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Career Strategy Podcast with Sarah Doody | UX, Product Design, UX ResearchAuthor: Sarah Doody from Career Strategy Lab
Welcome to the Career Strategy Podcast, with Sarah Doody, a UX Researcher & Product Designer with 22 years of experience who is helping UX and Product people design their careers. Youll learn how to advance your UX or Product career including how get hired in UX, stay hired, get promoted, and build a personal brand and visibility. Youll also hear no BS tips to optimize your UX resume and portfolio, navigate your UX job search, and prepare for UX job interviews so you can stop being invisible and be seen as an in-demand UX professional. Get ready to UX your career, ironic, right?! Language: en Genres: Arts, Business, Careers, Design Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it Trailer: |
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184: Natalie got hired for a Director level UX role (and now she's the one hiring for UX roles)
Monday, 20 July, 2026
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 wayLinks & 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
