Landing a Director level UX role doesn't happen by accident, and neither does becoming the person on the other side of the hiring table a few months later.

Natalie Kurz did both. She spent six months on a UX job search after a layoff, landed a Director of Experience Design and Content role at NextGen Health, and within months found herself reviewing over 600 applications for her own open positions.

Natalie spent 25 years in UX, most recently as a people manager, before being laid off last May. She joined Career Strategy Lab during that UX job search, and the shift she describes isn't really about tactics.

She stopped using the "spray and pray" method long enough to get clear on what she actually wanted in her next UX role. She let her LinkedIn profile, UX network, and a background she almost left off her resume, do some of the work for her.

What makes this episode different is that Natalie is now the one hiring for UX roles.

A few months into her new position, she's already brought on multiple UX designers, including someone from Career Strategy Lab. Natalie now experiences the exact hiring process she was on the other side of not long ago.

So this conversation moves between her UX job search story and what she now looks for as a UX hiring manager, which gives listeners a rare before-and-after view of the same process.

If you're currently employed in a UX role and feel like your resume, portfolio, or LinkedIn presence isn't ready to go if an opportunity showed up tomorrow, this episode is worth sitting with.

Topics Discussed

✅ How a recruiter found Natalie and reached out about a completely unrelated UX role, purely because of how her LinkedIn profile came across

✅ Why she eventually stopped applying to every job with "UX" in the title, and what she focused on instead

✅ How a cold, polite message to a lead UX designer on a team she wanted to join turned into a warm handoff before she ever talked to a recruiter

✅ The background she almost left off her resume entirely, and why it ended up being a key reason she got hired

✅ What it was actually like reviewing over 600 UX applications as a hiring manager, and what made a resume or portfolio stand out in the first three to five seconds

✅ The line she now tells every UX applicant about generic resume bullet points, and why it matters more than people think

✅ Why she doesn't see contract roles, career gaps, or career changes as red flags in a UX resume, even now that she's the one hiring

✅ How she uses AI to check her own UX hiring decisions for bias, rather than to write applications

✅ Why she believes she'd be far more prepared for her next UX job search than she was for her last one, and what she does now to stay that way

Links & Resources

🔗 Episode 180 with Eric - UX Hiring Insights: Eric Shumake on Healthcare UX, Specializing, & Thinking of Your Career as Gigs​​

🔗 Natalie Kurz on LinkedIn

💸 See how you can get hired in UX with the help of my UX job search coaching program

📋 Take a peek inside my UX job search coaching program

👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube

Just laid off from a UX role? If you’re tempted to open LinkedIn and easy-apply to every role with UX in the job title, don't do it!

In this episode of the Career Strategy Podcast, Sarah Doody breaks down what she would NOT do after a UX layoff (e.g. play the numbers game) and the 3 things she’d prioritize instead.

You’ll walk away with a clear order of operations: get specific about the UX role you want, get visible where hiring actually happens, and start showing up for the work you want to be hired for.

🎯 In this episode we discuss:

- Why easy-applying to every “UX” job backfires after a layoff

- How to get ruthlessly specific about the UX role you actually want

- Auditing past jobs and naming your “superpowers” (and why to ask others)

- Where UX recruiters and hiring managers actually hang out

- The LinkedIn order of operations: headline first, then everything else

- Why turning on Open to Work is a signal, not desperation

- What to post on LinkedIn so your profile gets found, without becoming a “thought leader”

00:00 Intro

01:30 Why I wouldn’t play the numbers game in my UX job search

02:50 Step 1 — Get specific about the UX role you want

07:37 Step 2 — Increase your visibility

13:23 Step 3 — Post about what you want to be hired for

16:17 Putting it all together

17:44 UX Layoff checklist + final word

💸 See how you can get hired in UX with the help of my UX job search coaching program

📋 Take a peek inside my UX job search coaching program

👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube

This episode is a full walkthrough of how you'll get hired in UX faster with Career Strategy Lab and exactly what happens after you join. Sarah shares what genuinely helps UX people in their job search, after coaching UX and Product people since 2017 and running Career Strategy Lab since 2021.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

✔️ The six things that help UX and product people get hired faster

✔️ What your first 30 days inside CSL look like

✔️ Why positioning comes before your LinkedIn and resume

✔️ How the portfolio, case study, and critique process works

✔️ How monthly recruiter Q&As and the 850-alumni referral network help you get hired

Topics Discussed:

✅ The 6 things Sarah has found consistently help UX people get hired faster

✅ How the first 30 days inside Career Strategy Lab are structured and why every step is intentionally sequenced to build on the last

✅ What a Compass Statement is and why it comes before everything else in your UX job search prep

✅ How getting clear on your positioning makes fixing your resume and LinkedIn significantly faster

✅ How the weekly critique system works and why submitting imperfect work early beats waiting until everything feels ready

✅ The monthly recruiter and hiring manager Q&A sessions: who shows up, what you get to ask, and why this is one of the most underrated parts of the program

✅ How Career Strategy Lab's 850-person alumni network functions as a UX-specific job referral network and how members are actively using it to get hired

✅ The open to work area, interview debriefs, and hired recaps and why watching other people get hired in real time is some of the most useful intel you can get in a job search

💸 See how you can get hired in UX with the help of my UX job search coaching program

📋 Take a peek inside my UX job search coaching program

👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn, Instagram, & YouTube