I became a hiring manager for the first time recently (hit me up if you’re an intermediate cloud tech designer interested in healthcare). There’s a lot of talk about role “fit”. Before this experience, I always interpreted “fit” as a bullshit way of telling you that you’re not a good enough designer. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
When we say “fit”, what we’re really evaluating is “how likely you are to succeed in this role”. Because we want you to succeed. It is expensive and demoralizing for a team if a new hire fails in a role.
A role opens up because the team has identified a gap in resourcing, either backfilling a person who left or growing the team in order to tackle increased scope. Therefore we have already have an idea of the kind of designer that would succeed in this role.
That means we’re defining “fit” as follows:
Project fit: Is there evidence (portfolio pieces, past work experience) that show you would be able to solve the kind of problems we’re tackling in this role? Have you solved for similar kinds of users before? Does your process show your ability to solve our kind of problem? For example, if instagram ads was hiring, their ideal candidate might be someone who has a case study & relevant experience showcasing their process designing mobile ad experiences for ad consumers. This matters because the more relevant experience you have, the faster you’ll be able to onboard and deliver results.
UX skills: Not all UX roles are the same. Some roles emphasize certain skills more than others. Altho you can assume some basics like interaction design, individual roles might need stronger data visualization skills or design systems or even ux research. This is largely determined by existing team resources and future ambitions. Perhaps a team doesn’t have a UX researcher so they’re hoping their design hire will fill in. While you could presumably learn those skills on the job, depending on how fast the team expects you to deliver results, you could find yourself having a hard time. Sometimes you might not have a skill because you’re not interested in learning it. Then you definitely don’t want to hired for a role that expects you to use that skill.
Collaboration: Another fuzzy concept but quite critical especially in larger organizations. Designs don’t exist in silo. A key factor in determining the experience that ships is a designer’s ability to effectively build relationships and influence cross-functional partners like ux researchers, product managers, engineers, etc. Since collaboration skills are best learned in practice, amount of work experience and behavioral questions like “last time you had a conflict” help us understand your strengths here. When you’re junior, the expectations are that you’ll learn on the job, as roles become more senior, it’s expected that you already know how to collaborate with different functions.
Not a fit: What’s also helped me is having a clear picture of the kind of designer who would definitely not be a fit for a role. For example, if you have a branding role, then heavy enterprise experience would 100% not be a good fit.
All of this to say, how good you are as a designer is separate from if you’re a good fit for a role. I’ve come across many candidates who are fantastic designers and they’re not a good fit for my role. Getting a rejection for a role is not a signal that you’re a bad designer, rather that you’re not the right “fit” for that role. You may have also dodged a bullet unknowingly because getting a role that is not a good fit for you might feel good in the short term but could be painful once you actually have to do the job.