuff in your wake. And if you’re not capturing that, then you’re kind of doing something wrong.

Jason Ogle: Oh, that’s so good. I want to veer into education because obviously, I’m totally for education. I feel like, you know, I’m a high school dropout and I dropped out in – it’s funny to say that right after I said I’m for education, but I did drop out in junior year, like the first week I was just kind of done with it. And that worked out okay for me in my career because I was driven, I was ambitious enough to learn everything I could and you know, do the networking thing as we talked about earlier, and finally get my foot in the door took a while, the first one. But I want to know, especially now, I mean this is back in the 90s that I’m talking about, but I want to talk about now with so much learning available to us online, you know, and how much, I’m kind of biasing the question already, but how important or how critical is education, a college degree, certification, courses, etc., to actually landing a really great job in UX?

Andy Budd: Okay. Again, a brilliant question. So, I have never looked at somebody’s formal qualifications and said, okay, I’m going to hire you because of that, and I know you’ve very few people who have thought. That’s not to say that education isn’t important, you know. I have met amazing Designers and amazing programmers who are self-taught. And in fact, in the early days, and actually even today, a lot of the best people are self-taught because a lot of the university courses in design UX product are pretty poor. And so, you know, I look at the work they’ve done, I look at their portfolio. Now that would be an easy, you know, you could use that and say, okay, well, Andy says I don’t need to go to university. And for some people that might be true. And for some people, you know, building up that huge amount of debts if they hear that, you know, the certificate is meaningless, then they might choose to kind of go their own path and spend 10 weeks doing a general assembly course or spend the three years they would have done learning in college to buy all the books and go to all the conferences and teach themselves, but not everybody thinks and works like that.

So, I think you can get a huge amount of knowledge out of universities, but actually lots of it, a lot of the benefit is, you know, you’ve got to work hard. It’s not a case of just going to university and then pouring knowledge into you. You go there, you got 3 years or 4 years. You need to use that time wisely. And some of that might be, you know, building up your portfolio on the side why you’re studying. Go in and create fake projects or go and volunteer for your local charity to build them a website or you know, have a little kind of like business in a modeling WordPress sites or Shopify sites in your spare time, but that gives you, you know, what you need to do, whether you are coming out of university or where you’re going straight into the industries, you need to have a portfolio to show. And if you spent three years in a university degree, you probably learned a bunch of stuff, but what you will have is 4 or 5 or 6 projects. Whereas if you haven’t done that, if you’re just, you know, ditching university, you want to go straight into industry, how do you get that first gig? How did you get the second gig? How’d you get the 3rd gig? I get how do you feel your portfolio up?

And so, I think there is benefits of going to a great university, but less about the learning more about the time it gives you, you know, in the safety gives you to kind of work on projects. But if I’m honest, and this is not an advert for General Assembly because is not General Assembly is pretty crap, but I think the level of people that I see coming out of doing a 10 week General Assembly course is not a million miles from the level I see of people coming out doing a 3 or 4 years bachelor’s degree, and the cost of doing one or the other is huge. Particularly, I think General Assembly and similar courses because all kinds of courses out there work well if you’re transitioning. So maybe you worked in marketing for a few years or maybe you did a graphic design degree but now you’re switching into UX design and you know that is quite a good thing. You’re going to do a 10, 11-week immersive course and you come out, it’s like, you know, portfolio for the amazing things. So, if you are a self-learner, you can learn without a university degree, but the key thing is building up that portfolio of work.

Jason Ogle: Yeah, I love that. I think that there’s no substitute for experience. And then there’s the question of, well, how do I get experience if I can’t get hired? Well then you, Andy alluded to this, Defenders, you go and you take initiative to go and just knock on doors. I mean, think about a company, maybe a product you use, go and ask them if you can help. Ask them if you can help with their website or, you know, just take initiative and make your own projects. Make your own way in this. Don’t wait to be picked. As Seth Godin says, one of my heroes, Seth Godin says, “don’t wait to be picked, pick yourself.” And you know, he said something really interesting too. I got to interview him recently, which was pretty awesome for me as a big fanboy, yeah. I was reading one of his books and research and he talked about like an MBA, which is certainly, it’s a great degree to have, but it was amazing. He said, you know, “anybody who is really hungry can get the same level of education by reading a book for 30 days than going to college for 4 years.” And basically at the same level of education on an MBA without the piece of paper that says it. So, the whole point here, Defenders being as I always say, use your growth mindset. If you’re really hungry to get a job, a great job in this field, they’re the only thing stopping you is yourself.

Andy Budd: I mean that’s great advice. And I’m slightly envious now that you’ve been chatting to Seth because he’s amazing and sitting to a bit of conferences and he’s really cool. The one thing I would say again, you know, for the caveats, UX Designers are always going, it depends. I think one of the great things that you do find and go into university is meeting like-minded people. You know, so many of the world’s most successful startups. You know, Google, Larry, and Sergey, Sergei, or Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, you know, these projects wouldn’t have happened if these people are just gone, you know, become a solo bedroom designer. They weren’t because they found other people, other like-minded people. And so, going to university, I think is often as much around life experience and connections, and particularly the benefit of going to a well-respected should have maybe even Ivy League, we don’t really have that in the UK, but a lot of it is not about what you learned, but it’s about the doors he opens.

And particularly when the MBA think – I think you can progress really, really far as designer without anything like an MBA. But when you start getting into management, when you start becoming a design leader, when you start deciding that actually wants that position on the board, or maybe you want to get into startups and you want to be like the chief design officer or you know, a co-founder of a startup or going to work for a VC firm, having had some business training and business knowledge and experience can be really useful.

One of the things I think is fascinating at the moment is, there are lots of traditional old-fashioned kind of fusty MBAs which are just really teaching you, you know, bad economics, and a lot of that stuff you can just get from a book, but there’s a whole new generation of MBA’s design driven, places like “De School” which basically teaches you a design driven MBA. It teaches you design thinking. It teaches you how to solve problems in this sort of abstract way but not just how to solve interface problems, how to solve business problems, how to solve organizational problems. And so, if you believe strongly that design isn’t just about making something look pretty, but it’s about solving a whole wider class of problems, and you have a desire to go and learn at university, maybe don’t do a craft type project, you know, a craft degree, like graphic design or user experience design, but maybe going consider one of these new school MBA’s.

And again, the other thing that you’re learning at the very least is if you don’t, you know, you’re learning a bunch of stuff there, but also you will meet a whole bunch of people who 4, 5, 6 years on will be the people running these companies and they will remember you. And frankly, it’s much easier to get a job if you went to college with the owner of the company, that’s now a multimillionaire. And says, oh yeah, I remember Andy from when I went to college with him. I’ll give him a job, than you know, again, accepting a CV from a random stranger. So there is value in that, but there were also multiple other ways of getting there.

Jason Ogle: That’s good advice. So, let’s dive into the interview process. So, let’s say that somebody’s got a call from Clearleft and they resume, they look good on paper, their portfolio look good or maybe they were a referral from there. Those are always the best as you alluded to earlier, referrals are great from existing employees for culture. So, let’s say you invite somebody in to the office or to a coffee or something and you’re basically first impressions are really important obviously, but I’m curious, does appearance matter like attire and what they wear, how much does that matter?

Andy Budd: I would like to say, and I would like to believe that doesn’t matter as much as it actually does. But again, you know, we moving into kind of interesting but also sort of slightly challenging areas. So for instance, like, you know, it used to be a lot of companies will say, well, I hire for cultural fit. And at the time is, oh yeah, no, that sounds good, you want someone to fit culturally. Actually that was often a secret way of saying, I want to hire people who look like me and act like me, and behave like me, and because I’m a white straight man, you suddenly surround yourself by other white straight man. So this is not what I’m saying, but I think there is a value fit, which is really, really important. And you know, I have biases, I can’t help it.

If I have somebody come in to the studio and they look like a designer, you know, they’ve got the right like horn-rimmed glasses in the right, you know, Japanese designer shirt that will immediately tell, you know, that will immediately give a signal that this person feels like a designer. If somebody comes in and they’re wearing like a really kind of, you know, like not very well-designed business suits, it strikes me as somebody who may be is more of a business person or an accountant or whatever. You know, and if someone comes in and they’re just in their hoodie, maybe they’re cool, you know, maybe it’s, Oh, you know, this is a relaxed culture, and they’re so confident in themselves that they didn’t feel they needs to dress up, but it also might be that they’ve kind of misread the signals. So, you can’t help but kind of judge a book by a cover, even if you try your best to kind of avoid being led by those things.

I mean, I think that the best advice is to, you know, and this is almost kind of like something on Jeff Veen. I’m a huge fan of Jeff Veen, one of the founders of Adaptive Path. And he talked about this in terms of public speaking and he said, go in and just try and be slightly better dressed than the audience. And I think that’s true of going for a job interview. You know, you can look at pictures of the agency online or the company online. You can see the Instagram accounts, you can see what people are wearing in the [inaudible 00:35:14] photos on there, you know, and their website or people standing in front the sticky notes and just clock that and go slightly smarter. I think if you go crazy smart, people just think you’re kind of, you know, you’re not part of the tried. And if you kind of dress down to the point that people just think you are caring, but I think it’s important, but I think I wouldn’t worry and lose sleep over it.

But they all kind of like, we behave is like, you know, I’ve been in interviews with people, where people have answered the phone. And okay, you know, it might be an emergency at home and you want to give people the benefit of the doubt. You know, we want to be someone that hires company, you know, we want it to be inclusive. You know, if you have a single parent or even if you’re not a single parent and your child [inaudible 00:35:57] you know, that’s important. But, you know, I’ve sat in interviews with the same person has answered the same phone three times, knowing that it was from there, you know, from somebody that wasn’t important they need to deal with straight away.

So that kind of, you know, a lot of this is about respect. And the level of seriousness that people will take the interview because ultimately, you want to be wanted. You want as an employer to be interviewing people that really care about getting the job. And if people are presenting themselves as if they think, because – sorry, I’ve done a few last squareness this book costs, I hope I just highlight read labels you or something, but you want people to kind of care deeply. And if they are showing you disrespect, if they show you that they don’t care, then why would you care in return? So, I think there’s a kind of a mutual kind of respect and getting on there. So, I think the way you present yourself and the way you hold yourself is an element, but actually, it’s not the biggest element. You know, like if someone comes in and they are wearing some kind of heavy metal, kind of like outfit and they’ve got shaved hair and they’ve got piercings and they’ve got pink hair, but they are amazing designers.

You know, we are in the talent business, and actually to some extent like clients expect you to be a little bit quirky. So, in a really at the end of the day, it is such a minor, even though I said all that stuff before, you know, it’s such a minor thing, you know. I want creative people. I want people that are good communicators. You know, again, I don’t know if he hasn’t met Jesse James Garrett. Jesse James Garrett is one of the other founders of Adaptive Path and you know, Adaptive Path now owned by a bank. And he is the most unlikely banker you can meet, because he has piercings and pink hair and wears dark clothes and it has shaved under cut hair, but he’s awesome.

And so, I said that’s what you’re looking for. You’re looking for someone that can come in, has a sweater, has a confidence, but he’s not egotistical or brash. You want somebody that can talk adequately and talk through the story of their CV, talk to the story of their work that can explain the reasons why they did things. You want people to be a little bit humble. So, if you ask someone about us, you know, can you do this or that? And they can’t. I want to say, well, no, you know, I’ve read about this subject and I feel confident that I could do it, but I have never actually done it.

And actually you kind of want people to grow. So, you also want people to come in and say, well look, you know, one of the reasons I’m coming to you, it’s not because I am the best out there, but this me anyway, I want to get better. And the reason why I’m picking someone like Clearleft is because I’ve worked at other companies. I was the best designer there, but I knew I was not the best I could be, and I needed to go and work with people who were better than me, and the team at Clearleft are better than me. And so, I want to come, I want to learn and they want to give you value. But that’s another thing which I think is really challenging and you’ve got to get the tempo right, because I see too many people coming to interviews. They’re only about what they can get out of the relationship because it has to be quick pro quo. If someone’s like, oh yeah, you know, a fan of the companies, where do we have books, I’ve been on your podcast, and I so want this opportunity, I want to learn from you, I want to absorb all this stuff. That’s flattery, but I also want to know what you can give. And if you don’t, then move on to that. And if you don’t explain to me what you can give, how you can add value to the organization, then what you are doing is thinking selfishly. And I want people to come and work for me that will grow by giving, by doing.

I want people to bring their whole selves to work. And that means not hiding who they are. You know, we had an amazing talk at Leading Design. So when this comes through Leading Design, which is all about design leadership as you might’ve gathered and it was in London at the Barbican two weeks ago. We’re bringing it to New York in in June. And it’s about 200 design leaders. You might be a Lead Designer or a head or director or maybe even a VP of design, a lot of people that come are from really, really big companies. And one of the conversations, one of the talks from this amazing set designer, Emily and we had a few other Designers from that same thing, with this kind of idea of code switching. This idea is that you come to work but you pretend to be somebody else than who you are. Maybe, you’re African American, but you know, to fit in, you kind of fake different accent or different kinds of like patois or maybe you’re a gay, but you try and hide it, because you want to fit in. That’s not really good. You don’t want to force people to conform. You know, we want Designers. I want a whole range of different inputs. I want to have people from different backgrounds, different perspectives.

And so, I want people to come who aren’t just like me, who can feel comfortable enough to be themselves. And so, I think it’s important to bring your whole self to work because ultimately, like you work somewhere, you know, with colleagues, 8 hours a day, you know, have 200 days a year or whatever in 285 days a year. It would be really sad if you can’t be yourself at work. And so, you know if you are somebody that kind of likes to go clubbing at night, and you really enjoy that and you have stories, I’m happy for you to have that conversation as long as it doesn’t kind of affect the quality of your work, as long as it doesn’t affect the way that you deliver great work. So yeah, with your gender, your sexuality, your preferences of stimulants, like all of that kind of stuff, is your own deal or and you know, if it makes you a better human being and if you enjoy it, that’s great. And yeah, and it encourages a rich diverse working environment.

Jason Ogle: I love the takeaway from this is “really be more,” and I said this before and this is a quote from Sally Hogshead, she says, “be more of who you are.” And I think that’s the point that Andy just kind of made is, be more of who you are. Just bring your whole self to work. You know, whoever you happen to be, just makes you know, and of course that doesn’t mean exchange that for being a kicked butt designer, you know right? It’s both. Bring your personality and be more of who you are, but also kick butt. Do get your work, get your crap done, and work as a team. Of course, but, you know, there’s a quote to that I really like “I’d rather be hated for who I am than loved for who I’m not.” So, I think that those are just some really great things, great takeaways there.

And I want to talk about skills because we kind of, you know, like this is something that will come out more in the interview then certainly looking at a portfolio or a resume is, you know, somebody sitting there in front of you and you know, and of course you kind of have an idea of their hard skills based on what you’ve read on the resume and what you’ve seen in the portfolio, but what about soft skills, you know, what’s that tight rope, soft skills versus hard skills?

Andy Budd: Okay. So, I think there are three things I’m kind of burning to talk and then I know we’ll almost at an hour, so we probably want to sort of to finish the three things, but if I can get these three things out, that will be wonderful. So, one thing I’d like to buy is quickly “hard skills.” The next thing I’d like to buy is “soft skills,” and then the last thing I’d like to talk about is like “design tasks.” What often happens with, with hard skills first. It’s people learn to do a thing and then they get really good at that thing and then they really struggled to try the thing. Say for instance, you know, you might spend your whole career getting really good at Photoshop and that’s great because for many years Photoshop was the tool to deliver the interfaces it, but then suddenly Sketch comes out and you know, you are nervous to try this new thing, so you stop, you stop and you stop, and then maybe 3, 4 years’ time, you decide to switch and suddenly you’re behind the curve.

So, I think specializing on tools can be very, very dangerous. So what I’m looking for is I’m looking for tool users, I’m looking for Designers who have a toolbox of tools, I’m looking for Designers that can use Sketch, and can use Photoshop, and can use a whole range of other UI tool, and we’re looking for you UI designer. If I’m looking for a UX Designer, I want people that know 3, 4 different techniques for doing research, 2 or 4 different techniques or maybe 10 or 20 techniques for doing highly effective workshops. I want to know they have 6 or 7 different prototyping tools in their toolbox because it’s the whole kind of this whole old-fashioned adage like if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

You know one of my friends use to say, he said he could look at website and he could smell which tool created it because the tool he used usually leave marks. And so, if all you do is use one particular prototyping tool, then there are defaults and there are presets and there are, you know, shapes and things already in there, and so, these marks are pairs through the interface. So, you can look at different interfaces and go, I bet you it was used on Sketch, you know using vision, it did this and did that and, and something else. And so, what I want is I want people that are tool flexible. You know, if it’s a nail they can pick up a hammer, but if it’s a screw, they know how to use a screwdriver. Sure, you can hammer a screw in with a hammer, but it’s pretty ugly.

And so, flexible tool, you know, having a flexible tool sets will be important. The thing is that you can teach people how to use new tools. You can’t teach people to be nice people, which is really, really difficult. So there’s this Steve Jobs quotes again, I’m swearing a lot. I didn’t normally swear, but Steve jobs used to say “I prefer to have a whole than a**hole. I kind of always shows that’s because like, oh God.

Jason Ogle: What the heck does that mean?

Andy Budd: Well, basically what it means is “I would rather have a gap in my team than have somebody who is amazing, a brilliant person, but who is toxic.” And so, you know, I think soft skills are really important. You know, you could have somebody that is a genius, he’s the most creative person in the world, but if they struggle to work with team members, if they are egotistical and always have to have their way, it’s really, really problematic. So, hard skills can be taught, soft skills often things have been developed over time. This is the other thing where like I was having a discussion with another friend of mine online this morning, which you know, he was saying how, he didn’t believe that kind of seniority as a designer and your abilities as a designer were matched. I think he’s right.

You know, there are lots of people who are very senior Designers but are great Designers and there are a number of great Designers who have only been doing it for 2 or 3 years. So definitely being senior is not a shortcut for being amazing. But the other thing to remember, the converse of that is you might be amazing at your craft, but you might have only ever worked on 1 or 2 companies and you haven’t got your kind of like your world wisdom. You haven’t figured out how to navigate tricky political situations, whereas maybe you’re just an average designer, but you’ve worked at 5 or 6 or 7 companies for 2 or 3 years each and you understand how to get ideas out. And so I, you know, a lot of the time I would prefer to have somebody who is a less talented craft designer, but the designs actually get to the market and get to the market in a tiny way, rather than the genius that is constantly causing stress in the organization and a pissing off their colleagues, and ultimately not getting their design work out because they’re perfectionists.

And actually what you really want is you want a blend of both. You want to have production Designers, you want to have Designers that cheap. But again, you know, I can’t remember what I said. There’s a quote I had and I talk – which is basically that, you know, it’s something like, you know, good Designers kind of want to be – well, I’ve got two. One is good Designers want to be proven, right. Great Designers hope to be proven wrong. What that means is good Designers just want to kind of get under the radar and get that kind of eco boost. Great Designers want to understand what they’re doing wrong, so they can improve themselves and make it better next time.

So that’s one of the attitude I’m constantly looking for in hiring is people who rather trying to sell me their idea because it’s right or because they don’t have any other ideas because they knew the idea they have. I want them to help problem solve. And I want them to use me to say, well, that doesn’t work, that doesn’t work, that’s the work, and then to defend some of these answers if they think I’m wrong, but also to kind of accept, oh yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. I’m going to go back and I’m going to make changes and improvements. And so, and those soft skills just come with time and I know kind of difficult to learn. So I think soft skills are massively important and they’re the things that you can get out of interviews, whereas like hard skills, you can just see as a list on a resume.

The last thing I want you to talk about there was this idea of design tasks. And the reason I’m bringing up is because it’s really, really contentious. And I’m not saying that my approach is right. I know lots of arguments against its own task, but it’s quite common and a lot of companies would say, okay, we want to bring you in and we want you to prove to us that you’re a great designer. So, we’re going to set you a task or a test, as some of those tests are like, you know, we’re going to give you a problem to solve and you come back to us in a week and we’ll see how you solved it. And first one you look is the benefits of doing a design task.

So one of the benefits is maybe you already good design, but maybe you’ve actually just, you know, worked in the same company for many years and say you all have your portfolio pieces are the same or maybe, you know, you’re working in a company whereby, you know, you’re somehow you’ll be limited by the organization, and you know, you have an opportunity to [inaudible 00:50:04]. There are people out there who are great Designers and got terrible portfolios. And they’re also people that have got great portfolios because they were working in an amazing company that had an existing design language that had brilliant Designers around them, supporting them versus somebody that is working in an old-fashioned company that was doing it as good as they could do, but they didn’t have the support.

So it’s really difficult to judge the designer, I think just purely from their portfolio alone. I say the best one I think to judge a designer is to work with them to see them design, because if you worked with him to see them design, then it’s a level playing field. They’re now on their own. They’re not going to support mechanism, [inaudible 00:50:43] the design system and you can really see them work. And so, we love doing, or we have in the past love doing design tasks. We have in the past on the task where you go away for a week and you come back and you give us a design. We should have stopped doing that. More and more what we’re doing is like design tasks which happened during the interview. And maybe it’s not a big design task. Maybe it’s just like a 2 hour whiteboard exercise and often it’s not even alone. It’s something you do with another one of our senior Designers. And often that’s a way of showing like, seeing people working with them and kind of getting a better understanding of how they tick. So I quite liked them.

The counter argument design tasks is first of all, it’s a lot of effort for people to go through, that’s often unpaid, and actually, the really, really good Designers, they’ve got so many opportunities out there that they’ll go, well, I’m not going to be bothered doing that today design task because you know, I’m being headhunted by all of these companies. It’s just a hassle. Although you could argue that if the people really, really genuinely loved your brand, they would go through that process. Another argument against design tasks, particularly ones where the company says, Hey, I want you to solve a problem that we currently have. You know, we’ve got a problem with sign up, but I’m going to get 10 people to solve the problem. And what ends up happening is you get people to solve the problem for you and it’s basically Spec work, which is horrible. So, if you’re going to set a design task, you need to set a design task as fake, that has no benefit to you. You know, classic ones are like, you know, oh designer, you know, I think it might be an IDO test or whatever like, you know, design an automatic coffee making machine interface. And really, you know, if it’s a low or middle-level designer, you’re wanting maybe to look at the cost skills. As a senior designer, you’re wanting to ask the questions to make sure that they’re kind of specking it properly and that they’re understanding the problem.

The other challenge, which ultimately is like, you know, if you are young and single and out of work and someone gives you a design task on a Monday, he says, deliver me something by next Monday you could work 7 days. You know, 12 hours a day and do an amazing job. If you’re giving that same job to somebody who is a parent, who has child care duties and he’s working full time you know, they might only be able to find an afternoon on a Sunday 6 hours to do the same thing. So even though you might believe that you’re setting and even challenge somebody spent 50 hours on it and somebody spent 5. And so, what you need to do if you are doing a design tasks, do you need to make sure that you mitigate for that. I’d also people have health issues. And so, if you’re going to design tasks, you need to try and be respectful. And also, I think if people do have concerns around child care or health issues or just time that you figured out another way in which you can assess that person that doesn’t discriminate against them. But I think if done well and done smartly, design tasks can be a really great tool for hiring managers to judge people and judge that their fitness, and actually is a benefit to people that maybe are great Designers, but don’t have the perfect glossy shiny portfolio.

Jason Ogle: That’s awesome! I’ve encountered this myself where I’ve been asked to do design exercise to get in and try to get my foot in the door somewhere, and it ended up being basically like, can you redesign our product page? And It’s almost like even if it’s not the intention of the employer, it almost feels like, especially if you don’t get the job, it feels like, wow, I just gave away, I just gave you free ideas, I gave you free work and that you could potentially use. And it just feels unethical to me. It can come across that way even if it’s not intended to. So, I’d say be really careful there with that. That was great advice there Andy. So after the interview, and you can give me like a one sentence response to these next too. So after the interview, what’s a good length of time a designer should follow up if they don’t hear from a recruiter?

Andy Budd: Oh, that’s really tough. I mean, to be honest and actually this is one of the challenges I face, I see quite often. I really feel sorry for a lot of people who are interviewing, because often you intervene because maybe you’ve just lost a job and you want to get employed again really quickly, and so, you’ll respond to dozens of interviews and often, you know, dozens of job ads and often people will even respond back to say that accept, they’ve seen the CV. So, I think it can be really tough. I think as an interviewee, as a company, you need to try and respond as quickly as possible and you need to understand that people are going through a process and need response.

On the other hand, you know, one of the things that Clearleft are, is we’re very slow to hire. You know, we want to make sure that we’ve made the right decision because, you know, again, throwing a bad apple or throwing somebody that isn’t going to work out into the company can, you know, push you behind 12, 18 months and kind of make a mess. And so, we tend to be quite slow. And so it might be, and also because we were hot, you know, we might be interviewing a bunch of people, you know, that interview process, you know, from the first person to interview, to the last person interviews could theoretically be a month, because the first person interviewer might have been the first person to throw they CV in but maybe, you know, we’ve lined up the interview, but then there’s a loss when a candidate comes in, but then they’re busy or they’ve got to go on holiday it, what have you.

So, we try and be really good communicators to people who have submitted, but I think a lot of people who are applying for jobs, like will put an application in or go to an interview and then almost be real, then convinced himself they haven’t got the job when they haven’t heard back a day or two later. So, I would say like, hold your course, don’t immediately write yourself off. Don’t be critical because it might be that you’re the perfect person, but somebody is coming a bit late or they’re trying to give somebody a break, because if I had a hospital appointment or whenever and they might not be able to get back to you until yes or no for 2 or 3 weeks. On saying that, I don’t think it’s ever bad to follow up. You know, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to follow up immediately afterwards and say, look, I really enjoyed that interview. You asked me some really brilliant questions. There were few things that, you know, maybe I didn’t fully flesh out and here’s some links, etc., etc. No one’s going to kind of penalize you for sharing keenness.

I think if you follow up 2 or 3 days later, or 4 or 5 days later, just say, oh, I just wondered if there was any news. Again, you know, that’s not a major problem. If you’re doing it every 2 or 3 days, then that starts to get a little bit needy and neediness is not attractive trait, you know, sometimes it’s just a case of being honest, sometimes it’s just case of email and saying, look, I really liked the interview, I would really love to come and work with you, but you know, I’ve gone for a couple of interviews and I’ve got a couple of job offers. You know, you my preferred company, so I can probably hold off these other offers for a week or so, you know, but let me know.

And actually, weirdly, if somebody wants you and you put a little bit of pressure on them, they will indicate whether they think you’re worth holding onto. If you send that email and say, look, you know, I’ve got a couple of other offers but you’re my preferred one and people don’t contact you back, then that’s probably a good indication that they’re not as interested as you might hope they were. So you can use kind of little subtle techniques just to kind of ramp up the tension. I mean, and I’m not saying lie like if you haven’t got any other people you’re talking to, they just blatantly say that to kind of put [inaudible 00:58:45], but sometimes people are busy. The last thing a hiring manager wants is to see the perfect candidate but miss that candidate because somebody else is going to hire them first. And so, yeah, just be open and honest with your timelines. And, yeah, and guess what happened.

And frankly, also, the other thing lastly is, you know, I’ve seen people’s that you know I have interviewed with I really liked but they weren’t right now. And so again, the other thing is like if you’re getting a rejection, it’s difficult but I think one of the great things about design is we used to critique, and so the important thing to learn as a designer often is when I’m saying that something is not working about your design, I’m not critiquing you as an individual, I’m critiquing your design. And often the same is true of an interview. I am not judging you as a human being. I am judging you as a set of capabilities for this particular role. And just because I think you are not wanting for this particular role does not mean that I do not think he might be wanting for free future hopes. You might be a little bit too boor or a little bit too specialists, or bit too junior, bit too senior for this particular role.

I’ve seen a lot of Designers come to me who thinks they are bit too senior but they’re actually junior, and when that role comes up you know, we will get back to them. So again, just because you’ve been rejected for this one role, you know, be gracious. And at the end of it, just like say, look, you know, so he didn’t look at this time. I would love to kind of, you know, to do something with you again, I’d love to get a little bit of a breakdown on what you thought, I want to get some feedback. And actually if you can do that by phone, that’s brilliant. And leave the door open. You know, it’s the same as kind of selling design work. And if you failing a pitch, the last thing you want to do is kind of like beach crappy with the client and say, well, I’m too good for you anyway, and you know, see you in another life.

You kind of want to say, well, you know, I’ve really enjoyed meeting you. I’m sorry that we weren’t, you know, you didn’t feel we were the right agency for you now, but if in 6 month time the supplier that you’ve picked doesn’t work out, we’d love to get an opportunity to work with you again. In the meantime, if you’ve got any advice for me, for how we might have solve some of the problems that you didn’t see us, you know, delivering, please let me know. I see you do exactly the same thing as a design candidate or development candidate or product management candidate or whatever. And yeah, you might find that in 6 months’ time, you get a knock at the door and says, Hey, look, we’ve got exactly the right role.

Jason Ogle: Yeah, that’s awesome advice Andy. And you know, you kind of touched on this a little bit, but if it’s a pass. And first of all, Defenders listening, Andy just mentioned this, “don’t burn bridges” like you might feel – and I can totally empathize because I’ve taken it very personally and you can’t help it. It’s not just business. It is personal. You know, because you put a lot into it and you’re really and sometimes you are desperate, but you know, you don’t want to let off too much on that because it is unattractive. But you know, I would just say that – my question being Andy, if it was a past, should Designers inquire as to why for future learning or does that seem desperate?

Andy Budd: No, they’re totally. I’ve been – again, that’s a very attractive quality. Somebody that wants to improve, coming to them and say, look, you know, I’d love to get your advice on what didn’t work and I have built friendships and I have built, you know, 3, 4, 5 year relationships with people that are coming to interview, the worldwide at the moment, but we had a conversation and we went out for coffee and I explain why and then they grew and then I mentored them, and then 2, 3 years later, they were right for that role we’ve hired them. So, you know, it’s kind of again, it’s like romantic relationships. You know, there are people who are amazing for you, but neither of you may be in the right place in your lives at the moment, but who knows 3 or 4 years down the line, you know, you might be perfect for each other.

And so, there’s nothing different I think between romantic relationships and business or professional relationships. It’s not about you being a bad person necessarily, it’s just about the timing or where you are in your career journey or the company’s career journey. But the other thing I was going to leave you on is this is the idea a guy in the UK called Simon Wardley has this kind of concept of pioneers, settlers and town planners and different sizes of companies need different makeups. So maybe when you were a small little startup, you’re full of pioneers, people that are like charting the way and finding new territory, but as you grow to midsize client company, you don’t need those pioneers anymore. You need settlers, you need people that can use the lands that you’ve discovered and they can till the soil, and they can plant the seeds, and they can grow, and they can prosper.

And you know, and then maybe as you go even bigger to like a big mega corporation, you need the town planners that can put in the infrastructure and kind of like the roads, and the fire service, etc., etc., and different companies need different sets of skills at different times. And it might be that you went and hired for this company and you were like a settler. You were great at taking things that would exist, and making them optimize, making them really profitable, but they were looking for a pioneer. We might be that you were the pioneer, but maybe the company was already past that and they’re looking for a lot of settlers and town planners, but then they might spin up a new unit.

I think what a pioneer to kind of help be part of that in it. So again, it’s not just about you as an individual, you know, it’s not about you feeling, you know, you have a unique set of capabilities and skills which are right for different people in different organizations at different times, and that is really, really important to remember.

Jason Ogle: It’s so good. Andy, I’m going to let you go because you’ve been so generous with your time and I thank you for staying on longer than they said it would be. Thank you for the great advice. There’s so much value in this conversation. I know the Defenders are going to glean from, and talk about, and apply to their job search both now and in the future. So, thanks so much my friend. Let’s definitely do this again another time. And last but not least, I just want to say as always, fight on my friend!

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