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

The UX job market is rough right now. If your LinkedIn feed looks anything like Sarah's, you already know that. But while everyone is complaining about the market, almost nobody is focusing on the part of the job search they can actually control.

In this episode, Sarah breaks down why the job market feels so impossible right now, including the surprisingly outsized role that one-click apply has played in flooding recruiters with hundreds of applications per posting and what you can do about it. (Hint: The answer isn't more applications.)

Sarah shares real examples from inside the Career Strategy Lab community of how alumni are leveraging relationships to get referrals, introductions, and job offers, including one person whose hire two years ago has now led to four or five other alumni landing roles at the same company. The through-line is simple: the people who benefit most from their communities are the ones who actually show up in them.

Topics Discussed

✅ How the one-click apply button has made the job search harder for everyone and what that means for your strategy

✅ Why relationships matter more than ever in this job market, and why you need to start building them before you need them

✅ Why people say no to referral requests and how to change that

✅ Real examples of Career Strategy Lab alumni using community relationships to get referral links, introductions, and job offers

✅ How one hire two years ago has cascaded into multiple alumni landing roles at the same company

✅ The difference between existing in a community and actually participating in one

Links & Resources

🔗 Jared Spool: Why is the UX job market such a mess right now?

💸 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

Most UX professionals spend years trying to be good at everything. Eric Shumake, founder of HXR Labs, spent 20 years getting really good at one thing and it kept opening doors he didn't expect.

Eric is a principal UX researcher and a well-known voice in healthcare UX. His career has taken him through companies like Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Myriad Genetics, and AliveCor.

He also teaches, including a popular course on Maven on breaking into healthcare UX, and has been exploring how AI can meaningfully (and responsibly) augment research without replacing the judgment that makes research trustworthy.

In this episode, Eric and Sarah cover a lot of ground: how specializing almost always beats generalizing, what surprises people when they try to bring standard UX practices into clinical environments, why Eric thinks of every role as a gig, and what he'd prioritize if he were managing someone's job search like a product.

Topics Discussed

✅ Why specializing beats generalizing and how to niche down even when it feels risky

✅ How transferable skills work in practice: why experience in one highly regulated industry (like finance) can open doors in another (like healthcare)

✅ The biggest blind spot people bring into healthcare UX

✅ Why "recommendations are where insights go to die" and how to tie research to decisions and numbers so stakeholders actually act on it

✅ Treating every role as a gig and why that mindset is more practical than it sounds in today's job market

✅ Why posting consistently on LinkedIn is one of the highest-leverage things a UX professional can do in a job search right now

✅ Where AI genuinely helps in UX research (desk research, competitive analysis, automating the time-consuming parts) and where to draw a hard line

✅ What neurodivergence in the workplace looks like from the insideduring a job search

Links & Resources

🔗 Eric Shumake on LinkedIn

🔗 HXR Labs

🔗 Eric's Maven course on breaking into healthcare UX

💸 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

Re-entering the UX job market after years away is harder than most people expect, especially when you're doing it alone.

After 12 years at Constant Contact, growing from associate interaction designer to principal UX designer, Emmanuel relocated, took a deliberate career break, and then tried to re-enter a job market that had completely changed. He spent three months rebuilding his portfolio alone, then another three months applying and hearing almost nothing. His LinkedIn hadn't been updated since 2017. He burned out.

In this episode, Emmanuel shares what finally got him unstuck; why working on his resume, portfolio, and LinkedIn in parallel changed his messaging faster than tackling them one at a time; how early feedback from coaches and a community shortened iteration cycles he'd been stuck in for months; and what shifted when he started applying only to roles that actually fit. He's actively interviewing now, and the inbound LinkedIn requests have started coming in too.

Topics Discussed:

✅ What re-entering the UX job market after a long tenure at one company feels like and how to close the gap

✅ Why working on your resume, portfolio, and LinkedIn in parallel sharpens your message faster than doing them one at a time

✅ How long iteration cycles quietly stall your progress and what to do instead

✅ Why submitting imperfect work for feedback early is one of the highest-leverage moves you can make

✅ What AI tools genuinely help when job searching and where human judgment still matters more

✅ The confidence cost of mass applying

✅ What changes when you get more selective about the roles you apply to

💸 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

If you're sending dozens of applications per day and you aren't hearing back, this podcast is for you.

Carlos was applying to dozens of UX jobs a day, swiping through listings like a job board version of a dating app, and hearing almost nothing back. Out of hundreds of applications, he got two responses and both were rejections, but he knew he was a good designer.

In this episode, Carlos shares how he went from mass applying with no traction to landing a product designer role at Covenant Eyes and then getting promoted to senior product designer within the same year. He talks about what changed when he stopped treating the job search like a numbers game, how he used the same frameworks he learned in Career Strategy Lab to make his case for a promotion once he got there.

Topics Discussed:

✅ Why mass applying isn't productive and what to do instead

✅ How to use the skills from your job search to land a promotion

✅ Why confidence in interviews matters more than having a perfect portfolio

✅ A portfolio website vs a portfolio presentation

✅ How research a hiring manager before your interview helps you stand out

✅ How the skills you learn during your job search transfer directly into your work after being hired

✅ Why waiting until you feel confident enough to start is the wrong approach

Links From This Episode:

🔗 Free UX Case Study Template

🔗 Career Strategy Lab Syllabus

💸 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

Are you getting ghosted in your UX job search despite knowing you're qualified? When you have 5, 10, 15 years of experience and you're applying to 20+ jobs a week without hearing back or you're not making it past the first round, it's natural to start thinking you're the problem.

You're not. You're just unpositioned.

In this episode, Sarah makes the case that ghosting is usually a positioning problem, rather than a skills issue. Positioning is how you communicate what you do, who you do it for, and why it matters. It's the thread that connects what you've done in the past to what you could do for a team if they hired you. When that thread is missing, recruiters and hiring managers move on because your materials aren't clearly paining the picture for them.

Sarah walks through what it actually takes to fix your positioning, starting with the one foundational step most people skip: getting clear on who you are and what makes you different, before touching your resume, portfolio, or LinkedIn.

Topics Discussed:

✅ Why getting ghosted in your UX job search isn't usually a qualification problem

✅ What causes recruiters to move on from your resume

✅ What "positioning" means in the context of a UX job search

✅ The step most people skip that ties everything together

✅ How applying to fewer jobs can get you more interviews

✅ Creating a Compass Statement and how it acts as a filter for every career asset you create

✅ How niching down your job search to a specific industry or type of company can transform your UX job search

Links From This Episode:

🔗 How to stand out as a candidate by focusing on your benefits vs features

🔗 Developing your positioning through a career roadmap and compass statement

🔗 Free UX Case Study Template

💸 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