Jared Spool, the Maker of Awesomeness and co-founder of Center Centre UIE, is here to share some great insights. We discuss the steps you should be taking before leaving your UX Schooling, and what you can do to help you secure a job after graduation and avoid those first-year growing pains.
Additionally, we jump to the other side of the table in the hiring process. Learn how to streamline and hire better candidates.
Find Jared:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmspool/
Center Centre UIE: https://www.uie.com/
Please consider subscribing on any of the popular podcasting platforms.
Designed Today brings you insights to help bridge the world of Design & Business. Learn how you can improve your design, branding, marketing, and advertising skills all in one place. In this show, we’ll explore the startup world, flexing the entrepreneurial muscles, from a user experience perspective.
Episode #93 – Podcast Transcription.
Dillon Winspear (00:00)
Welcome back everyone to Design today.
What’s going on everybody? This is Design today and that was an intro that you will never hear again. I got an awesome episode lined up for you today. I’ve got Jared Spool, ready to chat with everyone in the Design today community. I’m so glad that you’re here. Let me tell you a little bit about Jared Spool. If you’ve been living under a rock, and you’ve never heard of Jared Spool before, then you are in for a treat today. More likely, you have heard him speak. At some occasion, you’ve maybe seen one of his you know, talks on YouTube or something like that. Jared Spool is a maker of awesomeness. That’s kind of the title he gives himself but I get back that he is a maker of awesomeness. And specifically, at a school that he helped co found called Center Center-UIE. Center Center is a school that he helped co found to help create industry ready user experience designers. We’ll talk a bit about that on the show today. In his 43 years of experience that he’s been in the tech field, he’s worked with hundreds of organizations. He’s written two books, and publish hundreds of articles and podcasts and tours the world speaking to audiences everywhere. So we are in for a treat. On this episode of Design today, we’re going to get into a couple different things here. First, we’re looking a little bit about the steps that you should be taking before you leave your UX design school. What should you be doing to prepare for a career in UX? And, you know, what can you be doing now to help secure a job once you start applying. So we’ll look a little bit about how to first apply for a UX job, what that first UX job looks like, and then the growing pains that come with your first year of UX experience and what you can do to overcome those. All that and more on this episode of Design today. So without further ado, let’s get into it. Design today, featuring Jared Spool right now. Jared Spool, thank you for joining me. This is awesome.
Jared Spool (22:07)
Thank you, Dillon. It’s awesome for me.
Dillon Winspear (02:11)
Oh, you’re too kind because I know you do this all the time. And the fact that you would say yes to someone like myself is quite the honor. So I appreciate everything that you’re doing. I know you got a busy day in a busy morning. Thank you.
Jared Spool (02:21)
Oh, wow. Yeah, I’m excited to be here.
Dillon Winspear (02:25)
Well, that’s fantastic. You know, you are a man of many talents. And when I tell people that we are doing a podcast recording with Jared Spool, there’s not a person who doesn’t get a little bit giddy because they’ve heard some of the things that you’ve done, they’ve read quotes from Jared Spool, they’ve been engaged in conversations with you. And they know that you’ve just got a wealth of background and knowledge. And, you know, I’m probably buttering you up quite a bit here. But it’s the truth. I mean, to have someone like Jared Spool on the podcast is going to be quite the treat for everyone listening here. So now we’ve got a cool topic to talk about. Before we get into it too deeply. I want to give those people who are maybe kind of stuck in Iraq and never heard the name Jared Spool before an opportunity to hear a little bit about what you’ve been up to-.
Jared Spool (03:09)
Really, people who actually haven’t heard?
Dillon Winspear (03:11)
No, I don’t know about that. Tell them UX design, they’ve heard the name Jared Spool. But tell the guests, those who are listening a little bit about what you’ve been up to recently.
Jared Spool (03:22)
Oh, recently, a few years back, we started a school, we started a new company, which is called Center Center, which became a school for UX designers. And most recently, we’ve sort of been expanding that into UX leadership, and growing our touch of sort of, how do we get better products and services delivered from companies and we realized a few years back that we needed more leaders who understood how to strategically do that. So that’s what we’ve been working on.
Dillon Winspear (04:07)
At the school that you started?
Jared Spool (04:09)
Me and my co-founder, Leslie Jensen.
Dillon Winspear (04:14)
Very cool. And I assume that’s a online school.
Jared Spool (04:17)
No. Right now. It’s an offline school. It’s an in-person school normally, but we had just graduated a cohort before the pandemic started and we’re waiting for this to pass before we start another one. It’s an in-person program. The Center Center program, the UX designer program is in-person because it’s really sort of a very interactive high touch. There’s a lot of leadership components and elements to it. The new leadership thing that we’re doing, that’s all online. We created a community called leaders of awesomeness and that community is where we host the online UX Leaders Program.
Dillon Winspear (05:08)
Cool. How many people did you have in your most recent cohort?
Jared Spool (05:13)
We had six graduates and the next cohort we have 12. And then after that, we’re hoping for 24. So was grabbing it.
Dillon Winspear (05:24)
You said you started this couple years ago. How many cohorts have you taught?
Jared Spool (05:28)
It’s a two-year program.
Dillon Winspear (05:30)
Oh, it’s a two-year program?
Jared Spool (05:31)
Yeah. So it’s two years, 40 hours a week, every day, you come in, #05:35# designer. In that process, you’re actually designing so you actually leave the program with two years of experience, which gives you a good starting point. When we set out, the thing we realized, well, you know, we having a background in UX, we do everything with research. And we started by researching with hiring managers, we figured if we could deliver graduates who hiring managers really wanted to hire, we would succeed for the students. So we started by looking at what hiring managers needed in the sort of overwhelming thing we heard from hiring managers was that they needed designers who could get to work right away, and that a lot of programs teach you good book knowledge, but it takes a good six months before you’re producing work as an individual contributor when you join a program right out of school. And so, we wanted to sort of bridge that gap, and give the students enough experience during the program that they’d actually be able to start with, and be productive in the first week. So we call it industry ready. So it takes two years to get you industry ready. That’s why it’s a long in-depth program.
Dillon Winspear (07:15)
And what were the students’ backgrounds prior to the cohort, were they UX designers, have they already gone through a boot camp or are they switching for UX?
Jared Spool (07:21)
Oh, no, they weren’t designers. In fact, one of the students had never heard of UX until she was applying for the program, she was an illustrator. She had training in graphic arts but her boyfriend had told her about our program, and she had no idea what UX was. So in the interview process, she was learning about what we did. And then blew us away with how quickly she picked it up. She’s now a rockstar designer.
Dillon Winspear (07:53)
What was it about this candidate that made you guys want to accept her into the cohort then?
Jared Spool (07:59)
Well, so we don’t require UX design as a requirement, because we’re making UX designer, so you don’t have to be a UX designer to become one. But you have to, there are actually nine qualities that we look for in a candidate, and you have to have those qualities. You have to have a history of design. And her story was interesting, in that she had been, you know, she wasn’t making money as an illustrator. She was working in a fabric store. And she was redesigning how the employees did things like restock the shelves and the fabric store. She didn’t know that that’s what she was doing. But that’s what she was doing. And so, when we were talking to her through the application process, because our application process is basically a series of interviews, it’s five and a half hours of interviews and through the application process, all these stories were coming out about different ways she redesigned the store that she worked in. I was like, Oh, yeah, you’re a designer. You just don’t know you’re a designer.
Dillon Winspear (09:05)
That’s awesome. Well, that’s really cool. I mean, I’m sure it kept you busy then. What have you been doing since that cohort ended? Are you revising the curriculum or what do you guys working on?
Jared Spool (09:16)
Yeah, we’ve done a major revision of the curriculum, really updating it. And then we’ve been focusing on two things. One is fundraising. So the way the program works is that we don’t expect the students to be able to pay for it. During the program, they get to pay for it after they graduate once they have salaries. And the money that is used to pay for the program is actually donated. So the way it works is the students are given a very low interest loans with very long term so they have 20 years to pay off this very low interest loan. So their monthly payments are going to be very small and the monthly payments don’t even start till they graduate, they’ve had three months to look for a job. All of our graduates in the first cohort found their jobs within six weeks. So they were actually making money before they had to make any payments. And the money that is loaned to them is actually all donated, which means that when they pay it back, they’re actually making their donation back to the nonprofit fund that funds the student loans. And then the next student borrows that money. So it just keeps propagating. And it allows us to grow the program organically. And the students just don’t have to worry about money, they even get a living stipend out of it while they’re there. The school is based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, so they get this living stipend, which that you know, you can live pretty well off the stipend and then they come to school, they can focus on just being a student at UX design for two years. And then they go off, get a great job and start paying back the loan. And every payment they make goes to another student who can then use it for education, so they’re always paying it forward. We call it the giving forward student loan.
Dillon Winspear (11:19)
That’s really cool. I mean, it sounds very thorough and thought out and it sounds like it’s tailored for the students who are obviously going to succeed. You need them to be industry ready, if that’s how the next person-.
Jared Spool (11:33)
Absolutely, because all the monies donated, and it’s all we were able to take control the terms and we’ve been able to do things like during the pandemic, we’ve just made it so that they don’t know, they don’t have to make any payments. And if they make payments, it goes 100% to principle, which means that they can actually reduce the amount of interest that they’re making. So if they happen to be in a company where they’re currently employed, and they’re getting paid, they can pay off their loan faster. And if they are in a situation where they’re not getting paid, because you know unemployment is high right now. They don’t have to worry about it. So we’ve been able to do things like that just to make it more humane. We realize that there’s no reason to be stressing out about. So just go get a good job and make your payments and we’ll be fine.
Dillon Winspear (12:33)
You know, there’s a lot of gurus online that you can find that will teach UX, there’s a lot of boot camps available where you can do a 12-week course to get a UX certification. But what I like about what you’re describing is, you’ve got some skin in the game, like you’re putting your money where your mouth is because they need to land a job after graduation in order to keep the program rolling forward.
Jared Spool (12:54)
Absolutely. That’s exactly our take on this, is that we need them to get a good job, one. Then that not only helps them, but gets the hiring managers to say, yeah, I want more people from your program. So we are very committed. And we work very closely with the hiring managers to make sure that what we’re delivering our graduates will meet their future needs. So the hiring managers are involved throughout the program. Throughout the two years, pretty much every one of our students was hired by somebody who had been to the school, understood what we were doing, met the students in advance, I had worked in several cases, I have actually worked on project with them because the students are always working on projects. So it’s built in and I see all these folks coming out of other programs and they’re saying, you know, I graduated from this program four months ago, and I’m still looking for my first job. And I’m like, well, is the program giving you any help? And they’re like, well, you know, they send my resume around. I’m like, no, that’s no help because while you were there, they would have been making connections for you and getting your work in front of people so that the day you’re out, you had offers out.
Dillon Winspear (14:22)
Yeah, that’s really cool. Well, that’s not exactly what we’re here to talk about. But it is a close tie in because we are going to spend some significant time talking about the hiring process. And one thing that I liked in our kind of a pre call that you and I had is we weren’t just going to talk about one side of the table in the interview, because there are two sides in the interviewing process. And we’re going to dive into both the sides for the interviewee and the interviewer. Because you’ve learned a few things that in the interviewing process that get a little bit tricky, get a little bit dicey and maybe potentially we’re not doing it right. So I want to first start off by talking about the interview. You talked last time about there’s some things that are working and not working for those interviewees. Can you touch on that a little bit?
Jared Spool (15:06)
Yeah, I mean, what I’m hearing from folks is that they’re struggling, especially folks who are more junior in their career. But, you know, right now, we’re in a situation where, you know, job hunting is always a supply and demand balance. And last year, the demand on the hiring side was much higher than the supply.
Dillon Winspear (15:42)
Locally, or are you saying like, nationwide, globally, locally, what are you thinking?
Jared Spool (15:48)
Globally, for the most part. I mean, there are still regions where UX is still starting to catch on. But when you look at Europe, and large parts of Asia, and definitely the Americas, there were way more openings, and there were designers to fill them. Now, the boot camps and things like that are changing that up a little, but a lot of the hiring managers because those folks are not industry ready, they get overlooked, unfortunately, and they don’t get to do that they deserve because they’re missing that sort of critical experience element. That’s for people who had any amount of experience and the demand was much higher than the supply. Finding a designer was really, really hard for a lot of managers. The pandemic and then the subsequent closing of organizations and shut downs has put a lot of people out on the market. And so now, the supply and demand has sort of changed. So I’m hearing stories of people who are submitting hundreds of applications and going on hundreds of interviews, in order to land a job. And it’s taking days, you know, months. A good friend of mine just posted today that he had been looking for 140 days, he’d submitted 128 applications, gone on 50 something interviews, and finally got his job as a Senior designer. And that’s a big switch from where we were a year ago, wouldn’t have happened a year ago.
Dillon Winspear (17:53)
You know, it’s interesting. Here in Utah, I feel like we’re on the other side of that spectrum. Like if we look locally, we’ve got a handful of boot camps here. And then we got a couple universities teaching UX as well. Now there is kind of a tech bubble here. I know you’ve visited Utah, you’re aware.
Jared Spool (18:11)
Oh, yeah.
Dillon Winspear (18:12)
I always felt that the supply and demand was not in favor of these recent graduates that there’s way too much supply and not enough demand. And that’s why students weren’t getting hired.
Jared Spool (18:20)
Well, the graduates without experience are sort of in a different place as organizations have not sort of shifted to understand how to take advantage of people who are new and need their first experience. Unfortunately, it’s a structural issue. What happens is, UX teams grow very organically, they start out usually as a single person in an organization. Right? It’s not unusual you know, when a startup goes from its very early stage into, you know, okay, now we’re shipping production, to immediately grow to 10, or 12, or 20 developers. But UX teams stay very small for a very long time. And even in large organizations that have hundreds of developers. There may only be a small number of UX people. Until the organization sort of discovers that there’s competitive value and having user experience as be the best it could possibly be. And then suddenly, there’s an investment but that investment, often the way that investment works, is the investment is an investment of: we need to scale this up really fast. So what the hiring management does is that they look for more senior people, people who can come in, start working right away, and begin to really work hard. And so they build up these UX groups. And once a UX group starts to build up, it tends to build up really fast. But it builds up with being very top heavy, they hire very senior people thinking that what they want are the best and the brightest, and they’re going to build this team of all stars, and they’re going to create this organization that can do all these things. And while it’s growing, that makes a lot of sense, but there’s moments where the growth starts to slow down, and the work becomes more production. And the problem that these larger teams have is that now they’ve got all these sort of senior really great people who are doing what we would call production work, and production work is sort of day to day. Here’s a problem to solve with a screen fix, you know, make the screen work, create wireframes, maybe do some usability testing, but it’s very localized, the problems are very repetitive, they’re not challenging, they’re not sort of big picture stuff anymore, they’re just, you know, we have to get all the pieces to be as good as all the other pieces. So we focus on that. And that becomes very routine very quickly. But they have their most senior people doing this work. And because they have their most senior people doing this work, the work itself is being is not being done effectively. And they get themselves into this #22:10#. They’re so busy doing this production work, that they don’t think they can bring in somebody who’s less experienced, has many coaching and mentorship and training and sort of bring up what their skills are. So they keep doing the production work because it has to get done. And they don’t get to tackle the big problems. And eventually, what starts to happen is the designers start to get really bored of the work and frustrated by this and they start to leave. And in order to replace them, they replace them with a senior person, because that’s all they really know how to hire, and they don’t have an infrastructure set up to deal with more junior people. And that’s the problem, you get into the sort of #22:52#. So you go into a market like central Utah, and what you find is that there’s a bunch of senior folks. And the moment they say I’m looking for a job, they get like two offers the same wing, while you’ve got a whole bunch of junior folks who are looking for months who are not at work. And the only way to really fix this is to take a step back and to say, how can we structure the work? How can we start to bring in one, then two, then four, then eight, Junior folks and train them up to do that day to day production work, and then start giving those more senior people more lead work where they can go out and solve bigger problems in the organization, in the product, in the service and the way the organization produces products and services, actually tackle bigger things, actually make the product more competitive, make the organization more effective, and grow into those more senior roles and be doing the work that senior people should be doing. But that takes leadership that is realizing that they need to make this shift. And there’s some real rough turbulence in that change. When you first start, and if you’re, you know, nose to grindstone trying to get production stuff out saying, well, we’re going to deliberately slow that down so that we can restructure. It’s a really hard problem.
Dillon Winspear (24:27)
Yeah, well, that makes a lot of sense. I’ve not framed it up in the way that you’re describing there. But it makes a lot of sense, because you’re 100% right. You know, there were a couple of layoffs, not necessarily during the pandemic, but in the previous year. And you know, when senior designers hit the market, you know, it was a feeding frenzy, and they were hit up by every big company that you can think of up and down Utah giving them offers. Meanwhile, the junior ones are sitting at home twiddling their thumbs. You know, I was on a coaching call last week with a candidate who said they applied for 240 positions. And that’s the most I’ve ever heard of. Previously, that was lower than 100 but this girl was saying that she’s had 240 applications, and she can’t get in anywhere. And I’m going, how do we miss that?
Jared Spool (25:09)
One of the problems is, the more you apply, the worse it gets. And so, instead of being more strategic, if you’re just blanketing your paperwork everywhere, it’s actually not helping you. And it comes off as being a bit desperate. Which recruiters can smell. And you know, the first question they ask is, why is this person so desperate? They might not be able to just get a job, and then there’s a reason for it. So that’s hurting people. And then, the other issue is that you’re not actually able to develop the relationship you need to do this. And this is one of the things that a lot of the boot camps, they don’t teach this stuff. This is something that we were very focused on in our program, which is that all jobs in particular, your first jobs are based on relationships. I mean, you can put your application and hope to win the resume letter, where you know, they’ll reach into the bucket, and they pull out a resume, and they call out your name. It’s like, oh, you get to do an interview. But I mean, you can see now the systems actually tell you in some cases that five, six hundred thousand people have applied for this job. What are the odds you’re going to get that position? You know, one in a thousand. But if you have a relationship with people who work in that organization, you have been talking to them, been learning about what they do, and gain some sort of way through that, you can skip the resume lotto, you can actually get them to talk to you about things that they know about you and have a conversation. People would much rather hire someone who they have a relationship with than someone who they’ve never met before. And so, if you’re blanketing your paperwork, across every organization, you’re not taking the time to build relationships with those organizations that actually might have eventually hired.
Dillon Winspear (27:31)
Yes, I like how you called it the resume lotto because I’ve used the analogy that it’s like playing the penny slot, right? You can go sit down at a penny slot machine and just pull, pull, pull, and you’re going to pull 240 times before you might win. And the winnings might not be great anyways, and so again, it’s just like, I don’t think the correct way of getting into position is these cold applications. I always try and share that you network into your first position.
Jared Spool (27:56)
Yeah, cold applications are the hiring managers’ last resort. They don’t want to hire people from cold applications, they’re not interested in cold application. So you’re not doing yourself any favors, right? Just going in that door. Again, I put some of the blame on the schools. They’re not doing the work that they need to be doing. The build-up, the reputation.
Dillon Winspear (28:29)
Sorry, I’m interrupting you, but I want to get to this point right here. So if these candidates that are still going to be continuing to come out of the boot camps, and their boot camp or their schooling might not be helping them, what should they be doing then instead through that process?
Jared Spool (28:45)
They need to be developing relationships. So they need to not just go to boot camp, but they need to be participating in meetups, they need to be engaging in the communities you know, there are several, very-. The thing about Center UI is there are very active groups that have regular meetups and people all know each other and you know, going to those things is a start. Getting to know the people there is great. Actually, becoming part of the organization and working on the organization. Other organizations always need volunteers to help organize meetings and bring refreshments and sit and take people’s names and working on those committees. People get to see your work ethic, they get to see how you meet commitments. You get to talk to them when they’re alone. In time you get to have chats about the work that they do. And you get to learn and they see what you’re interested in and what you want to learn, and those things are critical to success. And the one of the things that we would do in Center Center is we held workshops for senior managers. And in the same facilities that are not yet UX design, graduates were learning UX design, and we would all eat lunch together. And the students would come and sit down with these hiring managers, and we would teach the students how to have a conversation with a hiring manager, and how to talk about what they’re learning in the program, but also how to ask questions about what it’s like in their own company. So we had people from companies all over the world, what was it like to work there? And you know, what made the problems they were trying to solve interesting? And these are learned skills to be able to have these conversations. Yeah, so if you feel awkward about it, welcome to the club, we all feel awkward about it, don’t trust anybody who doesn’t feel awkward about it. But they’re necessary things. And now, those hiring managers are very much looking over every junior person they meet, thinking someday, I might want to hire this person. But they’re going to want to hire someone, you know, even when they are absolutely ready to bring in junior people. They’re going to want to start with junior people they know they can trust. So how do you earn trust in these organizations when you’re there, you’re present, you participate? This is absolutely key, and if you’re not doing these things, then there are other people who are. And over the years, I’ve been involved in dozens of UX and professional organizations. And I can tell you, the junior people who show up and are willing to volunteer for all the things and do all the things, they get noticed by every senior person who’s involved in that. Now that enthusiasm is contagious.
Dillon Winspear (32:23)
You know, and I think it’s important to point out as well that we’ve been talking about, you know, a lot of these junior levels who are coming out of schooling, or boot camps or whatever, and they’re trying to land that first position. But I also don’t think it ends after you’ve secured your first position, because eventually, there will be a second position and you continue to use your time to continue to cultivate more and more relationships. It’s an ongoing process. Is that accurate?
Jared Spool (32:47)
Yeah. I mean, here’s the ideal scenario, which, you know, senior people have figured out. Some, not all, and the ideal scenario is this: the moment you realize that the job you currently have is not the job you want to have, you know, in a few months, you start telling people, hey, I’m thinking about moving around. And in the ideal scenario, offers come in before you’ve actually decided to leave. You know, people are like, well, if you’re thinking you should call me, right, I want to know, the moment you are available. Because I’m thinking about stuff. You know, in the ideal scenario, not recruiters, but managers are popping you an email saying, Hey, I’m about to open a position, I want you to know, it’s going to open next week, and I wanted you to have it start off, right? They would love more than anything for you to be the first application and because as they were crafting the job description, they were thinking about you. And they were saying, how do we get a job that would be perfect with this person? So that’s your ideal scenario. And the only way you get that is to have these people who know your work and know what you’re capable of. And the only way to do that is by actually being there and talking about it. And at the same time, learning about what they’re working on.
Dillon Winspear (34:20)
So when we spoke last time, you mentioned that, you know, the hiring managers are screwing a lot of this process up, and that the hiring process needs to be designed. Can you speak a little bit to that? How do we go about designing the hiring process?
Jared Spool (34:35)
So it’s not hard to sort of sort hiring managers into hiring managers that know how to hire and hiring managers that don’t know how to hire though they often think they do. And, you know, I can spend 10 minutes with a hiring manager and tell you quite accurately which pile that hiring manager goes in.
Dillon Winspear (34:55)
What do you look at?
Jared Spool (34:59)
I look at their early process, I look at the how much definition they put into the job. Because the smart hiring managers will define the job in incredible detail as if they were designing an application, but they’re designing a position. And they’re thinking about it. So they know what the person who will fill the position will actually accomplish in their first year. In fact, one of the tricks that we teach when we’re training managers how to be in that pile of smart hiring managers is to write what we call the thank you note. And the thank you note is a thank you note that you are giving this new person a year after they’ve joined the company. And in that note, it describes every accomplishment that they made, and how each of those accomplishments helped the business grow and become better. And so, they start by looking at it with the end in mind. Lou Adler, who came up with the idea of performance-based hiring, he calls it hiring for the first anniversary, not for the first day. So what you’re doing is you’re thinking about that first year, and all the things that person will do. And then you step back, and you say, once you get everybody on board, because hiring is done as a team, in pretty much every organization, not a solo activity. If it’s a solo activity they’re doing it wrong because when you bring in a UX person, they’re going to work as a team. So everybody who’s going to interact with this person needs to have a say in the hiring process.
Dillon Winspear (36:59)
Are we talking about managers and developers as well?
Jared Spool (37:02)
Yes, absolutely. Because if they don’t have a say in this person, and more importantly, if they don’t understand why the person is showing up, that person will be underutilized. If a product manager doesn’t understand why you’re hiring a designer, that product manager will not interact with that designer, which means that designs will not get into the product. If we senior developers don’t understand why this designer, not just any designer, but this designer is coming in to work on this thing. They’re not going to make room in their projects to make sure that the designer has input into that project. So that thank you note needs to describe what projects that designer will have input into. And the leads of those projects have to be able to say, yes, if I had this person, I would make such good use of them. Or say, If I had this person, I would ignore them because they’re going to slow me down. Why are we hiring this person?
Dillon Winspear (38:10)
Now it’s sometimes hard to discern, just via interview, right. So I think it goes back into-, we talked about well, that’s why we network. That’s why we get to know him beforehand. Because there’s a lot of things that you can fake in an interview. But you mentioned when we got started that when you’re looking at candidates at Center Center, you’re looking for specific qualities in designers.
Jared Spool (38:31)
Right. So this is one of the things that the smart hiring managers do, they create these written documents that everybody has input into that says; this is what we are looking for in our candidates. And in the hiring process, we are looking for what’s called compliable evidence, and a compliable experience is if I’m hiring someone to come in and help me roll out a design system, I don’t want someone who’s never heard of a design system. I want someone who’s rolled out design systems before and not just any design system. If we’re rolling out a design system that has to deal with 30 legacy products, then I want someone who’s worked with design systems across large numbers of legacy products. I don’t want someone who’s only going to design system for products that haven’t been built yet. And everything is Greenfield, they won’t know how to deal with the legacy aspect. So we get into detail, really specific detail about what it is we’re trying to hire for. We start with that “Thank you” note, but then we go into great lengths. The next thing we grade is called a performance profile. And that’s what is the person’s performance going to be measured on? What are the things they’re going to accomplish? This is a six-page document that everybody who’s going to have any interaction looks at and says yes, this is the candidate. If we had someone to do all these things, this would be fantastic for our organization. When can they start? I want them now.
Dillon Winspear (40:11)
Well, I heard a kind of a catch 22 there, though, because we talked about, you know, if we’re looking for a designer who’s got a design system, background and legacy products, are we distributing them to junior designers who could potentially grow into that position?
Jared Spool (40:26)
Absolutely. Which is why when we hire junior designers, we call them early career designers. Some of them maybe switch career and are actually not Junior per se, but they’re early in their UX career. When we’re hiring them, we need a description that says, what are they going to accomplish in their first year, so we wouldn’t have them come on and lead a design system job, but we might have them be the person who does the vast quantity of production work that you need to do to support a design system across 30 products.
Dillon Winspear (41:00)
That makes sense.
Jared Spool (41:02)
So instead of saying, in the description, for the leader of that team, you’re also going to implement every little component, and you’re going to document every little component, and you’re going to create the unit test for every little component. And this thing’s going to have 170 components, and you’re responsible for doing all of that. No senior designer would take that job. But there’s any number of junior designers who would line up to be the ones who could say, that component you’re using when you pull down that menu on that system, I built that.
Dillon Winspear (41:38)
Well speak to me now a little bit, because if we’re planning for the first full year, it’s been my experience that there’s going to be ups and downs in that year, there’s a lot of growing pains in that first year. So how do you mitigate some of those growing pains and still feel like you’re cultivating the designer you’re aiming for at the year mark?
Jared Spool (41:56)
Growing pains for the designer.
Dillon Winspear (41:58)
But the designer is going to be feeling those growing pains in the business, who’s now working with this new designer, who is going to face those growing pains again? Because, again, we hired somebody junior, who’s not quite ready. There’s not a year mark yet.
Jared Spool (42:11)
So, but you need to think about what is that? What is it? What do you want from somebody? Right? On the hiring side, when you’re saying, okay, what’s going to accomplish in that first year? One of the questions you ask, is you take all the things that they need to do, and you say, Okay, what are the things they’re going to know coming in? And what are the things that we’re going to expect to teach them. And there’s no right or wrong on that list, we get to decide. And we adjust the list based on market availability. If we make the things that we expect them to know, too big, we’re going to limit the pool of possible candidates. If we make the things that we’re going to need to teach them, too big, we’re going to basically be opening a small school. If we don’t need them to have any previous experience in UX, to know anything about UX, we’re going to create a school for UX. So there’s some baseline. Well, they should have at least done this, or this or this. And we can even start with if we think that, you know, one of the boot camps is a great feeding process for our program for what we’re building. And we want to hire a bunch of people out of this thing, because we can get them fairly inexpensively, we get to really know the program, we can take the curriculum and say, okay, we know everybody coming out of this program will know these things. But in order to complete the job, what will we have to teach them? How do we set up some sort of training or mentorship or something that’s going to get them that extra thing? And what creates those bumps is surprises. Oh, I thought you knew this. Now I have to create on the spot of curriculum when I really expected you to be able to do this work. Now you can’t do the work, I have to have someone fill in to get the work done. While we train you to be able to do the work, I thought you already knew how to do it. So it takes ironing out and it takes practice but you can create programs, you can create a hiring program that uses a boot camp as a feeder program. And because you met with the instructors, and you know, if you’re smart, you’re meeting with the students while they’re in the program, you’re guest lecturing, you’re coming in, you’re giving them projects to work on. You’re spending time telling them what life is like at your organization. And then you’re picking out the ones who best meet your qualifications and you’re telling them what they have to prove to you they know and what they have to prove to you they can learn because when you hire junior people, what you’re really hiring is basically their ability to learn. Some people pick things up quick, some people pick things up slowly. So what I want to see for evidence from you as a candidate is how fast can you learn stuff? And this is one of the key mistakes I see in things like portfolios coming out of programs. Portfolio talks about all the things they did. But what they don’t tell me is, how did you learn to do that? Because chances are, I’m not going to hire you for anything you did in that program. It’s too basic, it’s too simple. I don’t care about it. I’m going to hire you for what you can demonstrate, you can learn. So tell me the beginning and end point of that project? Where were you in terms of what you knew how to do with the beginning? Where were you at the end? How long did it take you? What resources did you use when you got stuck? How did you plow through it? Did you give up? Did you just go ask somebody? Did you copy somebody else’s work? What did you do to get from here to here? And that’s what I want to know. Because you’re going to come to my place, and you’re going to get stuck, and I want to know how you’re going to deal with that.
Dillon Winspear (46:13)
That makes a lot of sense.
Jared Spool (46:15)
So this is the mistake that a lot of people make in their early work is I can’t see how-. You’re telling me you can do all these things. Okay, that’s great. I don’t care. Tell me how you learned to do all those things. That’s what I care about. If I’m a bad hiring manager, I’m going to ask you questions like, What does design mean to you? How do you define it? And when you look in the mirror, what sort of treat do you see?
Dillon Winspear (46:47)
You know, and I liked it, because you talked a bit about how we designed the process. Now you’ve done a lot of definition about what a design process looks like. And I think the repetitive cycle that happens is that, you know, when you got hired, your process wasn’t designed, and three years later, you’re now the hiring manager or part of the hiring process. And you’re just repeating what you went through. And now the next person goes through those pains as well.
Jared Spool (47:09)
Yeah, you’re repeating what you went through as a candidate, asking yourself what must have happened behind the scenes. It’s sort of like saying, well, I’ve eaten in a lot of restaurants. So I think I know how to run one.
Dillon Winspear (47:22)
And they’re just completely different experiences. And each of them needs to be tailored, or they need to be designed.
Jared Spool (47:28)
Exactly.
Dillon Winspear (47:29)
Yeah. Well, Jared, I appreciate your time. Unfortunately, we are at our time already. And I just want to make sure that I’m conscious of your schedule on whatnot. So we do have to put a bow on this. I want to allow you an opportunity, though, to kind of plug where people can find you and how they can reach out.
Jared Spool (47:46)
Well, you can find me at centercenter.com. You can find me at Twitter @JMschool, we’ve got this new program called leaders of awesomeness, which is at leaders got centercenter.com. And it’s free to join and right now it’s got 7100 UX leaders in it. And it’s a great place to come in and see what people are talking about. It focuses a lot on strategy, though, we’re rolling out some programs that are more for people in their early career. So we should have that in the spring. And it’d be great to have you.
Dillon Winspear (48:32)
Cool. I’ll be sure to drop some of those links into the show notes so people can find that a bit easier. Jared, thank you for your time. This has been an absolute pleasure for me.
Jared Spool (48:41)
Thank you. I know, if you’ve had half as much fun as (? iPad), then that means I’ve had twice as much fun.
Dillon Winspear (48:50)
Thank you very much. Hopefully this isn’t the end and maybe we can have you on the show again in the future.
Jared Spool (48:56)
Oh, that’d be lovely. I’d enjoy that very much.
Dillon Winspear (48:58)
Cool. Thank you everyone for joining. It’s been another episode of Design today. We’ll see you next time.
This was great. I live under a rock… But this was great to learn about the hiring process. I am print designer and I do 2d illustrations. I am not familiar with UX design so much. I definitely want to do something with this, once the school can open back up. Thanks for sharing!
Happy to hear you enjoyed this episode! Feel free to reach out as you continue on your journey!