#57 Typical mistakes designers are doing while applying for a job
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Oftentimes the experiences we have in life are so well connected to what we have in our career. I asked that question, what's your superpower? And most of the people don't say anything that's intriguing. And people just try to think like, oh, what I've done in design, like you can just

share other things as well. Show that you're human, that you care. It doesn't mean like hard skills. For example, I had this guy who was like, "I fled my son's baseball team." I'm like, "Oh, so you know actually leading kids? Oh, that's much tougher than leading adults." That puts the person in a different frame. We discussed with Ioana a few times that she recently had become a mom and it taught her so much empathy and so much management skills, all those different aspects of life. It could be also a strong power.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the next episode of Honest UX Talks. My name is Anfisa, and today, surprise, surprise, I'm not joined by Ioana, but I'm joined by Denis. Denis is the guy behind Figura, who is also the platform that sponsors our podcast. Figura is the most UX-friendly network and matchmaking platform for designers that

matches them with the companies. I really wanted to invite Denis, mainly because Denis has huge experience interviewing designers, helping them to find their dream jobs. And as we talked with Denis time to time, I always keep hearing his complaints as like,

Those applications, they could be so much better. So this is a very, very juicy topic. And I believe that there is definitely a huge gap with many designers who don't have experience applying for jobs, see or realize which mistakes they're doing. And so with that being said, the topic of today's episode is typical mistakes designers are doing while applying for a job. And yeah, for that, we will talk with Denise, who again is a founder of the figura.digital, who is also the sponsor of our episode. Hi.

Hi, Denis, how are you doing? How is it going for you? I'm pretty good. Pretty good. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. Let's start super quickly. Tell us a little bit more about your experience and what made you motivated creating Figuran. Thanks for having me first.

I'm pretty excited to be here. So I started Figueroa because I saw three issues in the industry. Back when I started around 10, 12 years ago, I started working remotely immediately with some companies and it was pure luck. Early from that day, I tried to figure out like, okay, why do some people in my country get remote work and others don't? And that was a question I had for my entire life.

2015-16, I quickly realized that in order to scale up, the only way was to move to the Silicon Valley. And I didn't want to do it because I liked my life here and I thought that talent shouldn't be tied to a location. And that was super frustrating to me.

So I did what everybody else asked, like freelanced a lot, worked with some tech companies until I managed to join TopTower as one of their product designers. And then it was like where this whole talent marketplace experience came to be where I get...

most of my domain knowledge in the space. I think that that's what the time when I really started thinking like, how can we make this better for designers? Because at that time I started posting on Instagram and dribble. I was becoming more active and I was getting to know more and more people who weren't from

the Bay Area or the US that were absolutely brilliant designers. And I can confidently say that some of the best designers I know are not from the US even. And that become to wonder like, how do they get work? How do they do it all? Because some of them worked with pretty cool companies. Fast forward a couple of years when I left TopTile,

this stayed with me and that's when the pandemic hit. So I did as anything as all the UX content creators does, I created a course. And that was like quite trendy in 2020, if you remember, it was like everybody was doing courses back then.

Of course, pandemic, what else do you do during lockdown? Courses. Yeah. I did notice like people take the course, but even if they do portfolio projects, they still like, Hey, how do I get a job? How do I get projects? So it was like, okay, I think we've covered this. And that was like this good feeling that really compiled over a few years, especially like this year I updated my course and it was like, Hey, it's still like I do interviews, I do everything, but like I cannot stand out. And there's so much resources out there at this point that

If you cannot get a job, like maybe you need to start reevaluating what you've done so far and trying to improve those rather than just blindly applying. So that's why I was like, I get like enough leads every so often, like, and I always refer them to other designers. I'm like, why don't just productize this? Yeah.

Right. Easier said than done. Cool. You saw that people after courses felt fully prepared and still would not land the dream jobs. And then you had this experience working from top to top, looking for people, vetting people, understanding their experience well, so they could be either qualified or not, or help them understand what they should improve. Yeah.

And so this experience helps you sort of to form the idea that maybe it could be a great opportunity that you have a lot of work, right? Coming in your way, you have experience understanding what is a good designer, as well as you can see that designers finishing courses and not being able to land the job. That sounds like really, really great opportunity and like perfect.

story for me. And then there's the other thing is that I started to notice a trend in the market where everything was getting segmented. They were coming platforms for engineers, for PAs, for marketers, designers, instead of making platform like that, everybody was doing design as a service, like a subscription based unlimited designs. I was like, I've tried to do this a while back and it was so miserable because we are like, you're not thinking you're basically a pixel pusher. I'm like, yeah, I don't want to do that.

Makes sense. So now today, was it like three, four months that you're running Figura? Technically it's six, but three months it's official entity. All time, sort of. Okay. Entity. Okay, cool. Like you said, today you're looking for a lot of designers for the marketplace and you're doing how many interviews per day, per week? How would you say? I mean, the most I've done in a week are like 160.

But like now I'm doing like three or four a day easily. Wow, that's still a lot of people, especially if it's like for a couple of months, it's a huge set of interviews. That is the reason why I really wanted to talk to you, dive deeper into this topic and understand a little bit more about

Because the more people you see, the more patterns you see, the more mistakes you see people doing. And this is what I think many of our listeners, especially those who are looking for a job, could learn from. Let's kind of dive deeper into it, right? What are the top three things you see continuously happening that annoy you to the death?

Oh my God. They're not free. Okay. You can Google, you can get more, definitely more. The first thing that immediately stands in my attention is maybe because one, we are looking mainly for product designers and as a product designer, the visual craft matters. You need to be able to create consistent and beautiful interfaces. And when people apply, like they have this case study that are super well-written, super polished, but when it comes to the finished product, I'm like, yeah, I

wouldn't want to use that really. Yes, it's like not well rounded experience. Yeah, even if it looks good, it's on trend, you can immediately spot like some simple mistakes like the biggest one using iPhone design styles and placing it in an Android mockup. I'm like, why would you do that? Like that's like,

Simple things like that, that are not even tied to what you do. But like that, that gets you wondering like if they're negligent about their work. And of course I've been there, I've done the same mistakes. So that's why I get frustrated when people do it. The second thing is case studies. I interviewed a girl in

Friday. What I loved about her, like at all of her case studies, it didn't come out to an end product because she was like, Hey, my findings were that there was no market for this. And she did the analysis. She did the research. She tried to ID it. She saw that nobody wants it and she left it there. She didn't push it to a finished product. She was just like, okay, this is someone who can actually take product decisions, which is extremely important.

yeah, that was like a thing that really stood out to me is that because people just copy each other when they do case studies and it's like, did you really do this? Especially some people who are like, for example, I'm from Bulgaria. And when you do a product for the US market and you say like, I did field search, I'm like, did you?

Did you? Because like, if you did field studies, means you went to the US and did it, not like in your local area. Because like markets are different. And the third thing is so many buzzwords. People just, when I talk to them and say like, hey, tell me a little bit about yourself. They don't tell me who they are. They just start like, I'm a product designer creating functional experiences to solve people's problems. You said it like, like perfect line that you know it from behind. Yeah, of course. I've heard it too.

And I'm like, cool, but that doesn't tell me who you are. This is like a generic title. I think that especially like the elevator pitch, nobody works on that. And that's like one of the most important things. Like I said, if you can grab an interviewer with a good elevator pitch, they'll be intrigued to learn more about you and dig more about you.

Of course, it's hard to do. It takes time. It takes repetitions. Those are maybe like the top three biggest mistakes. I did the same mistakes, honestly. I might still do. For example, I was recently in one interview and I did mention a couple of buzzwords. And when the guy asked me, can you give me an example? I was like a bit, ah, I just need to look for that example. So it's easy to talk the talk, right? Sometimes you need to walk the talk.

And this is something I feel like many people need experience doing. And it's a skill that you have to still build. I give the example of athletes like nobody became a great athlete with their first tries. But then there's this thing like seeing some people who are really good at interviews. And when it comes to a job, it's like, wait, how did we let this guy sleep?

How did he come in? So of course, don't just become great at interviews. First be good at what you do and then you become good at interviews. Yeah, practice, but also matching it with talking is quite important. Yeah. Because especially a lot of people also apply to big companies early on. And I think that's the worst mistake you can do because they get like thousands of applicants a day, most likely.

And all of their recruiting comes from internal referrals. They are barely even looking at their job posting because they're obliged by law to do it. And people think that when they apply code, it's going to happen. When I started, like that's one of the things I did. I looked for agencies and smaller startups. I looked at the founders. I stalked them a bit for a while. And then I applied to the job. And that really worked for me. And I do believe it works to this day still. Yeah.

To be honest, I agree with you. I was on the same track. I was also like my first design jobs were freelancing in agency, like you said, because it's definitely an easier onboarding curve. Let's say you don't have to go through millions of interviews to get rejected all the time. So it's kind of easier in terms of finding the job. But in terms of like practical experience for me, I still say it's kind of hard. Like if you're in agency, maybe you do have a good mentor, but if you're freelancing,

and you're the single fish in the sea, you can't compare yourself. You don't have anyone to learn from. So I think for me and you, people who like to Google stuff, I always complain that why people just don't Google it, right? People who like to figure it out on their own, from their own mistakes, it's totally cool. But if you need someone who can guide you, who can kind of shortcut the path for you and kind of prevent you from doing typical mistakes, then it's probably still better to apply for like companies with the same culture in it.

Not just freelance. Because yeah, for me, freelancing was tough. And it's cool because I've learned a lot. But at the same time, I'm sure I could do it much faster if I were under some sort of sub-design management or guidance. Yeah, that's absolutely true. But also one thing that happens quite often is that people just ask you questions. That's like, okay, but like, give me context. What have you done? Why didn't it work? Like, don't ask me like, hey, I cannot get a job. What have you tried? I'm like, I applied to these five jobs.

I mean, of course, if you applied five and get one, that's like quite an impressive hit rate. And even like, I do remember, like I have applied to like, maybe like hundreds of jobs. And every year I have this in January, I applied to all of the big tech companies just to see how they declined. Ooh, okay. Because it's like, it's interesting for me. It's like, I want to know, like, are they going to proceed with me or not?

And they always declare because I know some people that were there and they were like, yeah, we don't hire to job posting. It's super rare. But I do remember, I think Ron Segal had a video a couple of years back in his channel where he was like, how did he got his internship? And he applied to like 170 design studios until one said yes. So it's like, yeah.

And now people are looking up to him. So it's like everybody starts the same way. It's not like one apply, one hit. Yeah, for some people it can be, but often it's not. Yeah, yeah. And today we have to understand that after pandemic, more and more people switch to UX design. So the market is extremely competitive for early stage jobs.

and there's not enough of the offering for the demand being. So it is a very hard entry curve. So in that regard, definitely it's easier to start from freelancing or finding some sort of local opportunities that you can access. And then, you know, for me also, what was really helpful is that I could be in the environment in Estonia where every other person has an IT. So there's a lot of need for designers.

And you can network. You can go to the event, the hackathon or whatever, and find people who might need people like you. So for me, it was easy. But at the same time, yes, it was the remote. You still have to network though online. And let's establish an obvious here for entry jobs.

especially in the last two, three years, it became much harder to find the great first company with some UX maturity that will guide you and not like you'll be hired by a company that is engineering dominant and you will be just pixel pusher and burn out in six months or so. But that's also good. Cause then you see how that is. Like, I think that every bad experience has learnings in it and you should take from it. For example, like

Like if I didn't start in the agency like 10 years ago, I would have never known so fast what I'm interested in doing products. Because there it's like, hey, you have like three weeks to do this. We don't have time. Like it's the next project comes after that. I think that that's the to me because I really like this rapid pace of doing stuff because like you need to be so confident that what you do is like the solution.

because you don't have time you don't nobody's gonna sit there and wait for you six months to do your research they need to build that mvp and i think that people should experience both an agency and a product company because like in an agency they can go wide and explore a lot of things explore a lot of products a lot of styles and they need to work fast well and then we're like okay i actually for example i want to do healthcare products then you can go and look at all the healthcare tech products and then you can start apply because you've already done some work

Yeah. Having some domain knowledge is always a plus when you're applying for a job. I agree. It's like you have a shortcut. Of course, if you're applying to Figma, like the only domain knowledge you might have is like if you worked with Adobe sketch or.

I don't know, maybe. Even that is quite specific, I think. It's more enterprise, so it's not that agile and learning quickly. Okay. Anyways, I would still like to come back to our topic of today's episode. Actually, when you were saying typical mistakes, it immediately... Because I had those mistakes done, it immediately made me think, oh, it's like...

the scenes of designers and the things you mentioned already, right? Let's just like recap them. Using a lot of buzzwords for me, it's also very, it's a pet peeve. I hate it. And I see it just like, it makes me cringe. Second, not a very well-rounded experience, especially if you're applying for like middle plus positions. Maybe for juniors, you're still going for...

but for like middle-plus, you probably already want a balance between your user-centered design approach, plus the UI, plus probably some communication on top of that. And then in the case studies, the third scene you mentioned is using templates

And like those sort of fabricated case studies where it's all the plug and play, the same process, same steps, almost the same outcomes, nothing there to watch for. No story to read. What else comes to your mind? You mentioned there might be more than three sins or three mistakes we do as designers. Maybe some stories from the recent interviews. There was this guy that applied to the platform a couple weeks back and I reviewed his work and it

looked really good. It was okay written at best, but he's not a native English speaker. So I always give credit when not native English speakers. Right? Because it's okay. And when we started talking, he was like, I was leading a team of designers, things like that. I was

Like when you say something like this, that immediately flips my conversation because I'm like, okay, this is somebody who's more experienced and I won't ask him like the normal questions, which is like, what's your interest? What projects do you want to work on? Things like that. But I'm going to ask him like high signal questions.

And for example, high signal is like, what was a tough time with an engineering team you had and how did you overcome it? And then he replied like, oh, I didn't have tough times. I'm like, yeah, you haven't worked in a product team. That's it. Like I haven't met a designer at a given company that hasn't had a tough time in his, no matter what the company is.

There's always a tough time. That was like one of the huge red flags. Yeah. And then the other thing is that you said that most of the designers, especially on the culture interview, they don't realize that the first interview is not about what you can do. We'll give you a chance to show what you can do. We want to understand how you think, how you analyze. Are you a critical thinker? Not so much. Do you know all the UX terms? I mean, I cannot be.

I don't even know all the UX terms, but I know where to find them when I need them. Because I don't think that knowing all of this on top of your head makes sense always. But you need to know when and how to use it. I love to ask this question when it's like, what does success look like to you as a designer? And as I said, most of the people give bland engineering answers, which is like, oh, I want to serve users. I'm like, yeah, it doesn't happen. Yet another one. Yeah, I'm like...

No, especially as we're trying more like product design. So people can do everything like if what you do doesn't bring value to the business, what you do is completely obsolete. And designers need to learn this. And the sooner you learn this and actually start

working towards business goals that actually solve user problems as well, the more well-versed you're going to be in your career. Yeah, both. Both are equally important, definitely. I don't want to say, like, ignore the user, but I'm like...

If like what you're solving doesn't move the business in the direction you're headed, the stakeholders won't give a F pretty much. So you said you would ask the question like, how do you measure your success as a designer? What would be the good answer? You don't have to say your perfect answer, but like what are the signs of a good answer maybe? What do you expect hearing from a good answer? I mean, our work is so metric driven. So I would love to hear an answer. I've heard it once when it was like,

I know what success is because I've heard this company deliver 13% more click through rates or something like that. That was like the KPI. Yeah, it was business impact. Or I had one designer that applied and he was like, I want to work only with nonprofits. That was it. I was like, so he was like, when he said, like, I want to make an impact on the world, he was like, literally wanted to make an impact.

He was like, I'm willing to sacrifice money, prestige, resume, anything. I just want work to make any money. I mean, I've had like a lot of interesting answers. I like when somebody is honest and one guy was like, hey, success looks to me to make a lot of money as a designer. And that's like,

cool you know that this is like honesty it's like that's what i well i much rather hear something like this than just something generic but also like when we place them to companies we force them to ask questions and i did not even if we let them in i do notice the most successful designers we've had so far are the most curious ones one of our clients said like a girl replaced she was like a pit bull because she bite the problem and she wouldn't let it go until she got to the end of it

Nice. And they spent like an hour and a half just talking about the why's, what's the reasoning behind all of this building. And he was like, dude, I'm tired after this. My business partner hasn't asked me that many questions. And when I hear this, I'm like, this is a success immediately. I know. Okay. Question. How do you know it's a good person like during interviews? Like again, you're doing interview, right? So let's say we talked a little bit about the case studies, the fact that you might just use the buzzwords there. It's not

honest, it's using the templates and all that. Now you're on interviews and now you want to match this potential candidate with the experience you want this candidate to have to challenge the clients to make sure they know how to measure success and all of those. So how do you probe for the good candidate in the interviews? So

For us, it's all about culture fit because all of the companies we work with are early stage startups. So I come from a startup background. I know how hectic it is. So we want people who are go-getters. That's one of the biggest problems I've seen in the industry. It's designers relying too much on PMs or stakeholders to give them tasks to do. Well, our goal is to have people who are like, "Just give me one sentence. I can figure out the rest pretty much."

I can write a whole book based on this. This is one of the core traits I'm looking out for because one is good for the designer because this means that they're like the pit bull, like they're not going to let go of the bone so easily. They're self-initiative. When you're working with a startup, you're not just

a designer. You're a PM, you're an illustrator, like you might be an account executive, who knows? Like there's so many roles you need to take into account as one head and then culture fit because we interview all of our clients. We don't let anybody just start a project. We talk to them and we've talked to our designers. So we know

What's their vibe? What do they like? Why did dislike and how they communicate? Some people want to do async and some designers cannot work async. Some designers like to be on calls and discuss things. Others, if you put one meeting on their calendar, it ruins their whole week. So just getting that good vibe, good grooves. Cause I do think that getting that culture fit is so hard, but that's like so rewarding when we get it right. Cause everybody's happy.

And so what questions do you ask? Like when you're looking for those go getters, how do you make sure they are go getters? On the culture interview, the first one we cannot really filter on the culture interview. It's mostly like to see how curious they are. Like, do they ask questions? Cause like I tried to keep the culture interview relatively short, 10, 15 minutes. And if it's passed for like 40 minutes and the 30 minutes of that is like, they asking me questions. I'm like, okay, this guy is pretty curious or this girl.

So that's a big green flag because they ask a lot of questions and they care. But then on the second, like we have like a UX challenge, which is like the live whiteboarding challenge. And there you can see like how they collaborate, how they communicate. Because on the whiteboarding challenge, you need to be a go-getter. Like, cause you're there to be fooled by the people in the meeting. Like we're playing a role game. If you're not a go-getter, if you don't want to go and figure out problems, you're just going to come to a solution really fast.

And that's like a red flag immediately. I mean, the solution is the last thing on that part. Like we don't even care about this. We care about the things that got you to the solution. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I love this. I love this point. So it's a lot, it's a lot of mixed things. I can send you an article that I read like couple of months back, which was high signal questions. And I do ask quite a few of those cause I do like them and

they're like out of the box question. They're not like, where do you live? They're like showing how do they think? How do they approach problems? Mainly we're looking for people who can overcome adversity. And what that means is like when a PM is an asshole, like how do you work with that?

How do you navigate it? When you're in an engineering company, how do you transition that into a design-led company, which is extremely hard, but it's possible. So you need to learn how to do this. It's a mix of those things. One of the other things is like, I know that a lot of people are not native English speakers, but practice your English. That's vital. It's the most simple stuff that people ignore the most, pretty much.

Yeah, for me it's the same. They focus so much on the craft and they ignore all of the things that they can actually control. When I say control, it's like when I did interviews, I've gotten this positive feedback from all the companies I've interviewed.

And I think that that's a good thing is that all the companies I've talked to as a designer to apply, they were like, you were controlling the room, you were controlling the pace, you were like the playmaker in the room. We weren't interviewing you, you were interviewing us. And when somebody starts a call like that, I'm like, okay, this is in a different league now.

I really like this because it shows this arrogance and cockiness that you don't need the job, but you're there to show them that you're so good that they won't want to miss you. But it shouldn't sound cocky or arrogant. It should be like confident because I felt just like, I've seen so many good junior designers. They're really good. They can deliver. I'm like, yeah, I'm not really good at UI. I'm like, why would you say that? Like, if you don't believe nobody will, come on.

And you're not going to do just research your entire life, are you? I mean, as well, I think it's honest. And I think that could show that this person reflects and understands their weak side. And of course, it depends on the context in which you're talking. If it is like this one-on-one conversation with the manager, you should have those honest conversations and you should reflect on your experience.

But of course, if you're like on the, I don't know, group call, you're discussing your challenges and you're just saying, oh, you know what? I'm not good at UI and so I'm not going to deal with that. That is definitely bad things to say. So it depends on the context. But at the same time, I still think it's important to reflect and try to be as objective as possible about the skill. So sometimes it's okay. But also I asked that question as well, like what's your superpower?

And most of the people don't say anything that's intriguing. Like they say like, Oh, I'm a pretty good researcher. Okay, but like when you say like, what's your superpower? It doesn't mean like hard skills, like what can you do? For example, like I had this guy was like, Hey, I fled my son's baseball team. Like, oh, so you know, actually leading kids. Oh, that's much tougher than leading adults. That's how I feel.

the person in a different frame, like oftentimes the experience we have in life are so well connected to what we have in our career.

And people just try to think like, oh, what I've done in design, like you can share other things as well. Show that you're human, that you care, that you have other interests. Like nobody will force you to be behind the monitor for like 40 hours a week. I mean, they will most likely, but you have other interests as well. Yeah. Like, right. We discussed with Joanna a few times that she recently had become a mom and it taught her so much empathy and so much love.

management skills and time management skills. And so it is indeed impacting you as a professional, like all those different aspects of life. It could be also a strong power, if you will. And sometimes people don't think about it, especially if you're interviewing 100 people per week, you don't have a chance to check their profiles all the time and understand they have a kid and they potentially might be a good at time management. You as the candidate probably should speak up about it and be honest, but also like

be really confident in things you believe you're good at because nobody other than you will be able to show those up. Pretty much. Yeah. So we covered a lot of things, right? We covered the confidence, we have covered that it's important to be honest, that it's

It's important to show that you're a go-getter. One point I wanted to make to what you said recently, that you fill the room. As for me, it really depends on the company. And as I'm working on this new course about finding the job, I talk to different managers and it seems like there is no one general answer to this question. It's always different depending on the company context. But

I can see that some people would say, yes, you need to be able to lead this. But for some people or for some managers, it's important to be rather than filling the room, more like facilitating the conversation. So it could be like different sides, I would say, but it's still important to not sit back and wait until you're called out and, hey, you go and do this, right? Instead of being reactive at

kind of important to be proactive and in which way it's probably slightly differs from company to company, from your personal skill to another personal skill. Thus, that's why the culture fit interviews are important. And those are the questions you can expect to be answered there to really see if that's your natural traits in your behavior and your character is a good culture fit for that company context. But the key most important takeaway here is to be proactive rather than reactive, I would say.

That's like one of the other things. And I think that this will help you if you want to start a business is like when something happens, you don't want to react. You want to have predicted or plan and wait a little bit before you jump into decisions. Cause now as a business owner founder, like I've seen this so much, like where something happens and like, I want to react, but I'm like, oh, hold on. Let's just take a step back. And like a lot of people got into design for the wrong reasons.

because it pays well. And of course, that's always good. I'm excited that we bring more opportunities to people. But to be honest, I don't think that if you got for the reason just because of money, you last long because you fought with bad teams. I fought with bad teams. And when you get to that point, you'll be like, why am I dealing with this crap? Like, so...

And our job is not like labor intensive, like, but it's more like mental stress, resilience, which is like, you're looking for not just the money. I agree. It's very easy to burn out. One thing that I did to some of the people that I've mentored is that before we even begin the conversation that you want to

to land a job is that I give them this list. I'm like companies or projects you want to work with, types of hardware or software. Like, is it going to be like only iOS? Because I think that early on you need to niche down a little bit. Don't go like do everything, like focus on one thing, become really good and then expand. It's tricky, tricky point. I'm kind of disagreeing here, but let's go on. Let's see. I'm actually going to open it because I don't even remember. Okay.

Because when you open it, for me, it is really, in the beginning, it's great to have experience in multiple areas. So, like you said, agency, product company, freelancing, trying different industries. Figure out what you're excited about. Maybe it's really the...

the question of time and right maybe in the first two years and then you start niching down yeah okay so i asked them like uh what's your dream company because you need to craft your portfolio to suit the dream company like it doesn't work yeah right now like then what services do you want to offer

Do you want to be the greatest at UI design? Because trust me, like if you can create killer visuals, you'll get a lot of work. But if you're great at UX, you'll get a lot of work as well. If you're great at both, you'll most likely be a leadership at Apple. I don't know. So it's like, I give them like all the core skills that we do and just like take a step back.

Think what you want. Then I ask them about the superpower. Like as of today, what's your superpower? Is it iOS design, web design, SaaS, B2B, B2C? Like you've told me multiple times. It's travel. I want to do something in the travel space. And then can you be more specific than this? Is it like iOS apps for, I don't know, for who do you do it? Why do you do it? And what's your motivating factor?

And one thing that I think that people ignore a lot is not for who do I want to work with, but what I don't want to do. Because everybody does a to-do list, but not enough people do a don't-do list.

For example, like for me, those are like adult and gambling. I no matter the money, no matter the project, I won't do those projects. But I know that there are designers who have no problem with doing that. So yeah, we can share it with the people like this is a free thing that I've created and released to the public. So we can. Of course. Yeah, that'd be great. We'll add that. Yeah, we'll add this to the show notes.

Um, yeah, I guess we can kind of start wrapping it up, uh, with like a key takeaways and I will, I will say my key takeaways and feel free to add your key takeaways. Like you think is important to remember from this conversation. The scenes of designers as for me that stood out were, you know, buzzwords, not well-rounded experience, templates and being not honest. And then the tips apparently coming from those scenes, things that you rather do better or think about before.

is to, as for me, it's kind of reflect because it still comes down to, like you said, right? You need to know what's your superpower, what are your interests are. As for me, it's good to know what you're not good at yet and what you want to improve. Like the growth mindset is important. It's important to ask questions, especially questions during the interview. Another takeaway, the culture feed, which is quite different from different companies, right?

Maybe for you, if you're working with early stage startups, it's about being go-getter, figuring it out in the dark and being able to quickly move things and kind of make decisions. While maybe for like more enterprise companies, it's a bit more about the talking and communication and facilitation and all of those.

So it's really about like culture fit, where do you target? What's the specific of the market and how your personality matches with the needs of the market. And then another thing still like to add, obviously coming from the sense of the designers is the being honest, right? If it was not the perfect process, if you didn't have perfect results, if the project never was built or you learned that there is no product market fit,

It's better to be honest rather than fake it and say, yeah, yeah, we kind of build it, but then it's ha ha ha, yeah, somehow it didn't work. And you know, like I think for you as somebody who's doing hundreds of interviews per week, it's something that stands out rather than always saying the same perfect answers that you have read about on Medium articles, right? So being radically honest sometimes and saying what works, what doesn't work, it's better because it stands out from the default answers that you hear too much.

Anything you would add to the things like a red flags list and to the tips list? I wouldn't say a red flag, but one thing that I would say as an advice is like if you're applying like everybody else is applying, you won't get the job. So try to have more curated approach to applying to jobs, even if it's like on job postings. But before even applying, go analyze the company's product and just pitch them what you would do if you were working there.

Some PM would see that and they would like it. They would send it to the company and that might get you leads. There's, I think David from Copenhagen, that's how he got his job. He just redesigned some part of the product. And then two years later, they offered him a position and he was a marketing guy. And also don't you,

use the same cover letter, same application on all of them. Just twist it in a way that it's super personalized for every single job posting you do or application or project. That's why I think that writing is the UX designer superpower. If you become a good writer and can craft a good story and good narrative, you can send pretty good code emails, pretty good code outreach. That would unlock a lot of opportunities. And this is something we all neglect. Maybe that's another topic for another time.

No, but I agree. For me, it's a topic that comes later. It's the same with understanding your interests. And it's definitely two, three years in, in the industry where you can start thinking about specializations, superpowers, like I said, and then your deep interests. In the beginning, it's a bit harder. You have to float a little bit and kind of figure things out and experiment. But then as you mature in your career and you understand fundamentals, achieve that

balance level, right, with like research and then UI, then it's when it comes to understanding who you are as a professional, what do you got to bring on the table? And that of course comes down to the reflection act and understanding who can you send out. All right. So where can our listeners find those job postings that you were talking about today, where they can go and what should they expect from this application process?

Maybe you can give us a little preview and the link. So you can go to figure.digital and apply there. We have 400 applicants a week. So if we don't reply immediately, excuse us, give us some time. We're a small team. Our process is pretty straightforward. First, we screen your application and

your portfolio. We've turned out some good candidates because we know that we just don't have work for them or we couldn't match the things that they wanted to work on. We don't have it now, but we keep it in the pipeline. That's like our first screening part. And we do a background check, talk to some of your colleagues that you've worked. Are you actually a real person? So

The first real interview for you is like our culture interview. It's where we present you our vision, what we want to build, why we want to build it. And then we just want to learn more about you. So please, if you get to that stage, don't use buzzwords. At this point, we don't even care that you're a designer. Because you've passed that already.

you're gonna have a chance to show your skill so be human if you have a good sense of humor we love jokes so drop a joke or two so that doesn't matter after that we have like a classic whiteboarding challenge where we just look for ways to solve a problem it's not the one size fits all we're not looking for a solution but more like how you approach problems and then if a candidate doesn't show good UI skills on

their portfolio. We have a third interview, which is like a live UI challenge. And this is the most stressful one for candidates because we are like they're on a call together and one of our team is playing it as a creative director. Oh, what if we try this? Or so we are still looking for this collaboration and

because startups it often happens like where you're on a call and you need to ideate something that's why we do it and after that before that goes well like you're getting your profile started and you're ready to work with cool companies that you have

Nice. On board. Do you usually have like, if somebody said, I want to work, like I, for example, would do right in travel, do you usually say, okay, so we will look for companies that match your profile or would you say, oh, you know what? This candidate might be a great match for the company. So let's, let's kind of take them, him through the process. What's the, what's the matchmaking magic there?

So first, if somebody is a little bit more experienced, if somebody like you comes in or somebody we've worked with and know them, like we don't even take them to the process unless we know that we can give them jobs. If we cannot give them work, well, okay, it doesn't make sense to

get you on the platform because it's just going to be another platform for you. So we want to bring value to people. Yeah. But we had this where we try to match what our designers want to work, what we want to have as clients.

and then bring those. And the cool thing is that most people want to work on relatively similar stuff. A lot of people have the same interests, so mostly health wellness products, a lot of B2B, B2C travel, which is like, that's quite interesting. And we have a lot of FinTech at the moment.

That's the cool thing because we don't even niche down, but what we go in with, try to help, we actually helped a company hire a designer like this. They were like, "Hey, we need a designer in Web3, in Marketplace." They were like super specific what they need and we're like, "Okay, we don't have this in the network, so now we need to go and scout."

That was a fun project. And then we had like the other way where one of the times I was like, I'm going to do just dashboards, just for dentists, just in the US. Super speciality. And we found him a project actually. It was like, maybe it was a coincidence, but yeah. Of course, like if you're like super picky and we present you with projects and you say like always no, it's like, oh well, okay. But yeah, you probably should do it yourself.

Cool, cool. Thank you so much. I think our listeners could learn much better about the platform and understand if that's for them to apply and if they're interested. I think for me also another takeaway is that maybe you don't have the great match today, but you can come back in like half a year, year and apply again. Since this is a podcast, most likely people will listen it for, you know, this year, maybe the next year, there will be continuous conversations coming.

So I would hope that even if you didn't go through the process today, maybe in half a year from now, there will be a perfect match for you and you will be a perfect candidate for another client. So that's still for you. You can go through the process again. I just want to say like a no from us doesn't mean you're a bad designer or a bad person. It means that we just, one, we're keeping the network small because like we're relatively small and we want to have like this personal connection with everybody. So it means that we just cannot get you worded

fits you. But when that happens, we keep all our talents contacts and we reach out to them like the first first people that applied like four months ago, like I just reached out to them this week to see where they're at. So we're just keeping this connection at all times. Yeah, so people can say what they want. Exactly. That's that's great. So that even if you're sitting in the backlog, he will not be forgotten. And especially the project comes in. That's great. You can be still matched with that. Nice.

Okay, cool. We have a long conversation. Lots of things have been covered. So thank you so much, Denis, for joining us today and sharing your insights on this process. I think it's both interesting from the perspective of the mistakes, the tips, and also, you know, how to be a perfect match for Figur, the digital. That's the best way for you to go. Thank you so much, everybody, for listening. You will find all the things we have mentioned today in the show notes. And if you have any questions for us or any other topics,

you want us, me and Ioana, to cover in the next episodes, don't forget to submit those questions in the Spotify under their episodes. Or you can also find the anonymous link and drop your question there. Thank you so much and have a good day, everybody. Bye-bye.