job search requires research

What's in today's newsletter?

How designers actually get hired
Draft your dream design team or...
Your email as iMessages
1000+ textures in Figma
Launching products as a designer

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You know what kills me?

Watching designers waste 6 months applying to jobs they were never gonna get.

They're playing the wrong game.
The "spray and pray" method is dead.
Buried.

Back in the day, I could send my janky portfolio to 50 companies and get 10 interviews.

Now you're lucky to get 1.

Your job search is a matching problem, not a numbers game.

When you say "I'm open to any UX role"
Recruiters hear: "this person doesn't know what they're good at"

Here’s what I’ve seen work:

Pick your lane. Then dominate it.

Don't apply to FinTech, HealthTech, E-commerce, Blockchain, or whatever.

Pick ONE.

If you follow personal finance content, a FinTech interview might feel easy.

You already understand the problems.
Your interests leak into your answers.

A designer who tested dozens of budgeting apps crushes the FinTech interview.

Same skills as everyone else.
Different context.
Better fit.

Next: Stop sending the same resume everywhere.

That's like using the same opening line on Tinder. It screams: "I didn't even try"

If the job emphasizes AI? Lead with your side projects.
Data-heavy dashboards? Show your complex UI projects first.
Delete everything else. Your resume isn't your life story. It's a curated argument.

The biggest mistake designers make is they don’t research enough.

They read a job description. Then apply. That's it.

Meanwhile, designers who get hired ask:

What products does this company actually ship?
Who are their users?
How mature is their design function?
Who would I work with?
What cool things are they doing?

They dig into company blogs, changelogs, product reviews, LinkedIn profiles. They message recruiters. They show up in their communities. They make their name familiar before their resume lands.

When you nail the research, you don't need 100 applications. You need 10 good ones.

I did this for every single job I’ve had.

Treat your job search like a design project: clear inputs, strict filters, continuous iteration.

That’s how you get hired.

If I was looking for a job today, here's what I would do:

Stop applying to everything.
Start researching like a mad man.

Pick my industry.
Tailor my resume.
Do the work nobody else wants to do.

That would make me stand out, avoid drowning in rejections, and land the right role.

Good luck out there folks 🍀

I wrote more of this (readiness audits, salary research, turn rejection into your competitive advantage), read it here →

A big thanks to our friends at Optimal for sponsoring this issue.

You’re about to ship, someone asks “should we test this?”, and the honest answer is “too late, it’s already out.”

Optimal 3.0 exists to kill that moment. It’s an end-to-end user research platform that puts recruitment, testing, and analysis in one place, so research keeps pace with how fast you actually ship.

What that looks like day to day:

Access 20M+ verified participants worldwide
Bring different research methods into one study workflow, qual and quant together in one tool
AI surfaces the themes, quotes, and highlight reels, and you make the call

The same tools used by Apple, Netflix, and Google.

Try Optimal free

So what's went down last week?

The going ons, happenings & shenanigans you might have missed ↓

Draft your dream design team at Backyard Designers. Pick from a roster of 200+ designers you've been following.

Made by designers Tommy and Ridd as an experiment on Dive Radio.

Then Hang Xu, LinkedIn's favourite troll decided to make... Brokeass Designers

Hang said...

Tommy and Ridd built the ‘Backyard Designers’ draft board for the most elite AI-native designers on Twitter. But if you’re a mediocre no-name LinkedIn designer, you can go kick rocks.

Fear not, I gotchu, LinkedIn fam; I built ‘Brokeass Designers’ just for your pathetic no-talent ass.

Unlike Tommy, I won't make you beg or stroke my ego to be included, nor do you need to be a big name design influencer.

Just sign up with your LI and we’ll generate an AI slop avatar of you for the unemployment line. At some point in your life, you just have to accept that you’re not good enough for the FAANGs.

"Give me your fired, your mediocre, your disgraced masses yearning for a job. Any job.”

And no, you are not welcomed if you are featured on Backyard Designers, Dive Club or in any of Tommy’s media empire. This is for the every-designer.

This is too funny! You gotta try Brokeass Designers

🤣🤣🤣🤣

Email that comes in iMessage. Such a cool idea. Casual, quick, and leverages the behaviour we're so used to... chat. Most email interfaces suck and you end up getting 1,327 unread messages.

Emailed connect directly to your Gmail, emails arrive as texts, reply to respond, react to unsub, search and set reminders through chat, and a bunch more.

Very excited to give this a spin. Waitlist is open now. Use my referral link to skip the line: https://emailed.chat/r/chris