Update Your Resumé

You’re reading an excerpt of Land Your Dream Design Job, a book by Dan Shilov. Filled with hard-won, personal insights, it is a comprehensive guide to landing a product design role in a startup, agency, or tech company, and covers the entire design interview process from beginning to end, for experienced and aspriring designers. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

Before diving into the portfolio, start with your resume or LinkedIn. When someone will be looking over your profile, they’ll want to understand your story and have the right context when looking through your work. A lot of these initial impressions are based on quick scans of your profile.

• Where are you coming from?

• What have you done in the past?

• What impact were you able to deliver?

This is why it’s important to get the right version of your story out there. The combination of your work history and portfolio gives the recruiter and hiring manager confidence that you’ll be able to do the work and that you’re a reliable hire.

Generally, a recruiter or a hiring manager will skim through your profile to learn more about:

• You. Who are you, how do you see yourself, what is your unique angle, and what strengths do you bring to the table? While they won’t necessarily get all the information here (as usually this comes from your portfolio and subsequent interviews), this is where your pitch comes in to set the right expectations and help the viewer connect the dots between what you say you do and what you’ve done in the past, as well as the work that you’re interested in doing in the future.

• Work experience. How long have you been in this industry and what is your career and background like? If you’ve worked with recognizable tech companies (Uber, Apple, Airbnb), it’s usually a plus since they have rigorous standards and are well known. But if you haven’t worked at a well-known company, that’s not a minus either because, in the end, it’s more about what you’ve done rather than where you’ve done it.

• Your title. Titles are pretty inflated, so a hiring manager might skip over that, but it should give them a rough benchmark of where you are in your career.

• Your responsibilities. You might have worked at Apple, but what did you actually do there? What teams did you work on? The focus is on the work that was done and the complexity that you’ve encountered.

• Your impact. What outcomes were you able to achieve?

​important​ You might not have worked for the big tech companies. You might not have that magical five-plus years of experience. That’s all fine. What you can do is show how you were able to achieve the five years of experience in two years at a small company with outsize impact. Outcomes are key. What metric were you able to move? What value were you able to bring to the team? Emphasize a few key outcomes that truly moved the needle.

If you don’t have concrete numbers, how else can you provide evidence of the impact you made? Perhaps there’s a strong qualitative signal you got from user research that showed your work made improvements compared to the past experience. If you don’t have that, ask your customers for a testimonial or a quote. You can even supplement that with an audio recording (with their permission) in your portfolio to make the story come to life.