Business: Hiring UX Professionals

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss what skills are essential and desirable for a UX Designer.

Each month in Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts answers our readers’ questions about a broad range of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your question to us at: [email protected].

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If you’ve been working in User Experience for more than a few years, you’ve probably seen the ground shift under your feet. Job titles are multiplying, toolsets are changing, and employers are asking for skills that did not exist a decade ago. Your company might call you a UX Designer, a Product Designer, or maybe a UX Researcher who also codes in Python. Everyone claims to know what User Experience means, but the hiring market tells a different story.

A few years ago, my colleague at Mercer University, Dr. Bremen Vance, and I decided to find out what employers were really looking for. We collected nearly 15,000 UX job ads from the ten largest metropolitan areas in the US and analyzed them using text-mining tools that could identify patterns in the language of the listings. The goal for our study was to cut through the noise of opinions and look directly at how companies describe UX work when they’re hiring. Read More

Recently, I scaled a content-strategy team from three to eight people. In the process of conducting dozens upon dozens of interviews, while involving various internal stakeholders, I quickly learned how to avoid some common pitfalls of hiring for strategic roles.

It’s challenging to hire for strategic roles—neither as easy nor as straightforward as hiring for other skill-based positions. Ultimately, you’re looking for a strategic thinker who understands UX principles and best practices. If you’re not asking the right questions, it’s all too easy for candidates to bluff their way into a content-strategy role by saying what superficially seem to be the right things, without providing enough substance to show their strategic thought process.

In sharing my tips for hiring content strategists in this article, I hope to help you avoid these common pitfalls so you can hire talented strategists who can hit the ground running. Read More