The Hiring Shift
From believing and leaping to watching and measuring
I’ve been thinking about how dramatically UX hiring has changed over the past decade, and honestly, it’s kind of wild when you really look at it. Ten years ago, if you were a UXer looking for a job, the whole process was so much more relaxed. Companies would basically look at your portfolio for like 20 minutes, ask you a few questions about your process, and if you seemed smart and curious, you were probably getting an offer. No one was asking you to do homework assignments or going through ten rounds of interviews. Cultural fit? That wasn’t even a thing most places bothered with.
Back then, companies were betting on potential. They’d hire someone who showed promise, maybe had some design chops and could think through problems, and they’d figure the rest would work itself out. The field was exploding, everyone was still figuring out what UX even meant in their organization, and frankly, there weren’t enough experienced people to go around anyway. So you hired for curiosity and problem-solving ability and hoped for the best.
Fast forward to today and it’s a completely different world. Companies now hire almost entirely on past performance and incredibly specific context. I’m talking about job descriptions that read like they’re looking for a clone of someone who already worked there. “Must have led a team of exactly 8 designers across 3 product verticals while shipping 12 features in a fintech company focused on lending products for enterprise customers with 5,000+ seats.” Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but not by much.
The obsession with metrics is insane now. Companies want to know exactly how many people you managed, exactly what you shipped, exactly what impact you had on conversion rates. They want to see your OKRs and KPIs and all these acronyms that barely existed in UX conversations a decade ago. Did you increase sign-up rates by 23%? Great, but what about retention? Oh, you worked on retention? But was it B2B or B2C retention? Because we need B2B experience specifically.
And the domain expertise requirements are getting ridiculous. It’s not enough to be a good UXer who can learn new domains anymore. Companies want someone who’s already done the exact thing they need done. Healthcare UX? Better have HIPAA compliance knowledge. Fintech? Hope you understand payment flows and fraud prevention. E-commerce? They want to see your abandoned cart recovery strategies and checkout optimization wins.
The interview process itself has become this elaborate gauntlet. What used to be maybe two conversations has turned into this multi-week ordeal with portfolio presentations that need to be perfectly crafted with business impact metrics, take-home assignments that basically amount to free consulting work, whiteboarding sessions, cultural fit interviews, leadership philosophy discussions, and presentations to executives. I’ve seen candidates go through eight or nine interviews for a single role. It’s exhausting for everyone involved.
So what happened? Why did we swing so hard from “show us your thinking” to “prove you’ve already done this exact job”?
Part of it is just that the field matured. There are way more experienced UX people now than there were in 2014. When supply was limited, companies had to bet on potential because they didn’t have many other options. Now they can be picky. Why take a risk on someone who might be great when you can hire someone who’s already proven they are great?
The economy shifted too. The “growth at all costs” mentality of the early 2010s is over. Companies are more careful with their money, more risk-averse, and hiring managers are under more pressure to make sure every hire works out. It’s easier to justify hiring someone with a track record than someone with just potential.
Products got more complex and specialized as well. The days of the generalist UXer who could jump into any problem are kind of over, at least at senior levels. If you’re working on a healthcare product, there really is value in understanding healthcare workflows and regulations. If you’re designing for enterprise software, consumer app experience might not translate as well as it used to.
Plus, everything is measurable now. Companies want designers who can speak the language of business impact, and they want to see proof that you’ve moved needles before. It’s not enough to say you’re a good designer - you need to show that your designs led to measurable improvements in whatever metrics the business cares about.
Remote work probably made this worse too. When everyone was in the office, you could get a better sense of someone’s potential through casual interactions. Now companies are relying more heavily on structured interviews and documented experience because it’s harder to evaluate soft skills and cultural fit remotely.
But here’s the thing - I think we’ve overcorrected. This performance-first hiring approach is creating some real problems that companies aren’t fully recognizing.
For one, it’s making teams incredibly homogeneous. When you only hire people who’ve already solved the exact problems you’re facing, you end up with a bunch of people who think about those problems in very similar ways. Where’s the innovation going to come from? Where are the fresh perspectives?
It’s also creating this weird experience trap where companies expect people to have done specific things, but if everyone has those same requirements, where are people supposed to get that experience in the first place? We’re basically creating a system where junior designers can’t break into senior roles because senior roles require experience they can’t get without already having senior roles.
The whole thing is expensive and inefficient too. These elaborate interview processes take forever, cost a ton in terms of everyone’s time, and honestly, a lot of great candidates just drop out because they’re not willing to jump through eight hoops for a job. Meanwhile, hiring teams spend months trying to find the “perfect” candidate when someone with 80% of the requirements might have been perfectly fine with some onboarding and support.
I think the companies that are going to win long-term are the ones that figure out how to balance both approaches. They’re looking for ways to evaluate potential alongside performance, creating internal pathways for people to gain new domain expertise, and building assessment methods that test adaptability and learning ability, not just past accomplishments.
Some places are pairing less experienced designers with domain experts, which lets them leverage potential while reducing risk. Others are focusing more on transferable skills like systems thinking and collaborative problem-solving rather than requiring identical previous experience.
The truth is, the best designers I know are curious, adaptable people who can learn new domains and apply design thinking to novel problems. But our current hiring practices are optimized for finding people who’ve already learned specific domains and applied design thinking to familiar problems. Those are related but not identical skills.
I get why we evolved this way - it makes sense from a risk management perspective. But I think we’ve swung too far toward safety at the expense of growth and innovation. The companies that figure out how to bet on potential again, just with better frameworks for evaluating it, are going to have a real competitive advantage in building diverse, innovative teams.
Because at the end of the day, the most interesting design problems are the ones nobody’s solved before. And you can’t hire people who’ve already solved problems that don’t exist yet.