The UX job market is rough right now. If your LinkedIn feed looks anything like Sarah's, you already know that. But while everyone is complaining about the market, almost nobody is focusing on the part of the job search they can actually control.

In this episode, Sarah breaks down why the job market feels so impossible right now, including the surprisingly outsized role that one-click apply has played in flooding recruiters with hundreds of applications per posting and what you can do about it. (Hint: The answer isn't more applications.)

Sarah shares real examples from inside the Career Strategy Lab community of how alumni are leveraging relationships to get referrals, introductions, and job offers, including one person whose hire two years ago has now led to four or five other alumni landing roles at the same company. The through-line is simple: the people who benefit most from their communities are the ones who actually show up in them.

Topics Discussed

✅ How the one-click apply button has made the job search harder for everyone and what that means for your strategy

✅ Why relationships matter more than ever in this job market, and why you need to start building them before you need them

✅ Why people say no to referral requests and how to change that

✅ Real examples of Career Strategy Lab alumni using community relationships to get referral links, introductions, and job offers

✅ How one hire two years ago has cascaded into multiple alumni landing roles at the same company

✅ The difference between existing in a community and actually participating in one

Links & Resources

🔗 Jared Spool: Why is the UX job market such a mess right now?

💸 See how you can get hired in UX with the help of my UX job search coaching program

📋 Take a tour of my UX job search coaching platform

👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube.

Most UX professionals spend years trying to be good at everything. Eric Shumake, founder of HXR Labs, spent 20 years getting really good at one thing and it kept opening doors he didn't expect.

Eric is a principal UX researcher and a well-known voice in healthcare UX. His career has taken him through companies like Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Myriad Genetics, and AliveCor.

He also teaches, including a popular course on Maven on breaking into healthcare UX, and has been exploring how AI can meaningfully (and responsibly) augment research without replacing the judgment that makes research trustworthy.

In this episode, Eric and Sarah cover a lot of ground: how specializing almost always beats generalizing, what surprises people when they try to bring standard UX practices into clinical environments, why Eric thinks of every role as a gig, and what he'd prioritize if he were managing someone's job search like a product.

Topics Discussed

✅ Why specializing beats generalizing and how to niche down even when it feels risky

✅ How transferable skills work in practice: why experience in one highly regulated industry (like finance) can open doors in another (like healthcare)

✅ The biggest blind spot people bring into healthcare UX

✅ Why "recommendations are where insights go to die" and how to tie research to decisions and numbers so stakeholders actually act on it

✅ Treating every role as a gig and why that mindset is more practical than it sounds in today's job market

✅ Why posting consistently on LinkedIn is one of the highest-leverage things a UX professional can do in a job search right now

✅ Where AI genuinely helps in UX research (desk research, competitive analysis, automating the time-consuming parts) and where to draw a hard line

✅ What neurodivergence in the workplace looks like from the insideduring a job search

Links & Resources

🔗 Eric Shumake on LinkedIn

🔗 HXR Labs

🔗 Eric's Maven course on breaking into healthcare UX

💸 See how you can get hired in UX with the help of my UX job search coaching program

📋 Take a tour of my UX job search coaching platform

👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube.

Re-entering the UX job market after years away is harder than most people expect, especially when you're doing it alone.

After 12 years at Constant Contact, growing from associate interaction designer to principal UX designer, Emmanuel relocated, took a deliberate career break, and then tried to re-enter a job market that had completely changed. He spent three months rebuilding his portfolio alone, then another three months applying and hearing almost nothing. His LinkedIn hadn't been updated since 2017. He burned out.

In this episode, Emmanuel shares what finally got him unstuck; why working on his resume, portfolio, and LinkedIn in parallel changed his messaging faster than tackling them one at a time; how early feedback from coaches and a community shortened iteration cycles he'd been stuck in for months; and what shifted when he started applying only to roles that actually fit. He's actively interviewing now, and the inbound LinkedIn requests have started coming in too.

Topics Discussed:

✅ What re-entering the UX job market after a long tenure at one company feels like and how to close the gap

✅ Why working on your resume, portfolio, and LinkedIn in parallel sharpens your message faster than doing them one at a time

✅ How long iteration cycles quietly stall your progress and what to do instead

✅ Why submitting imperfect work for feedback early is one of the highest-leverage moves you can make

✅ What AI tools genuinely help when job searching and where human judgment still matters more

✅ The confidence cost of mass applying

✅ What changes when you get more selective about the roles you apply to

💸 See how you can get hired in UX with the help of my UX job search coaching program

📋 Take a tour of my UX job search coaching platform

👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube.