Speaker 1: Hi everyone. Welcome to Designing Your First Job. My name is Timothy Wilkins, and this is going to be a video for UX design graduates that are just coming out of a boot camp to help them land their first job. I've been a recruiter for about six years, worked at big companies like Warner Media and Facebook and others, and I think I have some value to bring you today. So hopefully, if you're just getting out of a boot camp, I can comment on some challenges, but also provide some good solutions for you. Welcome to this presentation. I'm quoting myself there. Great way to start. Okay, so we just talked about the things that we're going to cover, some of the challenges and realities that you're facing as a new grad. We're going to go through your three biggest assets as a new grad, and we're going to talk about some actionable steps that you can take. So something to understand about recruiters like myself, which will largely be the gatekeepers to your future roles, is that we tend to look for three things on a resume. And the three things that we look for is job title, the company that you've worked at, so what name it was or what scale it was, and how long you've worked there. So those are the things that we're trying to find, because generally speaking, we have a requisition or a job where we need to fill a certain level of experience. We need the candidate to have a certain understanding of a scale that the company is working at, and we need a certain level of, we need a certain title. So that's just kind of how we do our jobs. So coming out of a bootcamp, you won't have really any of these things. You don't really have any time in the seat. Your title is going to be a bootcamp grad, essentially. And as far as the companies that you've worked at, perhaps you came out of a prestigious bootcamp, but nonetheless, that is not going to weigh very much on the job market. So those are some kind of challenges that you face right off the get-go in terms of how recruiters think and how they're perceiving your resume and bootcamp coming right out. So that leads us to our first kind of solution, or I should say response to this truth, and that is that your resume is going to need some excavation. Very likely, before you got into the bootcamp, you had some kind of, I would say, inclination to doing some design work. Perhaps you were designing before you got into the bootcamp and you wanted to learn about the more technical aspects of design work. Maybe it was just an interest of yours because you love to draw. Maybe there's many different reasons that you might have taken the bootcamp. But the bottom line is that people think about experience in a very traditional way. I worked at X company. They paid me X amount of money per hour, and I got X amount of experience. So now I'm allowed to put that on my LinkedIn profile on my resume. And I want you to expand the aperture of that because there are probably a lot of projects that you've worked on that you might not think of as experience. But when you think about your resume as a marketing tool, understanding that if you had done a contract on Fiverr, or if you did a small businesses rebrand, or even if you helped a family member with their website or something like that, there are ways to word this as work experience because, indeed, you did learn something. If you got compensated, then you did do a job. And these tiny things to the eye of a recruiter or potential employer, the more that you can get, the more competent that you seem. And the name of the game with your resume and on LinkedIn is to try and hit those three things to gain experience where you can, to excavate it, to think about the titles that you had. So if you were helping somebody with a small rebrand, and it was a small project of you and another person, then you could be the lead designer. That might be just the truth. So on the initial step, you'll have your portfolio, but I encourage you to expand beyond that and think about ways that you can have more and more experience to communicate on your resume. A quick note on line. There's a spaghetti noodle theory. And as you excavate experience, you know, there's going, you're going to be towing a fine line. From my experience, most people exaggerate or embellish on their resume. It's the nature of presenting yourself and trying to present yourself as a marketable candidate. So, and I think that there is a degree here where you can bend the truth, but if you bend it too much and it breaks, you end up hurting your chances at employment. I have some examples here. If you made a logo for your brother's website, a lie or bending the spaghetti noodle too much to where it breaks would say, I work with a creative team to brainstorm innovative advertising campaigns and company-wide strategic vision enhancement in perpetuity. It's a word salad. And that's not really what you did. There wasn't really a creative team. It was you and your brother. So a better example of excavating this experience would be, I led the development of brand identity for a small family run startup. That's very true. It's, it's the same thing, but worded in a way that, um, that demonstrates that, that has truth, but still demonstrates an acquisition of experience. I apologize. It looks like somebody is pinging me and I don't want that to be a distraction in this video. Uh, they're probably done. Okay. So the last thing to say is that because you're at the beginning of your career, your soft skills are going to be much more important than your technical acumen. And I would argue that this is true. This is a, a universal truth as your career unfolds. And at every stage, this is still going to be true. Um, I have a quick story about my, my best friend, the average developer. He came out of a bootcamp and he was an average developer. He didn't have a, he's great with people, but he was very average. JavaScript didn't come natural to him. It was definitely a swim against the current. And, um, wherever he would go, he would have a lot of imposter syndrome because there would be people that were naturally very gifted at this profession. And in comparison by comparison, he would notice that he was falling short, but he continued to get promoted. And he's now been doing, uh, went from front end development to full stack development to now a lead developer at a pretty prestigious, well-known company. Um, and the reason he was able to do this is he's just such an excellently emotionally intelligent teammate. He's highly collaborative. He's very creative. He's an active listener. Um, he brings humor and lightness to, uh, the work environment. Um, he is a very team oriented and he works extremely hard and these skills will always be noticed by your employer. The person that says, I can solve that. You know, you might not think that it's being noticed, but the people around you do notice when you're someone that works hard and that puts in effort. And that's the one thing that I'll say that my, my good friend, the average dev did consistently in the ironic thing is now that he's been in the business for about six years, he's quite above average at his craft. The last thing that I'll say is that miracles happen around people. You're swimming against the current because your resume is not real marketable. Um, so what you're going to need to do is talk to as many people as you can talk to them the way that if you think about this as dating, if you go and you have an agenda on a date, um, people can kind of sense if you're being a little too needy or if you're, if you're, uh, if you're too focused on the end goal. So I really encourage you to just go out and get to know people. And if there's somebody at a company that you're interested in, let go of the idea that they can get you a job and just simply connect with them, be their friend. And, uh, the paradoxical conclusion of that is that oftentimes as you generate trust and rapport with these people, they tend to want to help you, which is very similar in dating. If you just go out and get to know somebody and you're not trying to force it to go any particular direction, there's a much greater likelihood that there's going to be some trust and some possibility for intimacy. Um, maybe in that situation. Okay. So, um, the last thing that I'll say is that, you know, the economy is kind of a jerk right now. Um, you don't, uh, you're coming out of a bootcamp at a time where it's very difficult to get jobs. You know, I'm just to be overly transparent. I was recently laid off and I'm currently looking for a job as a recruiter. So, you know, recruiters suffer all the same things that people that are unemployed coming out of bootcamps suffer through. And the strategy is always the same. It's to connect as much as possible. It's to utilize your creativity, to put out good effort and to let go of the outcome as you connect. But I only want to bring up the slide because I want you to have proper expectations on what to expect. You know, if you go into the gym and you expect to get six pack abs after a month, um, then it's going to be, uh, a difficult, um, realization when nothing has changed. You know, it takes a very long time to get six pack abs. I would think I'm capable of getting them because of my body type, but that's another story. But the bottom line is that your job search might take three to six to nine to months to one year. And that's okay. You know, you might have to, in the very beginning of your, your career, you're going to have to be patient. You're going to have to be creative on how you can meet your financial needs while you take further steps into this career path. And it's also very possible that you get a job next week, but I want you to be prepared and have proper expectations that this is supposed to take a while. And that the idea is to be consistent and effortful in your approach to finding a job and to let go of the timeline as much as you possibly can. You're in this for the long run. You start the gym trying to get in shape in three months, it's going to be kind of miserable. But if you think, I don't really care if I see any differences for a year, I just want to keep showing up. It's going to be a much better experience. So your biggest three assets, let's talk about that. Creativity, effort and networking. So those among your boot camp graduates that enjoy, even relish the opportunity to overcome a challenge, like I'm in a bad market and I have like a resume that is very entry level. Yes, that sounds like a great challenge. I can do this. Those are going to be the ones that land the job the fastest. This goes back to like that, you know, what we expect, a comment that I made earlier. And that is what this is called reward prediction error in psychology. But if you expect that this is something where I did my boot camp and therefore I should get a job relatively quickly, then it's going to, then not only is it going to be disappointing, but it's going to, it's going to, I guess you could say, what is the word I'm looking for? It's going to make you not want to try even more. It's going to, it's going to deflate you. So I really want you to understand that the reward is not going to come easy. The effort is what's important. It's not necessarily the reward. If you expect the reward to take, take time and take effort and you're up for that challenge and you want to put in the effort, that's great. But if you expect that this should maybe come easy for me or that the reward should come quicker, then you're kind of sawing off the branch that you're sitting on. So that's just something to, that's the first thing that is your asset. Put out effort, commit to the effort, decide that the reward is how hard you're working and the rest will come. Creativity. Now the traditional approach is very limited to getting jobs now. So you have to think outside of the box. If you're just submitting resumes, you know, directly to a UX designer or UI designer applications, it's going to be a very long slog and you're going to be one of those LinkedIn posts where it's like, I've submitted a hundred resumes and only gotten four responses. What is wrong with me? Well, what's wrong with you is you're using an antiquated approach to getting employment. A better approach is getting creative and using all of the different things that we have available. Yes, we have job boards of course, but we also have the ability to connect with anybody and to add a note. We also have the ability to make videos of ourselves. We also have the ability to get in front of decision makers in ways that we never ever could. And the sky is the limit to what you can do now with the technology that we have available. So all I'll say is that we are in a new landscape of getting jobs and you are very likely a creative person, which is why you became a UX designer and that creativity doesn't stop at design. It should be part and parcel of your job search as well in finding your next role. The last thing I'll say is networking. Obviously, we've already kind of talked about this, but it begs repeating. Your next opportunity is very likely going to come from somebody that you already know and your job is to find that person. There's this six degrees of separation theory where everybody knows everybody else within six people. I think like in the world, I can't remember exactly how that goes. But all of the jobs that I got into recruiting came from in some way, shape or form saying hello or reaching out to my own network and getting introductions or getting referrals or so on and so forth. So really, really buy into that idea that you probably already know the person that's going to give you your next big opportunity. It's just up to you to connect with them and wait until they emerge. The last thing that we'll talk about is actionable steps. So the actionable steps for you is to make sure that you optimize your LinkedIn and understand that the way that recruiters find your resume is via parsing through keywords and the search engine that LinkedIn provides. The way that you optimize for that is that you put as many as possible in there for whatever specific job title that you want to be working at. The second actionable step I would do is to connect with a local design agency. That might be Creative Circle. It could be Robert Half. Nonetheless, these people are being paid to get you your first role. And oftentimes, there's going to be hiring, batch hiring at these bigger tech companies and these people might have the connection to those batch hiring. And if they know you and you're connected, again, it's going to come from someone you know and that might be where you land your first job. That's how we did it at Meta and Facebook, by the way. Whenever there was big batch hiring, we would work with agencies to find those candidates. And yeah, the last actionable step I'll say is that you need to send connection requests to gatekeepers at the companies that you want. So if you find a company that you really like, you read through the job description, you say, this looks awesome, then what you also need to do is submit your application and then find people in that company to connect with or find the gatekeeper and say, hey, I just applied to this role. I'm really excited about it. Is there any way that we can have a digital coffee or is there some way that I can learn a bit more about it? And very often, I'll just say this, whenever I'm really wanting to get into a company, do not be shy about how many people you connect with at that company. It's very unlikely that they are all talking about who tried to connect with them today. In fact, they just aren't. So don't be shy. Connect with as many people as possible. It's a numbers game. Somebody's going to be having a good day that's going to want to, you know, say, oh, well, this is the point of contact for that position. And that's just going to give you a giant leg up. So that is the presentation. Congratulations on graduating your bootcamp. Please, if you found this content valuable, please follow. Please like and subscribe. And I'll try and do more stuff like this. Good luck. You're going to be fine. This is an exciting time for you. And keep me updated on how things turn out. All right. Adios.