Table of Contents
- The UX job market has a dirty secret
- The 7-level hiring pyramid
- How to access the UX hidden job market
- Finding the right people
- How to build relationships that turn into UX referrals
- Step 1: Personalized connection request
- Step 2: A few back-and-forth messages
- Step 3: Book a 15-minute call
- Step 4: Repeat with two or three people
- Step 5: Create a targeted artifact
- Step 6: Send it. Ask for feedback.
- "But I don't do free work"
- Standing out without big logos or referrals
- The 2 skills that give UX designers the most leverage
- 1. Self-awareness
- 2. Speed
- Stop waiting, start creating
Do not index
Read time: under 8 minutes
The UX job market has a dirty secret
60 to 80% of jobs are never posted publicly.
Read that again.
Most UX designers spend the majority of their job search energy on the 20–40% of roles that are visible. The rest are filled quietly, through conversations, referrals, and relationships — before a job description ever gets written.
In a livestream, Chris — Founder of UX Playbook, talked with Joseph Louis Tan — founder of Career Creators, former Head of Product Design, adjunct professor at NTU Singapore — to break down exactly how the UX hiring process works from the inside.
Joseph has helped mid-to-senior UX professionals land $150K–$300K roles through strategic networking. Not through applying online. What he shared was uncomfortable, and incredibly useful.
Let’s dive in in this blog!
👉 The insight in this blog traces back to a thoughtful conversation with Joseph — here’s the full livestream:
The 7-level hiring pyramid
Joseph has a framework he calls the Hire and Seek Pyramid. Seven levels. And the further down you go, the more expensive and risky it gets for the hiring manager.
Here's how it looks from the top:
Level 1 — Internal transfers. Already know the company, culture, and product. Cheapest hire possible. Zero onboarding risk.
Level 2 — Internal team referrals. Your direct colleagues vouching for someone they know and respect. Joseph explains:
"I've already hired these people and trusted them. Generally it's like a friends of a friend — I would have that unspoken trust with the referee."
Level 3 — Peer network. Other design leaders, hiring managers, LinkedIn connections. Still warm. Still relatively trusted.
Level 4 — Talent pipeline. Candidates from previous hiring rounds who didn't land the role — but were close. They're sitting in the ATS, waiting for a nudge.
Level 5 — Recruiters and headhunters. Expensive (15–25% of first year salary as placement fee). Useful for niche roles. But they're facilitators, not decision-makers.
Level 6 — Public job boards. LinkedIn. Indeed. The places most UX designers spend most of their time. High volume, low trust, huge cost to the hiring team in time and effort.
Level 7 — Graduate/campus recruitment. New grads. High risk. High cost.
The problem is hiring managers work top to bottom. Job seekers work bottom to top. You're starting where the company least wants to find you.
How to access the UX hidden job market
So if public job boards are the worst entry point, what's the move?
Joseph calls it the back door hiring method. Instead of applying to the open role (front door), you build relationships with the internal team and hiring manager directly.
"You can't go for the internal hire because you're not inside the company — but you can go one level down, which is the internal referrals from the immediate team as well as the peer network."
Here's the important part: even a mediocre cold outreach to someone inside your target company yields about a 10% response rate. Joseph's clients typically get 20–30%. One client hit 85% — purely by personalizing every single message.
Finding the right people
When a job is posted on LinkedIn, the hiring manager is sometimes listed directly. Start there.
If not: read the job description carefully. It'll reference specific teams or departments. Search those keywords on LinkedIn, filter by the company, and find the designers, researchers, and product managers working there.
LinkedIn Career Premium lets you send 150–200 personalized connection requests per week. That's a lot of doors you can knock on.
Can't find anyone on the design team? Go to the recruiter or TA partner. They're actively trying to fill the role. They'll tell you things the job description won't.
Land your next role with Job Sprint —165+ micro-video lessons directly from years of experience hiring UX designers as UX Managers.
How to build relationships that turn into UX referrals
This is where most designers either skip steps or blow it.
Joseph's model is simple: move from cold stranger → warm connection → trusted advisor → internal champion.
It doesn't happen overnight. And it doesn't happen by asking for a referral on the first message.
Step 1: Personalized connection request
Reference something specific. A post they wrote. A career move they made. A case study you found compelling.
Generic "I'd love to connect" messages go nowhere.
Step 2: A few back-and-forth messages
Be genuinely curious about them. Not about the job. About their career, their experience, what they're working on.
Step 3: Book a 15-minute call
Ask about what motivates them. What's their team focused on? What problems are they solving? What's the culture like?
Step 4: Repeat with two or three people
You're building a picture of the company's real priorities from multiple angles. This is research no job description can give you.
Step 5: Create a targeted artifact
A 10–11 page slide deck with high-level ideas. No polished UI. Just your thinking applied to their real problems.
Step 6: Send it. Ask for feedback.
Here's what Joseph has seen happen when this is done well:
"Once that doc is sent to them, if it's really impactful and it's really good ideas, what happens is they send it in the Slack channel and just share it around and say, 'Hey, I just spoken to this person online — really good person, really good fit, had some really interesting ideas. What do you all think?'"
That's not a job application. That's an organic conversation starting inside the company on your behalf.
"But I don't do free work"
Fair. You don't have to frame it as free work. Joseph's take:
"If just going through that research feels like it's beyond you, then you know it's not going to be a good fit — and you've saved months of being in the wrong job."
And if you do it and don't get the role? That artifact goes into your portfolio, targeted at a specific industry and company type. Joseph has a client who did exactly this — didn't get hired, put it in her portfolio, and months later a completely different hiring manager found it and reached out.
The work compounds.
Standing out without big logos or referrals
Not everyone has a FAANG company on their resume. That's fine.
- For resumes: use the XYZ format for every bullet.
"Accomplished [X], as measured by [Y], by doing [Z]"
Don't just list responsibilities. Show impact. If your company is small or unknown, add one line describing what they do and one line describing your team context. Give the reader something to hold onto.
- For portfolios: design for skimmability.
A hiring manager might spend 30 seconds on your portfolio before deciding whether to keep reading. Put an executive summary at the top of every case study — problem, objective, value, impact. Four sentences. Make the headlines of each section work as insight statements, not just labels.
As Chris puts it:
”The designers I think about are the ones putting work out there. If I was hiring a web designer right now, I can think of specific people in my head — because I've seen their work already, alive on the internet.”
Joseph got his last Head of Product Design role partly because of a 100-day writing project he ran on Instagram and Substack. He wrote long reflections on what he was learning. Every day. His CEO's core value was learning.
“Because I've done this reflection and I actually write about what I read — that convinced him we were a really good fit. A writing project, posting every single day. Who would've thought?”
You don't need a famous company on your CV. You need visible, consistent proof of how you think.
The 2 skills that give UX designers the most leverage
When asked what separates the designers who grow fast from the ones who stall, Joseph and Chris gave two answers that complement each other perfectly.
1. Self-awareness
Before you know what to search for, you need to know:
- What energizes you
- What you actually want
- What your non-negotiables are
- What problems you're genuinely interested in solving
Without that clarity, you mass-apply and spiral.
Joseph recommends going back through every role you've had and asking three questions:
- What did I not enjoy?
- What did I enjoy most?
- What's my most memorable moment?
Do it for every job. The patterns tell you where to go next.
2. Speed
Move faster than feels comfortable. Follow up in 24 hours instead of "later this week." Ship the side project this weekend instead of when it's perfect. Compress your feedback cycles.
"Speed gives you reps. When you work with speed, you tend not to ask for permission — you see that as a blocker. And if you kind of treat normal tasks with that urgency, imagine how you'll handle more serious things."
Speed also defeats imposter syndrome. The less time you spend sitting with a scary task, the less time it has to talk you out of doing it.
Stop waiting, start creating
The public job board will always exist. The easy apply button will always be tempting. But every time you click it and disappear into a pile of 400 other applications, you're competing on the hiring manager's worst possible terms.
The hidden UX job market is not a myth. It's just uncomfortable to access. It requires reaching out to strangers, putting ideas in front of people who might ignore you, and shipping work before you feel ready.
That discomfort is the moat. Most designers won't cross it. You can.
Start with one company. Find two people on the internal team. Have two real conversations. See what you learn.
You are not waiting for the market to get better. You're not waiting for the algorithm to surface your profile. You're taking back control of your UX career, one relationship at a time.
Wish you all the best 🍀
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