The UX Job Search Playbook
How to Land Your First UX Job — Even if You’ve Been Ghosted 100 Times Before
How to stop getting ignored and finally land Fortune 500 UX interviews in just 30 days (even if you’ve applied to dozens of jobs, have no “real” experience, or feel like every recruiter wants a unicorn)
Yes! I’m Ready To Land My First UX Job — $37
(Limited-Time Launch — Regular $97)
The proven system that’s transforming rejection into confidence and Fortune 500 UX interviews in just 30 days
“I’ve applied to 200 jobs and no one even replies. I’m starting to wonder if I wasted my time getting into UX.”
Sound familiar? We’ve all been there. I was a UX career changer — taking in all the job search advice, and still watching recruiters ghost me while everyone on LinkedIn seemed to “magically” land their dream UX jobs.
The Struggle: Why Getting Your First UX Job Feels Impossible
My daily job search struggle looked like this:
Sending out endless applications and getting zero responses
Wondering if my portfolio was “good enough” or just confusing recruiters
Getting ghosted after promising interviews
Feeling crushed seeing others from my bootcamp get jobs while I stayed stuck
Wondering if switching to UX was a huge mistake
I tried all the advice out there:
“Just network more on LinkedIn” (I cold-DM’d people… nothing)
“Update your portfolio design” (I redesigned it 3 times and still got ghosted)
“Take another UX course” (I already spent thousands on my education)
“Do free projects for experience” (it just made me feel used)
“Apply to 100 more jobs” (I did — and still nothing)
Each rejection made me feel smaller, and every ghosting email stung harder.
Then I discovered something that changed everything, helping me land six-figure UX jobs working for brands like Disney+, Squarespace, Marvel, Hulu, J&J, Ford …
I realized the problem wasn’t my talent — it was how I was presenting my value as a UX designer.
Through trial, error, and hundreds of recruiter conversations, I uncovered what actually gets entry-level designers and UX career changers noticed, even without experience.
According to a 2024 UX Research survey, 78% of hiring managers said most junior UX applicants “fail to tell a clear story of impact.”
They don’t care about “pretty wireframes.” They care about how you think, communicate, and solve problems.
That insight changed everything. I stopped focusing on “looking hire-able” and started communicating like a designer who solves business problems — even in my portfolio, resume, and LinkedIn profile.
Introducing: the UX job search playbook by UX Woman, helping UX career changers land interviews with HP, Reddit, Nike, Google and more…
This isn’t another fluffy “networking” guide or generic resume template.
It’s a step-by-step system that helps you:
Get recruiter callbacks even with zero formal experience
Fix your portfolio story so it shows problem-solving impact (not just screens)
Use AI and UX strategy to personalize applications that stand out
Build LinkedIn visibility that attracts real recruiters
Interview with confidence and handle tricky UX hiring questions
After helping over 100+ aspiring UX designers replicate these results, I refined everything into one complete roadmap anyone can follow — even if nothing else has worked before.
Don’t just take my word for it…
We cover a variety of topics to build a revenue-generating business in 90-180 days
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Module 1: Forming a company (LLC, S Corp, Inc, etc)
Consider company formation, business tax, business insurance, and the barebones resources you would need to set up your business (i.e, website, inventory, etc.). Its okay to not have a final idea at this stage, but an understanding of costs and revenue needed to break even.
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Module 2: Identifying target market, competitors and doing due diligence
Be strategic about choosing a target market as a small business or startup identifying an invisible market where there is less competition. This is Blue Ocean strategy in a nutshell and we dive into how to analyze markets and the competition.
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Module 3: Problem identification, sales call strategies
To build a business from Day 1, we consider monetization from Day 1 via sales call interviews to get to understand client/user problems while also framing our call as an offering, based on what we learn from our target audiences. It is this mixed methods approach that creates the distinction between working on a business vs. working on a project or product idea.
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Module 4: Prototyping, Pretotyping, Monetization
The reason we set ourselves up as a business from Day 1 is because we need to be able to create prototype launches that are monetizable to test the impact of our ideas and kill any idea that does not end up being monetizable.
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Module 5: Product positioning, brainstorming offers, mastering creative marketing copywriting
Learn about the psychology behind product positioning, crafting creative offers, and writing creative marketing copy that sells your product or service.
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Module 6: Marketing strategies for each marketing channel, product-channel fit
Marketing strategies vary across each marketing or distribution channel and need to be tailored to the channel. Often, we pressure test multiple marketing channels before focusing on a couple.
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Module 7: Quantitative business strategy methods and processes, sales funnels
In a startup or small business we learn to rigorously use quantitative data to make decisions on the success or failure of our product and marketing ideas and strategies. Create a robust quant testing process.
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Module 8: Storytelling for clients, customers, investors, and stakeholders
How might we craft a compelling business offering to clients vs. customers vs. investors vs. stakeholder vs. partners? We might tell the same story, but how we tell it has to be different depending on the audience.
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Module 9: Creating contracts and project plans, scoping projects and services
How might we sell our services to large brands or form brand partnerships and collaborations? What type of contracts, project plans, and scope do we need to define to get paid?
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Module 10: Business models, scaling businesses and optimizing processes to scale
As we put together the simplest version of our business together in the first 90-180 days, how do we optimize our processes, marketing, and product to scale?
4 key mindsets to build a revenue generating business in 90-180 days…
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It might be a new skill for some folks to let go of their perfectionist tendencies and focus on building a business based on their existing strengths and expertise, while keeping in mind their weaknesses or limitations so that they can seek help as needed.
Growing a business might also mean evolving and releasing self limiting beliefs in order to take bigger leaps and risks.
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In our curriculum we focus on Blue Ocean strategy and inclusive design because this helps our cohorts come up with innovative ideas for products and services that focus on invisible markets and invisible communities.
This gives their ideas an edge because they are competing in undersaturated markets, where nobody else sees the opportunity in that space quite yet…
Think Airbnb. Think Uber. They were trailblazers of innovation. RESIST the urge to simply copy competitor businesses. You will always be steps behind. If you follow your own path, you will be steps ahead.
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In building a business, we become incredible multitaskers! Rather than being linear, or deductive, or inductive, it’s important to develop an associative mindset….connecting the dots that others might not see yet.
This helps us switch back and forth between design, monetization and marketing because we see how everything connects holistically.
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In our curriculum, we cover cognitive psychology, sales psychology, and stakeholder psychology, covering how to approach user interviews, sales calls, stakeholder and investor meetings and more.
There are different psychological approaches for each situation to help you tell a compelling story or make an impactful pitch, all while making sure you are asking the right questions so that the other party feels seen and heard.