How To Write Inspiring Job Descriptions For UX

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UX, Business, Career, Communication, Human Resources
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Jay Kaufmann has been designing interactions for 20 years and building design teams for 7, currently at Zalando. He is launching a new UX Think Tank event … More about Jay ↬

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Jay Kaufmann has written job listings for many organizations over the years and for all manner of user experience roles. When he wrote his first job description, he took other listings from his company as a base, looked around for some examples from other companies and ended up with what he sees in hindsight as being the usual run-of-the-mill hodgepodge of bullet points. Presented with this today, Jay would throw out more than half the content in order to focus on what’s relevant and unique. In this article, he’d like to share some tried and true techniques for advertising your UX opening.

To attract motivated designers and user researchers, keep your eye on the why. What’s the why? It’s the underlying purpose that brings you and your employees together. Why the why? Because if you focus only on what you need, then you run the risk of filtering down merely to an adequate match for the list of skills needed for defined tasks; however, if you lead with why a candidate would want to work with you each day, then you might just attract the best fit for executing your company’s mission.

I’ve written job listings for a half-dozen organizations over the years and for all manner of user experience roles. When I wrote my first job description, I took other listings from my company as a base, looked around for some examples from other companies and ended up with what I see in hindsight as being the usual run-of-the-mill hodgepodge of bullet points. Presented with this today, I would throw out more than half the content in order to focus on what’s relevant and unique.

Now, I prefer to start by finding the underlying raison d’être for the position in order to craft a customer-centered call for applications. In this article, I’d like to explain why and share some tried and true techniques for advertising your UX opening.

Create An Opening By Killing The Job Description

The main problem with the traditional job description is that it describes a job instead of the goals and results. In his article “Ban Job Descriptions and Hire Better People,” Lou Adler asserts that orienting a job description around skills and experience is counterproductive. Instead, he advocates for a performance profile that explains what must be accomplished on the job.

Modern motivational psychology (see Daniel Pink’s Drive) says that employees in the knowledge economy are motivated not by carrots and sticks but by purpose, not by tasks but by mastery. Similarly, Simon Sinek, author of the bestseller Start With Why, argues that the problem with typical job ads is that they skip over the purpose: “They are all about the what, and not the why.”

In my experience, designers and researchers in particular are emotionally invested in their work. Highly motivated UX designers are looking not just for a job, but for a quest, a great experience in improving other people’s experiences. They want to take on a mission that aligns with their own values.

The benefit of tapping into this desire for something larger than themselves is not necessarily that you’ll attract more candidates, but that you’ll attract those candidates who are inspired by your mission and culture. In his TEDx talk “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” Simon Sinek underscores the value of hiring employees who buy into your larger purpose: “If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears.”

At Zalando, we strongly believe in our mission, so we do not want to present a job. Instead, we aim to establish a dialogue with candidates and learn about what would make them enjoy coming to work every morning to contribute, produce and grow. We want to offer careers that our people can easily transform into their callings, and our responsibility is to clearly explain this vision to our candidates.

Redefining The Job Description

To transform a job description into a career opportunity, we follow this simple checklist:

State the mission. Interview product owners, designers and managers to identify the objectives and key results that you envision over the next year for this role.
Remove requirements. Put yourself in the applicant’s shoes, rather than list your company’s needs. Move your internal requirements to a separate checklist for interviewers.
Present challenges. Craft key results as statements about the impact that the designer will make on customers and the business. Describe the day-to-day work clearly but briefly — and tie it into the larger mission.
Highlight transformational benefits. Keep the discussion of benefits and culture short but inspiring. Leave the standard ones till later, to minimize noise.
Inspire. Excite applicants about the mission (“Should you choose accept it”), and send a clear message that the company offers an environment for professional and personal growth.
Test and iterate. Ask, observe, measure and learn.

State The Mission

First things first: What’s the purpose underlying the role? Hiring guru Lou Adler talks about focusing on year-one success, rather than day-one requirements. And Sinek points out that successful hires are those who want a challenge. When I’m crafting a job description, I search out the relevant objectives and key results (OKRs) or key performance indicators (KPIs) that convey the longer-term arc and mission of the role. The exact targets often cannot be disclosed, but some real-life goals can trigger the candidate’s imagination and hopefully inspire them.

To give you some examples of what I mean, here are some goals we’ve incorporated into recent descriptions:

“You will increase customer engagement by enabling fashion experts to build their own curated boutique shops within the larger Zalando e-commerce experience. The goal: Give customers a more inspiring and entertaining entry to our assortment.”
“You will increase the customer retention rate by personalizing recommendations, enabling discovery and individualizing the user experience.”
“You will increase brand loyalty and drive sales by designing enticing interfaces for fashion inspiration, guidance and advice. Your innovative design approach for editorial topics will give our customers a fresh, playful cross-device shopping experience.”

Remove Requirements

Job descriptions usually contain a long list of tasks and requirements. These are employer-centered, uninspiring and often irrelevant. Lou Adler says that requirements not only filter out a lot of perfectly qualified candidates, but are counterproductive to diversity hiring.

And for UX, the quality of the work far outweighs any more mundane requirements. As Pixar’s Andrew Gordon says, “any art-based job is more about your portfolio and less about credentials.”

Question your requirements. For your UX research opening, do you really require two to five years of experience or a degree in psychology, or do you need someone who can set up a test plan that increases your conversion rate by 0.8%? Does the designer you seek really need to know Axure, or can they learn it on the job?

Despite having said that, don’t throw all requirements out. Some traditional bullet points such as “A positive attitude” or “Experience with e-commerce” are uninspiring because they are employer-centric, but they are still helpful for internal use precisely for this reason. I like to collect such requirements into a separate internal hiring checklist to help me articulate interview questions and screen CVs. Removing these mundane yet important requirements from the external listing not only makes the job description more applicant-centric, but allows you to better evaluate candidates. When candidates are not given the answers in advance, the right ones will successfully identify the experience and skills they need to deliver results. Anyway, the hiring checklist is a story for another occasion.

Transform Tasks Into Challenges

After throwing out the requirements, prune the tasks. Half of these are usually boring, but I still like to keep a few to show the flavor of the work. Because the language of user experience, user interface and human-computer interaction design is confusing even for designers, hiring managers should communicate day-to-day tasks in accessible language to ensure that UX candidates understand the focus of the role.

At this stage of the description-crafting game, I take one of two routes. The first approach is to keep the basic tasks short and string them together — for example, “ideation, information architecture, wireframing, prototyping and testing” or, for a lead position, “setting direction, identifying priorities, assigning resources, tracking progress and critiquing designs.”

The second approach is to elevate tasks to challenges (we literally call them “challenges”) by tying them to the larger purpose, focusing on the outcome (“responsibilities”) — for instance, “Hold accountability for developing a category structure for our store that measurably speeds product finding.” The subtle difference in how you frame the description reinforces learning and a sense of ownership.

Elevate the tasks to challenges by tying them to the larger purpose, focusing on the outcome. (Image credit: Flazingo Photos)

Promote The Transformational Benefits

We like to keep the list of traditional benefits short and to focus instead on the unique ones. All of the perks can be discussed during an interview or at some later stage anyway. We pick the most unique or fun perks but then hone in on how working for us can transform one’s career. For instance:

“Embark on a tour of mastery.” (We’ll explain what that is in a minute.)
“Network with a large, active in-house UX community of practice.”
“Become part of a growing company where you can shape the future of our work processes.”

We are especially proud of our “tour of mastery,” which is based on the tour of duty concept of Reid Hoffman and others (a new “compact” between employers and employees for the post-industrial age). We added a nod to Daniel Pink by replacing “duty” with “mastery” to focus on the employee motivation aspect of the tour.

The tour of mastery is a purpose-driven personal growth plan aimed at leveraging and expanding each tech employee’s professional potential. The tour mainly involves exercising certain competency muscles in day-to-day work (for example, deepening one’s information architecture skills by testing and redesigning a category tree), supported by conferences, trainings, mentoring and peer critique.

Inspire By Writing An Inviting Call To Action

Don’t ask people to apply for a job. Invite them to have a conversation about their career and their goals. In our most recent postings, we changed the boilerplate “Want to join us? Then go ahead and apply!” to “Sounds like fun? Start the conversation. Tell us what the next step in your career could be.” We still don’t have the clearcut winner here, but we plan to follow up with the results of such tests.

Here’s an encouraging anecdote that tells us we’re on the right track. A few weeks ago, a bright young designer sent us an email saying that “It was surprising to see a job posting from Zalando on Dribbble, so I had to see what it was about.” Later, during a phone conversation, she expressed joy upon learning of our goal to visually improve the interface of our online store in order to maximize emotional engagement. She told us, “That was the most inspiring job description I’ve read in months.” Objective achieved!

This particular conversation with the candidate was a sweet reward in and of itself. Even without that, though, we are clearly seeing that our effort of emphasizing purpose and laying out potential career development paths results in inspiring conversations with talented and passionate designers.

Test And Iterate

As you already know, testing and iterating is the key to the best results.

In user testing, observations are more valuable than opinions. (As Jakob Nielsen says in his first rule of usability, “Pay attention to what users do, not what they say.”) However, when you evaluate the clarity of information (instead of evaluating the ease of use), it’s hard to observe directly.

Our latest approach to evaluating job descriptions is three simple methods:

guerilla-style think-aloud user tests at a meetup,
online surveys distributed to the UX community,
crowd-sourced inline comments on a draft description (shared online).

The goal of such research is to learn whether a job description feels motivating enough, is clear and reflects well on Zalando’s UX competence and UX maturity.

Zalando's UX jobs website — Zalando’s UX jobs website

Because we think big and act fast, our job descriptions are online after just a couple of hallway tests. We suggest never skipping hallway testing; asking colleagues for face-to-face feedback is always invaluable. Apart from the good ideas for refinements, the most important feedback I’ve received from colleagues kept me from putting a spoof “unicorn designer” job description out into the world. Staring into these descriptions for days on end and in a sort of creative hysteria, I thought the parody was a hilarious idea. Thankfully, several designers pointed out that it was not funny at all and essentially prevented what could have been a disaster.

(We are still testing and refining the aforementioned postings, and we’ll report our findings to the UX community. Watch this space.)

What Do You Think?

Our most recent UX career opportunities are the result of the approach described in this article. Do you find it helpful? What have you learned putting it into practice? What hiring approaches do you find work best for user experience positions?

Share with me and in the comments below. And if you’re an aspiring master UX hiring manager, we are looking for UX leaders to help us inspire designers.