Hiring Beyond 2025: Breaking the Algorithm, Beating the Bots, and Building Better Teams

Ryan Leffel, Mrinali Kamath, Kelly Bowker at UXDX USA. Video: https://youtu.be/sCjaFGsl-ZE

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Introductions and hiring processes

[00:00:12] Ryan: All right, I think this is going to be a good one. I know we're close to the end of the day, but I think this one could get a little bit spicy. Thinking about hiring, in my opinion, hiring is broken. Both the candidate experience that people are going through, I think that is very much broken. And if you're hiring managers, the way you're finding candidates and receiving candidates, it feels like that's broken too. So we want to drill in to some of this today. Kicking us off here, do you both want to do a quick intro of yourselves, but also give an overview of what your hiring processes look like?

[00:00:45] Kelly: Sure. I'm Kelly. I've been working for over 20 years. I've done design, UX, consulting, strategy, PM, and then boomeranged back to design in summer of 2020. My hiring process is first just keeping track of the skills matrix of my team, directly and cross-functionally, and then doing stakeholder interviews to really understand what that job description that I need to write in partnership with my recruiter looks like.

[00:01:12] Mrinali: Hi. I'm Mrinali. I'm a design director at Ford. I'm quitting my job in two months to be a founder, so that's exciting, and a little nerve-wracking. Thank you. My hiring process has changed. I was previously at Amazon and IBM. At Ford, it just depends on the kind of recruiting team that you get. Sometimes you get design recruiters that are really good at vetting candidates and actively sourcing. At Ford, we have more of a generalist approach.

[00:01:47] We do a quick hangout session once we have gone through the ATS manual process of vetting candidates. Then once I have a good hangout session and I know that the person is really fun to be with, and I want to hang out more, I get them into the portfolio review. Then I really rely on my team's expertise and gather data in order to see whether it's a good fit.

AI screening and whether portfolios matter

[00:02:10] Ryan: You mentioned AI screening. We were going to talk about that a little bit later, but you mentioned it, so let's get into that. Do you feel like AI monitoring and screening is helping you find candidates, or do you see that as something that is hurting?

[00:02:26] Mrinali: Two years ago I went from being an individual contributor to a design leader and a manager, and I didn't know how to hire. The way I upskill best is to talk to a lot of people. So I talked to 40-plus hiring managers and design recruiters, and what I learned is the ATS is not fit to evaluate design candidates. This is because it focuses on the resume, whereas for design, as we all know, it's the portfolio that matters. We do have tools like Eightfold AI that can do a really good job ranking resumes, but it's kind of moot for us, because we have to manually vet portfolios and see if there are good candidates.

[00:03:13] Kelly: We talked about this before, and this is hilarious. I don't look at portfolios. I've been a hiring manager for at least five years now. The only time I've looked at portfolios is when I'm hiring a net new junior associate coming straight out of undergrad, or for an apprenticeship program, or somebody who's potentially taken a career break or done a transition. Then I look at portfolios because I need to know they understand basic graphic design skills and hierarchy. Otherwise, I use portfolios as a vetting process after they've passed those soft skill and emotional intelligence inquiries, because at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, it's all about the relationships for the work.

[00:03:51] Ryan: And we've all talked about this. I think it's great to have a portfolio. I think way too much emphasis is put on a portfolio. It's part of the hiring process, especially when the first impression you're getting of somebody, you're making that impression off of what you see in a portfolio. You're hiring the person, not the portfolio. So where we could go with this is: what do each of you think makes a good portfolio stand out?

What makes a portfolio stand out

[00:04:15] Kelly: The last really successful portfolio, where I wanted to go talk to this person, was concise, it was clear, and I understood the impact immediately. But more so, they sprinkled throughout their hot takes: this was the ask of the boss, I didn't necessarily understand why that was the direction, I knew that was my job, but this is how I would have done it alternatively. So they showed both sides of their own personal experience while anchoring to "I know this is the job."

[00:04:51] Mrinali: For me, the portfolio is your product. We place a lot of importance on the portfolio, especially in big tech and now automotive. I like to tell people you need to put yourself in the shoes of the hiring manager. There's a three-second, 30-second and a three-minute view of your portfolio. Imagine I'm going through 200 candidates. I have literally three seconds to look and close the tab. So I need to be able to very quickly know whether this person is worth going into further.

[00:05:29] Then once we have a smaller pool, I'm spending 30 seconds checking out the first project, seeing if you have good storytelling skills, if you have a good design process, if you've highlighted the impact, if you've reflected and realized what you've learned and what you could do better. Those are the key points that I'm looking for.

[00:05:49] Ryan: You look at any portfolio and it's always based on work. This is what I've done, these are the projects I've worked on. Every portfolio is all projects and all work. I've talked to a lot of designers to help advise on how to create a portfolio. The first thing I always do is say, "Tell me about yourself. What's your background? What's your story? Why are you passionate about design, about research, whatever it might be?" And you always hear something fascinating. Then you look at the portfolio and that's never there.

[00:06:15] I think the most important thing is finding a way to make your portfolio uniquely you, because you're telling your own story, who you are and why you're doing what you're doing. And also, who are you as a person outside of the work you do? It sounds silly, but I think it helps, because it helps form a human connection with the person who's looking at the portfolio, and sometimes that echoes a lot further than the waving hand that says, "I'm a researcher, I'm a designer."

[00:06:44] Kelly: That's advice that I even give to my day-to-day team and cross-functional partners. If I took away your title and the job you worked for, who are you? The number of times the response from the other side is crickets is overwhelming. And that's also just general advice: we put too much emphasis on our job being our identity. I'm excited for the future, where we have more opportunities to identify ourselves as something beyond our work.

Showing private work, and resume length

[00:07:11] Ryan: I know I have a lot of questions. I'd love to get into design challenges, and I want to get into some of this stuff here. Let's start with this first question, which seems to have the most votes. What are your recommendations for demonstrating past UI/UX work for folks whose previous work is private and can't be used in portfolio work?

[00:07:28] Kelly: It can be used in portfolio work. I think there's a difference between a public portfolio, a website that is readily available that you link to from LinkedIn, and the portfolio that you share during a case study. I have worked in fintech, I've worked in insurance, I've worked in e-commerce on back-end platform stuff that is very proprietary, and I've still shared that in a deck. At the same time, I don't show all of it. It's more: what are those key screens, a lot of diagrams, and then what are the skills that I've learned and how I've grown.

[00:08:01] You need to think about a portfolio as multifaceted. You have that deck that you're showcasing, which you can keep private and only share with those applications, and then, is it actually necessary for you to have a public-facing portfolio? I have not had a personal website since I graduated undergrad over 20 years ago, or something like that. That math, I like math, but I forget it on the fly.

[00:08:28] Mrinali: I think passwords are unpopular among design recruiters, at least. I'd spoken to someone at Meta and they said if we don't have your password, we just move on, because they cannot afford to spend that time on a candidate. I also worked at Amazon's innovation lab, so we used to work with really sensitive stuff, things that could possibly be on Amazon's roadmap. So I would highly recommend going the deck route. What I do is put in a Dropbox link and it goes directly to my deck. The other thing you could do is change code names. Don't talk about the specifics of the technology; focus on your process, because they're really trying to see how you're thinking about the problem.

[00:09:16] Ryan: Another way to look at it could be to use it as a way to get your foot in the door, a conversation piece. So: this is the work that I'm able to show publicly. However, I have other work, I'm comfortable showing it one-on-one, and I'd love to talk you through that work.

[00:09:29] Kelly: Yeah, and even just a slide that says this work is under NDA and is only for this hiring panel or this hiring loop. People get that.

[00:09:41] Ryan: I love this next question.

[00:09:42] Kelly: Me too. I started giggling.

[00:09:43] Ryan: Okay: resume length for senior and experienced roles.

[00:09:47] Kelly: It's the old rule of one page, and that's really hard to do. Even the last time I had a paper resume and went to an interview with it in hand, it was two and a half pages long, and that was 10 years ago. We do not need a one-page resume. And stop.

[00:10:05] Ryan: I have a question here. Just a quick show of hands: how many people are on LinkedIn? That's pretty much everyone. I look at it sometimes and wonder, do we even need resumes anymore? Because if you're working in product and tech, you have a LinkedIn. It should be an up-to-date LinkedIn. I'm not saying you have to be active posting all the time, but you should have an up-to-date LinkedIn. When I've looked at candidates and I see that they have their LinkedIn on their resume, or I get the person's name, that's the first place I go, just because it's easy to scroll through and see everything. So this whole idea of "I need to have a resume in a PDF, and I'm going to print it out and hand it to someone," I feel like that is an older way of thinking about presenting yourself.

[00:10:49] Mrinali: I have a slightly different take on resumes. I feel like the more I grow, the shorter my resume gets. But honestly, if I was starting at a junior level right now, I would just use an AI tool and make your resume specific to the job, because what you're trying to do is get through the ATS, right? Even better, if you're a hustler, just network and talk to people and go around the ATS, is what I would say. Hiring managers have the ability to create their own funnel of people.

[00:11:29] Not all hiring managers do this, but I at least look at all my LinkedIn messages when I'm hiring, and I go through the portfolio, and then I will shoot a message to my design recruiter saying, "Hey, I like this person. Just check if they're legally allowed to work at Ford, and then let's have them in for a conversation."

Getting around the ATS

[00:11:47] Ryan: I want to get back to questions, but you've mentioned the ATS a few times now. So let's talk about advice you might have in terms of how somebody could get around the ATS.

[00:12:02] Kelly: Prior to getting to that: stop with the buckshot applications. Technology makes it really easy to just apply, apply, apply, apply, and then you feel very defeatist very quickly, because you get the automated response in less than three minutes: "Thank you for applying. We've decided you're not a good fit." And you're shocked: how is that possible? But in order to be more successful, exactly as Mrinali said, your resume needs to be probably around 60 to 70% matching what that job description is.

[00:12:36] And if you're taking that time, to your last point of "can I legally hire them," you also will not apply to a job that you legally can't be hired for. My last job posting, I had 700 applicants in three days, and at least a third of them I legally could not hire. It is a burden on me and my recruiting team to go through all of that. Our time is spent looking at people that we can't hire, and we miss the ones that we can.

[00:13:03] Ryan: I just want to make one more comment to get back into these questions. I think another great way to get around it is what all of you are doing right now. You're at a conference with, I'm assuming, a lot of people you don't know. Talk to people. If you're sitting down and there's somebody next to you that you haven't met yet, introduce yourself, because referrals are really the best way to get through those systems, in my opinion. If you have a referral, then you don't have to deal with these nonsense screeners that people go through. I know a lot of people who say, "I applied, then five minutes later I got a rejection back." There's no way that was looked at. But if you find somebody at a company and say, "Hey, I love the work you do"...

[00:13:44] Kelly: That's how I got my job right now. I was here at this conference a year ago, and I joked around saying I'm trying to build my team up to put myself out of a job. That's the goal of a leader. And then the following Monday I was told to go. Then I used this network and other things and found a referral that got me connected, and I talked and talked, and lo and behold, I learned enough about the company to feel confident that I was the right person for that position, which then boosted and enabled me to be successful in that interview process.

[00:14:12] Mrinali: My last hire, the way she came to me was she set up a little recording of her talking about why Ford. She was being very intentional: "I want to specifically work at Ford," and not just, "Hey, I'm really interested in your role, here's my portfolio and my resume." That really spoke to me, and she's turned out to be such a great hire. I love that she put in that effort.

The biggest mistakes candidates make

[00:14:42] Ryan: Let's go to this top question. This one's been here a while, and it's been jumping back and forth and got back into first place here. What are the biggest mistakes you see candidates make? Mrinali, do you want to start with that one?

[00:14:54] Mrinali: I think not having the confidence as a candidate to just reach out to the hiring manager. Find the hiring manager, find the human behind the job, and get in touch with them, because you've already got a no; you might just get a yes, right? And then let AI do the ATS stuff, so that you can be more intentional about what companies you are specifically looking to get a job at, and go that slightly extra mile to say why this company and why I'm excited. So dive deeper into humans and let AI do the ATS stuff. I think that kind of hybrid approach should get you to cover a lot of ground.

[00:15:38] Kelly: Mine's a two-part answer. The first one is clearly they're not active listening. I start most hiring manager interviews by saying, "In the next two minutes, tell me who you are," and then I get a five-minute-long backstory starting from high school, and this is somebody in their 30s. That then continues to show throughout the rest of the questions: they're not concise, or they didn't practice and prepare, so they're stumbling along the way. I'm getting more information than I need, but I'm struggling to even connect the threads, whereas professionally they thought that was one of their strengths. So then internally I get distracted, because I'm thinking, wait, this skill is lacking.

[00:16:25] But it's practice with a friend. Really understand the question that's being asked. If you're confused, ask them to repeat it, or say, "You said this. This is how I'm interpreting it. Am I correct?" and then move on. Especially in design and research, that also shows you have those skills to do it in your day-to-day.

[00:16:46] Ryan: I think another thing to think about is to really advocate for yourself. I've talked to a lot of people who are going through interview processes and they hear, "Okay, it's Wednesday, and I'll get back to you Thursday or Friday with next steps," and then three weeks go by and you don't hear anything. I know ghosting seemed to get some votes up there. Speak up for yourself. It's okay to email somebody a few times to follow up and see what's going on. And if anyone out here is in the hiring position or a recruiter and you're one of the ghosters, step back and maybe think about that. Because when you're ghosting people, you're creating a really bad candidate experience. And I think it's really fair to think: if this is the experience as a candidate, maybe this isn't a company where I actually want to be.

Regrets, and assessing emotional intelligence

[00:17:33] Ryan: Okay. Do you have any hires you regret?

[00:17:38] Kelly: No. Even the ones that have completely bombed, because I am a product of my experiences: the good, the bad, the confusing, the weird, the surprising, all of that. In the moment, when it was a big struggle, or I felt like I failed them as a manager, or it even impacted my own employment stability and put me at risk, I might have felt regret. But at the end of the day, we only learn and truly understand through reflecting on our actions of the past.

[00:18:09] Mrinali: Yeah. No regrets.

[00:18:14] Ryan: What sort of questions or prompts do you use to determine a candidate's emotional intelligence and soft skills?

[00:18:20] Mrinali: It's a great question. For us, we do a lot of behavioral questions. I think it stems a lot from my time at Amazon. We have a set of leadership principles that we vet candidates by, and we have a question bank that's available online that you can see. For designer roles it's usually bias for action, disagree and commit, those kinds of leadership principles. And talking about preparing, and what mistakes candidates make: they expect to have those scenarios offhand and that it'll just come to them.

[00:18:58] For me, I had two pages of prompts for each leadership principle when I was interviewing for Amazon, just for me to remember, because you're in that state of fight or flight and there's nervous energy when you're interviewing. So you want to really be prepared, and ask a friend to go through the behavioral questions with you, and practice how you would respond in the interview. That is the kind of preparation: how can I make it easier for my hiring team to judge my own soft skills and how I behave in certain situations?

[00:19:36] You should make notes even at your job: how did I handle this conflict, how did I handle changing requirements? Because that's just the job, right? No job comes without conflict and changes. So they're really looking beyond the portfolio: how is this person going to behave at work, in a really short period of time? If you can make it easier for the hiring team in any way, I would highly recommend it.

[00:20:01] Kelly: I have a list of interview questions that I ask as a hiring manager. These are publicly available, so if you're interested in them, feel free to ping me if they're not readily linked from my LinkedIn. Right now I'm at a company that has former Amazon leadership, so we have the exact same Amazon leadership principles. It was refreshing to see that my questions very much aligned to theirs, even without me being aware of them ahead of time.

[00:20:24] The spicy question I always ask is usually a two-parter: tell me about a time you had a peer you liked hanging out with outside of work, but any time you got put on a project with them you wanted to crawl into a hole. Or tell me about the characteristics of somebody that you love working with. I'm trying to understand how self-aware the candidate is, because that is usually the highest signal. The more self-aware they are, the more they understand how to navigate the messiness of human relationships. And that is only getting harder the more we work fully remote, because then you don't have those times between active projects to actually hang out, get to know a person and build that trust in the background.

[00:21:16] Ryan: I think one way to evaluate it, which might actually help back into the question, is what I'll call the one-on-one test. I'll ask myself: is this a person that I want to have a one-on-one with every week? And usually if the answer is no, it's because of soft skills or emotional intelligence. So when you're interviewing, keep those things in mind.

[00:21:33] Mrinali: I shouldn't be saying this, and my manager is probably going to kill me, but he says within two minutes of the interview, he knows. I feel like we tend to get trained for bias internally, but you don't realize that you've honed this intuition of knowing people since you were a baby, right? So honestly, if you can hang out with the person, if you are open to one-on-ones with this person weekly, and the soft skills are there, the technical skills will come. They'll grow.

[00:22:06] Kelly: Somebody asked that question earlier: if you know that it's a no early on, what do you do? I end the interview. I interviewed a candidate recently, not for my team but as part of an interview loop, and asked one of those spicy questions: what frustrates you most about your current job or company that is the catalyst for you looking somewhere else? I was just trying to understand why they're motivated, if they currently have a job. And I was essentially told, "Oh, I'm so tired of the red tape." They worked in e-commerce, and I work in healthcare.

[00:22:42] I essentially said, "Excuse me, can you be more specific? Because I've worked in e-commerce a lot in my history, and I know that there's red tape, and I was really curious whether it's a specific thing." He said, "Oh no, I was at a startup and I could just text the users, and we saw stability, and I want to get back to that." I said, "I don't think this is the right job for you." He asked, "Why not?" We are doing HIPAA compliance as we speak. You are going to come up against a red wall. So again, going back to it: please be specific in your job applications. It will save everybody a lot of headache.

The wave emoji and design challenges

[00:23:23] Ryan: Okay. This next question does a great job of asking two questions while also answering the question at the same time, so kudos to whoever thought of it. Thoughts on the wave emoji?

[00:23:33] Kelly: Are you talking about this one or the actual wave?

[00:23:37] Ryan: I think they're talking about...

[00:23:42] Kelly: I think it comes down to: we all have our own personal tastes and preferences. There are going to be some people that are super excited by that, and others that see it as a gimmick. So it comes back to understanding who your audience is, how you perceive your audience, and how your audience perceives you. If it's something that you want to do, that excites you, and you want to be part of that similar type of community, then you'll be successful with that community. But if you're at a point where you need a job, but you still want and prefer to have a job in this space, then you need to maybe not quiet parts of your personality, but understand that it will require a more generic presentation until you start meeting folks one-on-one.

[00:24:31] Mrinali: Irrelevant. The wave emoji is irrelevant to my decision-making process. So use it, don't use it, I don't care.

[00:24:40] Ryan: We can move on from the wave emoji, because there was another question that came up, and I don't know where it went, but it did have votes and then all of a sudden it got passed. I do want to hit this one: design challenges, take-home tests, whiteboard sessions. Where do you all stand on that? Because I'll say right now, I think they suck.

[00:24:58] Kelly: They do suck.

[00:25:00] Mrinali: I have a lot more to talk about. We all see these differently.

[00:25:03] Ryan: So let's get into it.

[00:25:05] Mrinali: I feel differently about a lot of things. I think design challenges are a great way to understand how people think and assess behavioral stuff, like soft skills and team dynamics, and how they get along with people that they don't know. If you are a startup and you are doing a design challenge, pay them really well. I know a startup that paid a candidate $500 if they were not converted to a hire, and I think that is just a respectful way of compensating someone for their time.

[00:25:42] On one side, I would say if you're doing a design challenge and you're not paying someone for it, do it in person during the interview, and don't ask for free work. Give them a prompt like, "How would you create a home on Mars?" It's not something that we're going to do, but I just want to know how you think, and how you go from broad, to getting requirements, to figuring out a solution.

[00:26:06] Ryan: I mean, if... Oh, sorry, go ahead.

[00:26:08] Kelly: No, you go.

[00:26:09] Ryan: I would say if you're going to do it, at least make it fair. Don't expect somebody to come in and have a whiteboarding session about your business that they know nothing about, and evaluate them based on that, because then you're immediately putting a candidate at a disadvantage.

[00:26:21] Kelly: It goes back to something that one of the other speakers said about being aware of your own biases, and pay them. I've had a variety of careers. I've worked in consumer goods, where I've designed the little tchotchkes, and I've seen work that I designed for a job interview then out in the world at Claire's and Limited, and it's like, wait a second, I didn't get paid for that.

[00:26:44] But make the design challenges in the space cross-functional. You go to undergrad and you rarely have experiences working with engineering, working with marketing, working with the business team. That's actually where the design challenges are less about whether you can tactically do this thing. I go back to: how do you communicate? Do you understand the problem? I want to understand how you think. But also, for those who are hiring managers or part of that interview loop, make sure you align as a team before and after on what things you're looking for, and then assign specific behavioral principles to each person, so that you're not trying to watch out for every single thing at the same time.

Rapid fire: researchers, cold applying and new designers

[00:27:30] Ryan: We're going to rapid fire these last few, because we have a minute left. Let's try to do as much as possible as a yes or no. Let's do the research one, because it's tied, so it can go either way. Do researchers need portfolios?

[00:27:41] Kelly: Yes.

[00:27:43] Mrinali: I don't hire researchers. Don't know.

[00:27:44] Kelly: Yes, they do. Storytelling. Happy to talk more later.

[00:27:49] Ryan: What makes or breaks a candidate?

[00:27:52] Kelly: Going back to: do I want to have a one-on-one with this person? I'm really invested in people development, so it's more: do I see a spark in them, and do I want to help them 10x themselves? Whether they want to continue growing into higher levels or stay where they are, but stay active in how technology changes.

[00:28:08] Mrinali: I think intent to do really well at Ford, being able to communicate and be articulate about your work, and just generally being a person that would add to the culture.

[00:28:19] Ryan: I'm with you there. Does cold applying still work? I'm going to say no.

[00:28:23] Kelly: No.

[00:28:24] Mrinali: No.

[00:28:25] Ryan: Okay. And we have nine seconds. Do we have anything? "Do you usually know within five minutes?"

[00:28:29] Kelly: I answered that one already.

[00:28:30] Ryan: You did answer that one. We're at zero. The last one: in our new world, where AI-augmented senior talent seems to be the new standard, how do new designers make it into the industry?

[00:28:49] Kelly: I love it. That's a good one. I think you need to look at three things. One is how do you scale yourself with AI? Look at the workflows that you already have and what a design-to-code tool can take away from you. Then double down on the things that truly make you human. Double down on knowing your customer, double down on knowing the business, and then join those dots, so that AI takes on the more production, menial tasks.

[00:29:17] Mrinali: This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and I'm concerned about that chasm that's growing, because AI is augmenting a lot of the junior talent stuff. I'm happy to talk further, since we are past time, but find side projects, find community organizations where you can continue to upskill those tactical skills while learning AI, to help you get viewed at, or have those tactics for, that senior level even if you haven't had three to five years of experience. This is the problem I'm trying to solve, so hit me up. This is my idea space. I'm happy to help.

[00:29:52] Ryan: I think we're all passionate about this topic, so feel free to hit us up. Thank you all so much for all the questions. Hopefully this was a useful panel.

[00:30:01] Kelly: Thank you.