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.

If you're sending dozens of applications per day and you aren't hearing back, this podcast is for you.

Carlos was applying to dozens of UX jobs a day, swiping through listings like a job board version of a dating app, and hearing almost nothing back. Out of hundreds of applications, he got two responses and both were rejections, but he knew he was a good designer.

In this episode, Carlos shares how he went from mass applying with no traction to landing a product designer role at Covenant Eyes and then getting promoted to senior product designer within the same year. He talks about what changed when he stopped treating the job search like a numbers game, how he used the same frameworks he learned in Career Strategy Lab to make his case for a promotion once he got there.

Topics Discussed:

✅ Why mass applying isn't productive and what to do instead

✅ How to use the skills from your job search to land a promotion

✅ Why confidence in interviews matters more than having a perfect portfolio

✅ A portfolio website vs a portfolio presentation

✅ How research a hiring manager before your interview helps you stand out

✅ How the skills you learn during your job search transfer directly into your work after being hired

✅ Why waiting until you feel confident enough to start is the wrong approach

Links From This Episode:

🔗 Free UX Case Study Template

🔗 Career Strategy Lab Syllabus

💸 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.

Are you getting ghosted in your UX job search despite knowing you're qualified? When you have 5, 10, 15 years of experience and you're applying to 20+ jobs a week without hearing back or you're not making it past the first round, it's natural to start thinking you're the problem.

You're not. You're just unpositioned.

In this episode, Sarah makes the case that ghosting is usually a positioning problem, rather than a skills issue. Positioning is how you communicate what you do, who you do it for, and why it matters. It's the thread that connects what you've done in the past to what you could do for a team if they hired you. When that thread is missing, recruiters and hiring managers move on because your materials aren't clearly paining the picture for them.

Sarah walks through what it actually takes to fix your positioning, starting with the one foundational step most people skip: getting clear on who you are and what makes you different, before touching your resume, portfolio, or LinkedIn.

Topics Discussed:

✅ Why getting ghosted in your UX job search isn't usually a qualification problem

✅ What causes recruiters to move on from your resume

✅ What "positioning" means in the context of a UX job search

✅ The step most people skip that ties everything together

✅ How applying to fewer jobs can get you more interviews

✅ Creating a Compass Statement and how it acts as a filter for every career asset you create

✅ How niching down your job search to a specific industry or type of company can transform your UX job search

Links From This Episode:

🔗 How to stand out as a candidate by focusing on your benefits vs features

🔗 Developing your positioning through a career roadmap and compass statement

🔗 Free UX Case Study Template

💸 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.

What do you do when you have years of experience, you're making it through rounds of interviews, but you still aren't getting offers? For Andrew, the answer was scrapping his entire UX portfolio and starting over.

Andrew had been applying to jobs for a year. He was making it to the final interview rounds at companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google, but he wasn't getting offers. On paper, everything looked great. He couldn't figure out what was missing.

Eventually he did. After six years at GE, he'd gotten so deep in the work that in interviews, he'd talk at length about how interesting the products were and the intricacies of the industry. He was selling the products instead of himself. So he scrapped everything and rebuilt his portfolio around a single core message: what he does, what he's good at, and what he can bring to the companies he's applying to.

The clarity changed how he talked about himself in interviews. By the end of each conversation, hiring managers knew exactly who he was and how he'd be an asset. Three offers followed, including one from Blue Origin, where he accepted a role that brought him back to the intersection of hardware and software that drew him to UX in the first place.

Topics Discussed:

✅ The difference between selling the product you worked on versus selling yourself to a potential employer

✅ The value of working on your resume, LinkedIn, and portfolio in parallel rather than sequentially

✅ Why making it to the final round but not getting the offer might signal a problem with your portfolio

✅ How perfectionism and long iteration cycles quietly destroy your confidence and what breaks the pattern

✅ What it looks like to rebuild your career materials around a single core message and how that clarity shows up in interviews too

Links From This Episode:

🔗 Free UX Case Study Template

💸 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.

NDAs stop a lot of UX professionals from including their best work in their portfolio, but they might not be the obstacle you think they are.

Sarah has spent nearly a decade coaching UX professionals, and one of the questions she gets most often is how to handle NDA-protected work in a portfolio. In this episode, she walks through what NDAs typically do and don't restrict, how to write about protected work without violating your agreement, and why UX recruiters and hiring managers aren't looking for pixel-perfect deliverables (and what they are looking for instead.)

Sarah also shares a concrete example of how to frame a confidential project in a way that's compelling, specific, and respectful of any agreements you've signed. If you've been leaving projects out of your portfolio because you weren't sure what you could share, this episode is worth a listen.

Topics Discussed

✅ What NDAs actually restrict vs. what most people assume they restrict (they're not the same thing)

✅ A concrete example of how to write about a confidential project without naming the company, showing screens, or violating any agreements

✅ Why UX recruiters and hiring managers care far more about how you think than what the final product looked like

✅ Practical ways to include visuals from protected projects without revealing anything proprietary

✅ How NDA concerns often uncover the real problem: not knowing how to structure a UX case study

✅ How to go back to a former employer and ask the right questions to clarify what your NDA actually allows

✅ Why your UX portfolio doesn't have to be a website and how a presentation format can sidestep a lot of NDA concerns entirely

Links From This Episode:

🔗 Free UX Case Study Template

🔗 UX Hiring Insights: Alexander Zeh of ManyChat on Diverse UX Teams and Standout Portfolios

🔗 UX Hiring Insights: Ben Peck on UX Generalists, Soft Skills, & Standout Portfolios

💸 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.

Have you been applying to UX jobs you know you're qualified for and still not hearing back? Chances are, your experience isn't the problem, it's how you're presenting it.

After nearly a decade of coaching UX and product professionals and reviewing thousands of resumes, portfolios, and LinkedIn profiles, Sarah has seen the same red flag mistakes show up again and again. The candidates making them are talented, experienced designers who simply were never taught how to market themselves.

In this episode, Sarah breaks down one major red flag mistake for resumes, portfolios, and LinkedIn. Spoiler alert: fixing it doesn't require months of work.

Sarah also shares the story of Jonathan, a UX director with 20 years of experience who was getting ghosted on 75% of his applications. He was qualified, but his materials weren't telling his story effectively. Once he addressed the right things, he landed an executive-level role at the University of Houston.

Your materials don't have to be perfect... they need to be 10% better than everyone else making the same, avoidable, mistakes.

Topics Discussed

✅ What hiring managers and applicant tracking systems are silently penalizing you for

✅ Why showing deliverables without context, process, or decision-making is leaving hiring managers cold

✅ What to put in your LinkedIn headline instead of just your job title and company name (and why)

✅ How to optimize your LinkedIn profile for the algorithm

✅ How to rewrite vague resume bullet points so they communicate scope and outcomes

✅ Why talented UX professionals with years of experience still struggle to get interviews

✅ How to break out of the perfection trap that's keeping you in research mode

Links From This Episode:

🔗 Free UX Portfolio Case Study Template

🔗 Optimizing Your LinkedIn Headline

🔗 How to optimize your resume for the ATS so you can get more UX job interviews

🔗 EP 170: Jonathan's Journey From UX Layoff to UX Executive

💸 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.