Career Strategy Podcast with Sarah Doody | UX, Product Design, UX Research

Sarah Doody from Career Strategy Lab
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Welcome to the Career Strategy Podcast, with Sarah Doody, a UX Researcher & Product Designer with 22 years of experience who helps UX and Product people design their careers. You’ll learn how to advance your UX or Product career including how get hired in UX, stay hired, get promoted, and build a personal brand and visibility. You’ll also hear no BS tips to optimize your UX resume and portfolio, navigate your UX job search, and prepare for UX job interviews so you can stop being invisible and be seen as an in-demand UX professional. Get ready to UX your career, ironic, right?!

  1. 2d ago

    199: How to tailor your UX resume for every job (and why keyword stuffing backfires)

    Using one resume for every UX job application is easy, but it can leave your experience looking out of step with the UX role. In this episode, Sarah Doody explains how to tailor your UX resume in a few quick changes, and why keyword stuffing can make you look bad. What You'll Learn in This Episode: ✔️ Why a resume should be easy to read, even if it isn't beautiful ✔️ How to read a job description for the phrases, skills and software your resume should reflect ✔️ Four parts of your resume you can tailor without rewriting it ✔️ Why hidden white font keywords and repeated terms backfire Timestamps 00:00 Why your resume should be easy to read 00:32 Why to tailor your resume and how to use the job description 02:51 Tailoring your About Me and Company Summaries 04:14 Tailoring your bullet points 05:14 Why keyword stuffing backfires 05:58 Closing thoughts Related episodes Episode 78: How to optimize your resume for the Applicant Tracking System Episode 88: Troubleshoot your resume with 11 questions in this resume checklist Episode 29: It's a myth your resume must be one page, here's why 🎯 How I can help with your UX job search 📋 Get my UX case study template 👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube

  2. Oct 26

    198: UX resume myths about the ATS, with Workday UX director and hiring manager Patrick Neeman

    Patrick Neeman, Director of UX Design, AI Experiences, explains how applicant tracking systems read your resume and why he advises against a two-column layout. He also shares what he has seen as a hiring manager about keyword filtering, knockout questions and the six-second resume glance. What You'll Learn in This Episode: ✔️ Why Patrick says to use one column for an ATS and two columns for a person ✔️ How OCR can turn a two-column resume into one big line of text ✔️ How knockout questions and keyword filtering work in some systems ✔️ Patrick's misconceptions about companies, AI and recruiters in hiring ✔️ What Patrick says helps a resume pass a quick scan Timestamps 00:00 Intro 00:35 Who Patrick Neeman is 01:23 Keyword filtering and knockout questions 03:55 Why to avoid a two-column resume for the ATS 05:48 Misconceptions about ATS and hiring 07:28 The six-second resume study 08:45 What makes a resume stand out Related episodes How to optimize your resume for the ATS so you can get more UX job interviews How to optimize your resume for the Applicant Tracking System Links and resources Patrick Neeman on LinkedIn Workday careers 🎯 How I can help with your UX job search 📋 Get my UX case study template 👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube

  3. Oct 19

    197: How UX Recruiters Use AI in Hiring (and risks of UX candidates using AI)

    AI in UX hiring plays a huge part of how your UX application gets reviewed. Steph McDonald, a lead UX recruiter at HubSpot, uses it every day, and she's just as clear about where it stops. Steph has spent 25 years in recruiting, finding and vetting candidates in product management. HubSpot is an AI first company, so her team is expected to use AI in their roles. For her that means an AI notetaker in her interviews, which she says saves at least 30 minutes per candidate per day, and a scoring tool that ranks applicants against the skills she sets for each role.  She still looks at every resume. She starts with the lowest ranked ones so she can check the bot's reasoning and move people forward when she disagrees. Then there's what she sees from UX candidates. ChatGPT answers pasted straight into an application, follow up question from the chatbot included. Auto apply services sending software engineers and product managers to UX design roles. One resume that came back with the job description dropped in as the work experience and a product manager's title changed to lead UX designer. Her take on using AI to write is simple. Write it yourself first, then use ChatGPT to tighten it up. If AI is part of your UX job search right now, this is what it looks like from the UX recruiter's side of the screen. Topics Discussed ✅ How HubSpot uses AI in hiring, from an AI notetaker in interviews to a tool that scores resumes, and why Steph still wants to control resume review herself ✅ Why Steph looks at the lowest ranked candidates first, and what she's checking when she does ✅ What a knockout question looks like in a real application, using a hard requirement like building payments products ✅ Why years of experience isn't how HubSpot screens candidates, as far as Steph has seen, and the one situation where she uses it herself ✅ Why Steph doesn't buy the advice to stuff hidden keywords into your resume to please the bot ✅ The mistake that shows a UX recruiter you never read your own AI generated answer ✅ Why auto apply services backfire, and the strange case of four back to back resumes with identical formatting ✅ A resume an AI tool rewrote into something that made no sense, and what it says about handing your own story to a bot ✅ Where Steph draws the line on using ChatGPT to polish your writing Links & Resources 🔗 Connect with Steph McDonald on LinkedIn 🎯 How I can help with your UX job search 📋 Get my UX case study template 👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube

  4. Oct 12

    196: What a Shopify design recruiter looks for in a senior UX portfolio

    A senior UX portfolio gets read differently than a junior one, and most people never find out how until they're already in the rejection pile. Jared Tredly has spent around 15 years in recruitment, most recently as a design recruiter at Shopify, where he was hiring for roughly 30 open design roles at the time of this conversation. Before that, he worked agency side, where a single role could pull in 700 applicants a week. He's blunt about what actually happens to a UX portfolio once it lands in front of someone like him. At Shopify he sees 50 to 100 new applications come in on a given day, and he says UX recruiters broadly can see anywhere from a hundred to a thousand portfolios on a busy stretch. He'll often look at the work before he even opens the resume, because for UX design roles the portfolio carries more weight than it does in almost any other hiring process. He describes reviewing one like peeling back the layers of an onion. This episode gets into what actually earns a second look at that volume. Where seniority shows up in a case study and where it doesn't. Why he thinks ATS systems are mostly useless for screening portfolios, and what he actually uses them for instead. Why "impact" metrics carry less weight than most candidates assume, and what he listens for instead. If you've ever wondered what happens to your application after you hit submit, or why a UX portfolio that took you weeks to build didn't get a response, this is a rare look from the other side of the desk. Topics Discussed ✅ Why a UX design portfolio carries more weight in hiring than it does for almost any other role, and why that makes it the first thing reviewed, not the resume ✅ How many UX portfolios get looked at in a single day at a company like Shopify, and what that volume means for how quickly a decision gets made ✅ Why ATS systems are mostly unreliable for screening portfolio quality, and what they're actually useful for in the UX hiring process ✅ What causes an instant "hook" or an instant bounce in the first few seconds of a UX portfolio review ✅ Why inconsistency between a resume, UX portfolio, and LinkedIn profile raises suspicion instead of just looking sloppy ✅ What separates a senior level UX case study from a mid level one, including project complexity, recency, and evidence of influence over simple execution ✅ Why cramming a UX case study with slides or over explaining a process can actually work against a candidate ✅ Why raw impact numbers matter less than being able to explain why a UX design decision was made and what it actually changed ✅ Whether portfolio format (website, deck, or PDF) matters, and what actually causes friction for a reviewer regardless of format Links & Resources 🔗 Connect with Jared Tredly on LinkedIn 🔗 Explore open design roles at Shopify 🎯 How I can help with your UX job search 📋 Get my UX case study template 👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube

  5. Oct 5

    195: UX Hiring Insights: Steve Durgin, From Candidate to Hiring Manager, on Trust & Networking

    UX hiring decisions are less scientific than most job seekers assume. Steve Durgin found that out firsthand, first as a candidate, now as the one doing the hiring. Steve is the founder of affinityUX, a research led innovation and product studio that helps companies find friction in their products and build experiences people actually care about, using methods like jobs to be done and outcome driven innovation. Steve came from a background in social work and human services, went through Career Strategy Lab to make his pivot into UX, got hired, and eventually built his own agency. He's since hired six CSL alumni himself, so this conversation covers hiring from both sides of the table, not just theory. Steve used to think hiring was a logical process based on qualifications. Now he describes it as a psychological decision to trust someone under uncertainty and time pressure.  The conversation walks through what that actually looks like in practice: why a single clear, non-cringe pitch beat out a stack of cold applications, why posting inside a community instead of a public job board changes everything about speed and quality, and what he's actually trying to learn in a 30 minute screening call that never shows up in a resume. It closes with a practical framework for turning any conversation into more opportunities, plus a portfolio structure Steve says makes the difference between getting skimmed and getting remembered. Topics Discussed ✅ Why hiring is more of a psychological trust decision than the logical, checklist based process Steve assumed before he started hiring himself ✅ The exact type of pitch that got a candidate a same-day response, and what made it different from every cold pitch Steve normally gets ✅ Why posting inside a community instead of a public job board can cut time to hire dramatically, and what that means for where you should be spending your energy ✅ The specific question Steve asks every candidate to surface things that never show up in a resume or portfolio ✅ A real example of a candidate whose most valuable skill only became obvious once Steve actually talked to her, not from anything on paper ✅ What Steve looks for that goes beyond hard skills, from comfort with ambiguity to the ability to connect a task back to the business outcome it serves ✅ How to structure a portfolio case study into three slides so it survives someone with almost no time to look at it ✅ Steve's three part framework for turning a single conversation into new opportunities: asking for favors, offering favors, and proactively expanding your network Links & Resources 🔗 Join the affinityUX Contractor Pool This 10-15 minute form allows you to join affinityUX's pool of contractors. If they land a project that seems like a great fit for you, they will reach out! 🔗 Listen to Steve's earlier interview on the Career Strategy Podcast 🔗 Connect with Steve on LinkedIn 🔗 Book: Traction by Gino Wickman 🎯 How I can help with your UX job search 📋 Get my UX case study template 👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube

  6. Sep 28

    194: UX Hiring Insights: Marc Aquino, Senior Product Design Manager at Deel

    UX design burnout doesn't come from working too many hours. That's one of Marc Aquino's hot takes in this episode, and once it sits with you, it's hard to keep blaming the hours. Marc is senior product design manager at Deel, a global HR and payroll platform helping companies hire and pay employees and contractors in over 150 countries. He's spent 15 years in the industry, seven of them building and scaling design teams across startups, scale-ups, and global companies. His take started with a LinkedIn post responding to a Nielsen Norman Group article on psychological ownership, research originally from Lynn Van Dyne and John Pierce. Burnout builds from a cycle. You get excited about a UX project. You pour research and effort into it. Then stakeholders get involved, and it gets scoped down or reshaped until it barely resembles what you built. Repeat that for months, years, and it wears you down more than the hours ever could. Marc talks through how he tries to protect his own team from that cycle, including a framework for pitching big ideas without getting shut down, and a line from his LinkedIn post that stuck with Sarah: the UX designers who last the longest hold the shipped thing loosely and their own judgment tightly. Then the conversation shifts into hiring. What Marc actually wants to see when a UX project never launched. Why team metrics tell him more than individual ones ever could. What happens when a candidate claims credit for a huge revenue number all on their own. Deel gets an enormous volume of applications, and Marc is candid about how little time he actually gets to review each one. Topics Discussed ✅ Why UX design burnout might have less to do with hours worked and more to do with losing authority over something you feel deep ownership over ✅ The repeating cycle that quietly wears UX designers down over months and years, and why fast-paced companies make it worse ✅ A framework for pitching big, ambitious ideas at work without getting shut down before you even present them ✅ Why you should include projects that never launched in your UX portfolio, and what to talk about instead of the outcome ✅ Why leading with a huge dollar figure or revenue percentage in an UX interview can backfire, and what to say instead ✅ Why team metrics tell a UX hiring manager more about a candidate than an individual one ever could ✅ What actually happens to your application in the days after you hit submit at a company receiving millions of applications a year ✅ Two team rituals that help a UX design team avoid burnout and stay aligned every month Links & Resources 🔗 Connect with Marc on LinkedIn 🔗 Marc's LinkedIn post responding to the Nielsen Norman Group article on psychological ownership 🔗 Learn more about Deel 🔗 Kotter's Eight Steps to Change Management 🔗 Sarah's earlier episode with Steph McDonald, UX recruiter at HubSpot 🔗 10% Happier by Dan Harris 🎯 How I can help with your UX job search 📋 Get my UX case study template 👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube

  7. Sep 21

    193: Should your UX portfolio approach change based on your role or seniority?

    UX portfolio approaches based on seniority or role. That question lands in Sarah Doody's inbox nearly every day. Does the approach actually need to change? This episode answers a real question from a listener targeting director level UX roles, wondering if the portfolio frameworks taught inside Career Strategy Lab only apply to individual contributors. The process for building a strong UX portfolio doesn't change based on your job title. That's the real answer buried in a question Sarah gets constantly, usually from people convinced their situation is the exception.  This time it came from a listener targeting director level UX roles, wondering if the frameworks taught inside Career Strategy Lab only apply to individual contributors. Sarah's answer: no. Three reasons why. A portfolio's job stays the same no matter your title or years of experience. UX recruiters and hiring managers are always answering the same core questions. The way a portfolio gets consumed doesn't change either. A role gets 500 applications in 48 hours.  Every portfolio gets skimmed and scanned, not read word for word. And what makes a portfolio good is consistent across roles too. Answer the so what behind your decisions. Not just what you did. Gamified, operating system style portfolios are trending on LinkedIn right now. Sarah explains why they create friction instead of clarity for a recruiter trying to move fast. Then there's what-ifing. Hunting for UX portfolio advice specific to your exact job title, years of experience, or city. That search doesn't exist, and it's costing you time you don't have. If your job title or seniority level has you wondering whether you need a different UX portfolio strategy, this episode settles it. Topics Discussed ✅ Why the three questions UX recruiters and hiring managers are actually trying to answer never change, no matter your job title ✅ How the "jobs to be done" framework applies to your UX portfolio, and what your portfolio's actual job is ✅ What happens when a UX role gets 500 applications in 48 hours, and how that changes what your portfolio needs to survive ✅ Why talking only about what you did is the most common UX portfolio mistake, and what answering the "so what" actually looks like in a case study ✅ Why operating system style UX portfolios are trending on LinkedIn right now, and why they're probably working against you ✅ The real cost of constantly asking "what if" about your specific UX job title, years of experience, or city instead of just building your portfolio ✅ What went wrong with an early UX portfolio back in 2006, and what fixing it actually looked like Links & Resources 🔗 Episode 155, Sarah's interview with Patrick Neeman, Director of UX and AI Experiences at Workday 🔗 Episode 173, Sarah's interview with Jeni Bible, UX Manager at Home Depot 🔗 Episode 172, Sarah's interview with Alexander Zeh, Head of Product Design at ManyChat 🔗 Episode 192, Sarah's interview with Sylvain Maretto, Director of Design at Ecosia 🔗 Episode 161, Sarah's interview with Jared Tredly, Design Recruiter at Shopify 🔗 Episode 188, UX Portfolio Myth: Your UX Portfolio Does Not Need To Be A Website (Myth 2/5) 🎯 How I can help with your UX job search 📋 Get my UX case study template 👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube

  8. Sep 14

    192: UX Hiring Insights: Sylvain Maretto, Director of Design, on Why AI Hasn't Taken Over Hiring and What He Looks for in UX Portfolios

    UX hiring managers are looking for three things right now, and UX isn't specifically one of them. Not exactly reassuring if you've spent years polishing your process pages. That's the reality Sylvain Maretto lays out in this episode, and it's coming from someone actually reviewing applications, not theorizing about them. At the time of this recording, Sylvain was the director of design at Ecosia, the search engine that funds tree planting with its profits. He's spent 15 years building and leading design teams across Berlin, Tokyo, and beyond, with stops at Omio (joined when it was 25 people), Zalando, Tour Radar, and GetYourGuide. He also helped seal the acquisition of Holoplot, the audio technology behind the sound system inside the Vegas Sphere. He joined Sarah after leaving a comment on a LinkedIn post arguing portfolios need to be more experimental. He disagreed, and what follows is his actual answer: a triangle of AI fluency, UI craft, and business acumen. UX gets treated as a given, not a differentiator. From there, Sylvain walks through what happens inside an applicant tracking system when 500 people apply for one role. Why the AI built into most of those tools produces noise instead of signal. What a job description is actually telling you, if you read it twice. And how to talk about results when a project got canceled before it ever shipped. If you've ever wondered what's actually happening on the other side of your application, this is that answer. Topics Discussed ✅ The three things Sylvain actually screens for when he opens a portfolio, and UX isn't one of them ✅ What happens to your application the second it lands in an ATS, and why you're one of 500 people applying for the same slot ✅ Why the AI built into most hiring software is, in Sylvain's own words, mostly noise ✅ The STAR framework he wants every case study to follow, and why your "action" section is probably too long ✅ What to say about a project that got canceled or never shipped, when you still need to show results ✅ How reading a job description twice instead of once changes what you should actually be highlighting ✅ Whether hiring managers expect different things by country, or if it's really just about company stage ✅ Why Sylvain thinks a narrow, specific niche beats trying to check every box on a job post ✅ The values-based signal he built into his own hiring process at Ecosia that most candidates don't see coming Links & Resources 🔗 Connect with Sylvain on LinkedIn 🔗 Learn more about Ecosia 🔗 Sarah's book: The Product of You 🔗 Ioana Teleanu's LinkedIn post that started this conversation 🎯 How I can help with your UX job search 📋 Get my UX case study template 👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube

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Welcome to the Career Strategy Podcast, with Sarah Doody, a UX Researcher & Product Designer with 22 years of experience who helps UX and Product people design their careers. You’ll learn how to advance your UX or Product career including how get hired in UX, stay hired, get promoted, and build a personal brand and visibility. You’ll also hear no BS tips to optimize your UX resume and portfolio, navigate your UX job search, and prepare for UX job interviews so you can stop being invisible and be seen as an in-demand UX professional. Get ready to UX your career, ironic, right?!

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