Adam Perlis
How to Get the Design Job You Want
In this episode of Brave UX, Adam Perlis shares why it’s important to always treat interns well 🔮, how he’s trying to solve bad recruitment practices 👻, and some practical advice for navigating the job market 🧭.
Highlights include:
- How did an intern play a pivotal role in your career?
- What do the most successful design portfolio’s demonstrate?
- Why are you deeply surprised that you’ve become a design recruiter?
- How do you assess a candidate before deciding to present them to a client?
- Where and how should designers go the extra mile when applying for jobs?
Who is Adam Perlis?
Adam is the CEO and founder of Academy, a flexible staffing and recruitment agency that helps companies like Under Armour, NBC Universal and Wish.com, to scale their UX orgs and UXers to further their careers 🚀.
Before founding Academy, Adam spent a decade working in various design roles in New York, including as a Head of UX for AKQA, Head of Design for B-Reel and notably, Head of Design for TIME magazine ⏰, where he led the team responsible for TIME.com, FORTUNE.com and MONEY.com.
Adam has also been a Creative Director at AT&T, guiding the design of AT&T AdWorks and AT&T AdWorks Lab, and at Dish Network 📡, where he was a manager of Interactive Television.
A dedicated contributor to the field, Adam has spoken at events around the world, such as SXSW, Web Summit and Tech Open Air. He is also the host of “How We Scaled It” 🎙️, a podcast that explores the journey of growing a successful design practice from 0-100.
Transcript
- Adam Perlis:
- Those little things really can get you that foot in the door where you have nothing on your resume, nothing in your experience that says you should get this job, but you want a way to stand out and get in that meeting. If you get in there, you can close the deal. You should be doing it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds, and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class, human-centered research and innovation lab. You can find out more about me and what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research, product management, and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders in those fields.
- My guest today is Adam Perlis. Adam is the CEO and founder of Academy, a flexible staffing and recruitment agency that helps companies like Under Armour, NBCUniversal and Wish.com to scale their UX orgs and UXers to further their careers.
- Starting life as a product design studio and with over 5,000 comprehensively vetted UX professionals in their network, Adam reckons they bring something meaningfully different to the recruitment game.
- Before founding Academy, Adam spent a decade working in various design roles in New York, including as head of UX for AKQA and head of design for Breal. He was also notably head of Design for Time Magazine where he led the team responsible for time.com, fortune.com, and money.com.
- Adam has also been a creative director AT&T, guiding the design of AT&T AdWorks and AT&T AdWorks Lab, and at Dish Network where he was manager of interactive television.
- A dedicated contributor to the field, Adam has spoken at events around the world such as South by Southwest, Web Summit and Tech Open Air. He's also the host of "How We Scaled It", a podcast that explores the journey of growing a successful design practise from zero to 100.
- And now he's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Adam, a very warm welcome to the show.
- Adam Perlis:
- Thanks so much for having me, Brendan.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's great to have you here. Adam and I understand that within the last couple of years or so, you and your wife became Digital Nomads, and it seems to me that you made this decision to travel the world in the middle of the Global Pandemic. What led you to that decision?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, well, I'll tell you that it actually was a decision that we made even before the pandemic, and we spent about five years trying to figure out how to make our dream a reality. When I left my job at time and started Academy, the vision was to have a company where I could and my employees could work from anywhere in the world, and I wanted to make that possible. I wanted to be able to travel kind of like the Tim Ferriss of the worlds that I'd seen out there doing it. We kind of hatched a plan and everything in the business that we did or that I did to set it up helped ensure that we were always driving towards that goal and it probably took about five years to truly make it a reality, and that paired with the Global Pandemic happening, it kind of accelerated, I'd say even the timeline of that just because remote working became so much more accepted. So yeah, it's been a wild journey and I couldn't be happier that we've been able to actually do it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Fortune seems to have been kind in an ironic sense there with the Pandemic facilitating an easier business model for the type of life and work life that you wanted to lead. You mentioned some of the decisions you made earlier on. What were some of those decisions that you made that you feel helped you to create the type of business you now have in Academy?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, so I think some of the things were, when you first start a business, you really have to be deeply involved in the day-to-Day operation, and a lot of times that means being deeply embedded with your clients. Some of those clients may be very local. For us, it was New York City where most of our first clients were and they wanted FaceTime. They wanted to see me there doing the work, and especially as a product design studio when we first started, we had to kind of be there doing the work and especially if we were going to run workshops or do any kind of collaborative work. But over time I started to one, delegate responsibility to other people so I didn't have to be as involved in the day-to-Day client relationship. So that took a lot of time. That probably took the most time to finally keep myself more on the business operational front in sales and marketing and less on the day-to-Day work.
- And that was hiring great people that I trusted to be able to do the work and making sure that from the very start of every project I made it clear that, hey, I'm not going to be working on this, but my team will be working on this. That kind of trust with clients and reputation took a very long time to build. The other was ensuring that we learned everything there was to know about compliance and understanding from a state to state or even country to country basis, how do the laws work, how do we structure ourselves so that it's easy for us to make sure that not only me but anybody on our team can work from anywhere. And then also establishing great rapport with our clients and being clear that our team will be working remotely and that they won't be working in the office unless it's a very specific case, in which case we can fly the team in and make sure that they're there.
- And then the last was really a business model thing. We were a studio. We worked that way for a very long time, but over time we realised our clients didn't always need a full studio team. Sometimes they just needed a few resources like for staffing engagements or contract or freelance engagements, and then sometimes they wanted to hire people full time. And so we went to a more flexible business model and it turned out that staffing and recruiting started to become a lion's share of our business. So it really didn't require us to be in person to do that type of work. And so now I'd say that we're a very flexible business and we've built in policies for our team also how to work. We've created a very clear schedule of the time zones we work in, the hours that we work collaboratively, the hours that we work separately, and made a very concerted effort to adhere to those. For us as a business, it works great. It may not work for everybody, but it works really great for us.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I want to pick up and follow on a little bit more the story of Academy, but before we do that, let's come back to Digital Nomad. I understand that you and your wife are still technically digital nomads, but you may have found somewhere a place in the world that you'd like to call home. Where is that place and what is it about that place that you feel like you can build the rest of your lives there?
- Adam Perlis:
- Great question. A lot of the time when we were travelling, we would always have in the back of our minds, is this a place that we wanted to live? We lived in New York for a very long time. I lived there for 15 years myself, my wife and I, I believe it was five of those years, and we realised that we didn't want to live in New York long term. It wasn't the place we wanted to raise a family. We wanted to live in a warmer place. My family was in Boston, my wife's family was in Turkey. We were very split, so we started to kind of make a list of things that we were looking for. It needed to be a warm place, it needed to be a safe place. It needed to be a place that would give us a lot of opportunity. It needed to be a place that we really enjoyed and loved.
- We had travelled to so many places. We'd spent a lot of time in Puerto Rico. We loved being near the beach, and we were like, wow, can we find a place near the beach but also has great healthcare, also has great school systems, really deeply thinking about the future. And along our travels, we actually, we didn't expect to go here, but a friend of mine moved there with his whole family, uprooted his life from South Africa and literally moved to the island of Myorca in Spain and he was like, Hey, why don't you come and visit us? We've got a room for you guys. And so we were like, well, free place to stay. We're in Spain anyways. Let's go. We spent all of three days there and after kind of seeing their life asking lots of questions about their living expenses, how much does it cost to get an apartment here, how much is it for healthcare, et cetera. Yeah, we realised it really suited our lifestyle and checked all the boxes that we were looking for that I mentioned before. And not to mention it's in the centre of Europe perfectly in between Turkey and Boston, and also flies to I think a 158 or something countries direct from Majorca's airport in Palma. So really just hit all the marks we were looking for.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, you mentioned those marks and you mentioned obviously you are from the States and your wife is from Turkey, has family there. What was it that you felt that you couldn't find? The states are such a large country, right? There's many different places in the States that may have ticked some of those boxes, and likewise, turkey's a rather large country too. Couldn't you find in either of those countries that you were looking for?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, so in regards to Turkey, we love it as a country. It is one of the most amazing countries to visit, really in all the world, and I really encourage people to go and visit. I think there's just a few things that we were looking at that didn't really line up for us. We felt like the quality of the education system wasn't as strong as we were hoping for. While we certainly can live a pretty amazing life there, we felt like the opportunities our children might have living and graduating from a school in Turkey were as promising as other places. Those were the primary reasons, but access to affordable healthcare, incredible in Turkey, being able to, as I said, live a pretty amazing life. If you can earn US dollars and live in the country, fantastic. And a wonderful culture that honestly is so embracing and hospitable. All of those things give really high marks to why you would want to live there. But yeah, ultimately it came down to thinking about our future and our kids. I mean, Myorca seemed to level up on some other areas, so we ended up going with that. And
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Like you were saying, in terms of its geography, Maya sounds like it's in the middle, right? So you found the happy medium. It's a happy compromise by the sounds of it, when you need to get back to the states or visit family in Turkey, I think you'll find exactly. I think you'll see where my next question's going. It's based on an interview that you gave back in 2016 about your role at time, and I feel like it connects to what we were just talking about there in terms of the life that you've been designing with your wife. And in this interview you were asked the very proud end question, what is your idea of happiness? And I'll quote you now so you can recall what you said. You said ultimately you are in control of your own happiness. You have the power to choose and make decisions in your life to institute change that will make you happier. I feel empowered when I make choices to help me cope with life stresses. I feel happiest when I know that the choices I have made have been truist to myself and my wellbeing. So that was seven years ago. What would you say if I asked you the same question today, what is your idea of happiness?
- Adam Perlis:
- Wow. I mean, it's awesome to hear that. I haven't thought about that interview for a very long time, but I'd say that everything I said there completely aligns with my vision of happiness today. I still do truly believe that those choices that you make and the things that you can be in control of will ultimately lead to the things that you're going to be happiest about. I think one of the other quotes from that article, although I believe I misquoted it, but it was something that in fact, the same person who I'm following to my ACA once told me when I was deciding to just start my business, and I believe the original quote was from someone named William H. Murray. It was the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves to, and I do truly believe that. I think in every decision in my life, once I've committed to it, then everything else kind of flowed in that direction That led to ultimately my happiness because those decisions were very intentional and they were largely part of a goal of some sort of happiness, whether that was in my business or in my personal life or with my partner.
- All of it has intention. And as a result, I believe that the world kind of rewards you for really just the inertia of moving in a particular direction that I believe is truly connected to happiness.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- What relationship, if any, do you see between happiness in a general sense or whatever sense you want to talk about it and career success?
- Adam Perlis:
- Well, I'd say they're probably pretty directly related, at least for me, maybe not for everybody. I've always been somebody who follows their passion. I'm not somebody who is always pushing towards earning money. If I did, I probably wouldn't have necessarily been a designer, although I'd say that given the trajectory of design as a career, we've been very lucky about the compensation that arrives with it. Otherwise, it probably would've been a doctor or a lawyer or something, the traditional higher paying careers. But yeah, I truly believe that happiness is correlated to the things that you've done is conscious choices, and it does actually help, I think, improve your chances of business success. If I wasn't happy with what I'm doing, I just wouldn't turn up the same way as I do every day. But I also think that you'll find happiness, especially in your career, in different things, and it can evolve.
- Excuse me. In my early career, I wanted to be the vice president of design at some fancy place, and that was my goal. And then I became that, and then I was like, okay, well, I've achieved that goal and now my goals need to change because maybe, I mean, I could stay in that path, but I want to aspire to something else. And so the next thing was I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to start my own business, and now it's evolved to, okay, I'm become an entrepreneur. I'm almost getting to the place where I've been really successful, so successful that I can move on from doing it and do something else. And now I need to look towards what that next thing is. Maybe that's becoming an advisor to other business. Maybe that's investing in other businesses. Maybe it's also a subset of what I'm doing today, helping other people grow, which is kind of advisory in its own. So I think it's relative to kind of wherever you are in your career, those goals and that happiness will ultimately connect. Yeah, that's kind of the way that I always have viewed it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You spoke a little earlier about that quote in terms of making a decision to move to do something different, to change, and you'd spent, I think four and a half years or so at and t and the role of creative director. And during that time you had an intern called Will and I found this part of your story quite fascinating, and now hearing you talk more about it, it's sort of joining a few dots for me. What role did will play in helping you to make another career pivot or a different career pivot out of creative direction into product design?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, it's a great pull. I'm surprised you found this, but yeah, will had a pretty pivotal role in helping me transition, really transition my career, even though I was still working in the creative industry, but within it. So the backstory is that Will was an intern of mine at and t, and we forged a great relationship. He was a great intern, very responsible. I treated him well. I think this is definitely a lesson to treat your interns, right? Because one day they might become your boss. And about four years later from his internship, I was on the market starting to look for new jobs, created a new portfolio, put it up onto LinkedIn for the world to see, and he happened to come across it. And as it turns out, he had become, I believe, the head of innovation or director of innovation for Time Inc.
- And he basically reached out to me, said, Hey, can we get a coffee? During which he told me, Hey, we're hiring for a new head of design for Time Magazine. Is that something you'd be interested in? I was like, yeah, sounds like a total dream job. I would love to work there. And he was like, great, I'm going to set you up with an interview. And not more than three weeks later, I had a job offer in hand, and I had pivoted from becoming really a creative director at and t for four and a half years to moving into the product design field, which I had some experience in, but was never my primary job responsibility. And it was due to the help of a, at the time, a lowly intern who somehow had ascended the ranks all the way up to a director level in four short years. So treat your interns right,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Definitely. And it's a wonderful example of Providence playing out as well. And you were at time during a really unintentional pun, really interesting time, quite a critical time in America's political landscape. It was on December 7th, 2016 that the magazine named Donald Trump its person of the year. And I just want to quote what Nancy Gibbs who wrote the announcement article, said in that a little bit of what she said. She said that President Trump, this is me paraphrasing now quoting, receive this for reminding America that demagoguery feeds on despair and that truth is only as powerful as the trust in those who speak it. Now, without passing any political judgement myself on those words, clearly it was a massive statement for a company to be making at that time. Cast your mind back to what it was like that day, if you recall. What did it feel like at work when the cover, the announcement was made?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah. Well, I'll actually even bring you back a little further. So when President Trump was elected, I was in Lisbon speaking at Web Summit for the first time on one of the biggest stages I'd ever spoken. And the day after I spoke was the inauguration, or not the inauguration, sorry, was election day, and they announced that he had won. And the entire mood of the place just shifted so bad. I mean, people were distraught upset. It was just very interesting. And I was working at time at the time, and then I came back to work, and I think that sentiment definitely was felt inside the office as well. And when the time person of the year, I think a year later started to be discussed, of course his name was in the running and we weren't privy as the design team, we weren't really privy to the conversations the editors have between themselves to discuss who will become the time person of the year.
- In fact, it's a incredibly closely guarded secret. We knew probably one week before everyone else did, and we had one week to be able to create all the materials that would go out, the landing pages for each of the potential people, the winners page, all that stuff. And so when we were brought into that world, which was literally a top secret room no one was allowed to go into. And I have to say that from a personal political perspective, it was a very tough pill to swallow. And it's kind of hard, I think when you have to work at a company, especially in a media or news organisation, and you're not maybe a trained journalist who knows how to put their political views aside, it felt challenging to create work that would represent them in a positive way if you didn't necessarily agree with those people.
- And there was a lot of people on that list that year that we didn't really feel aligned. I personally didn't feel aligned with, can't speak for other people, but our job is to basically work as a journalist would as independently as we can, and let the people in our editorial staff do their jobs as we always trusted them to do great work. And so we did our job and held our end of the bargain. That was our duty as well. So yeah, it's definitely tough to have a company represent you in a way that maybe you don't agree with, and sometimes there's a line that you need to draw, but we felt like they handled it professionally enough and ultimately the cover was what it was, and that's who became time person of the year.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- In your time there, did you feel that company was, I mean, clearly it makes political statements through the type of decisions, the editorial decisions it makes. Did you feel that it was safe and welcoming or how would you describe the environment for a diversity of political opinions and thoughts and feelings around what was occurring in America at that time?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, I mean, time generally speaking is an incredibly open-minded environment where none of us would ever have any fear of retribution or anything like that for expressing our political views. But generally, I think as any journalist, good journalists should do, and even though we're not journalists kind of needed to follow suit and learn how to be agnostic of it, as independent as we possibly could. Either way we always would, would've conversations about what the impact would be and how it could affect us personally. And yeah, I don't think anybody ever felt uneasy about that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let's fast forward now. Thank you for going into that and giving us some insight into what that was like for you at time, at the time. I've got to stop saying that. So we've got to move on from this little bit about time at the time. At the time. I know it's terrible. It's terrible. Let's fast forward. Let's go forward. A couple of years or so after you left the magazine and you recently wrote on LinkedIn about starting academy, and I'll just quote you again now, you said, if you had told me three and a half years ago that a diehard designer would be at the helm of a UX staffing and recruiting agency, I would've probably choked on my coffee. So what is it about that proposition that would've made you choke?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, yeah, that's a pretty funny line actually. It's true though. I think that a lot of professionals, whether you're in design profession or any other profession, have probably had a pretty negative experience at one point or another in their career with recruiters. And it's for good reason. It's for the following reasons, actually. One is recruiters can be completely blinded by the entirety of the process in that they are bombarding candidates with messages that they are not personal in the way that they approach them, that they are treating them honestly like a piece of meat and don't take a empathetic approach to addressing their particular needs. And this is all born out of the business model that is traditionally known as contingency recruiting, where recruiters only earn money if they are successful at placing somebody in the role. And the reason that that is bad is because while it certainly incentivizes the recruiter to do the job faster and reduces the risk for clients who may not want to pay, if the recruiter does a bad job, it's bad because the recruiter can't spend a lot of time and attention on each and every candidate that they meet with.
- So all they do is focus on the basics of that particular candidate if they have very top level qualifications and then throw as many candidates as they possibly can at their clients and hope that one of them sticks. And if they do great, they win the game. But if they don't, there's just a mountain of candidates that they can't address any of their needs, they can't provide them clear feedback about why they may have been rejected. They can't help them grow or even improve their chances of landing the role, they can't meet with them. And so all of this creates this very negative experience. In addition, you get side effects like candidates getting ghosted by recruiters who have reached out to them for a role, or perhaps multiple recruiters have reached out about the same role because a client has hired multiple recruiters on contingency to pit against each other and see which one wins the race. This creates just a overall really negative experience for a lot of the talent that's out there. And I think it also leads to a lot of disingenuous and inauthentic relationships and conversations and opportunities that unfortunately have put a large stain on the recruiting industry as a whole.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So that's the problem. What is the solution?
- Adam Perlis:
- Well, we did a lot of thinking about this because I mentioned earlier that we made this big transition from being a product design studio to getting into the staffing and recruiting business. And with that came this very, at the time we thought nasty word called recruiter, and we were like, do we have to really call ourselves that? It just comes with this really negative reputation. Can we attack the problem? And we really kind of axed ourselves. We axed the industry and said, what are the problems? Some of the ones we identified before, but it came down to a few things that we felt like could be easily resolved. One was transparency and honesty and professional behaviour, not ghosting candidates, making sure that we get back to them, giving them honest assessments about their candidacy and where they are in the process, treating them like human beings, listening to them about their passions, their interests, and trying to align that with our clients and their goals.
- And with that meant that we wanted to give actual value back to the candidates that we were working with. It felt like they couldn't get honest feedback from their peers, they couldn't get it from their bosses. They really couldn't get it from anybody, even though the hiring managers that were, they were maybe interviewing for jobs at. So we felt like we could be this unbiased voice that could be honest with them and knowledgeable about the space that they worked in to give them actual feedback to help them grow. And so we often spend hours on the phone with people literally recording loom videos or listening to how they give their presentation or working through case studies together and giving tangible direct feedback about exact things that they can improve to improve their chances of getting a role either broadly or even more specifically at a company that we happen to be working with.
- Because we are often privy to insider information with the clients that we work with because we do a deep analysis of what exactly are they looking for as a client in this role. And then we can give tips to the people that we're interviewing to say, Hey, make sure you emphasise that you have zero to one experience or make sure you emphasise your design system work because we know that they're looking for that. It may not be in the job description, but we know because we've had those conversations. So we spend a lot of time with that. And then the other thing is in terms of our business model, we work in what's called a container model. So it's partially tied to the success of placement, and it's partially tied to a specific fee that we're paid upfront. So we're paid a portion of our fee upfront that guarantees us to the project.
- It makes us exclusive to the project. So you're not going to hear from multiple recruiters about it. It means that we're committed a hundred percent to the project because we're not going to be spending our time elsewhere to the next biggest opportunity that can pay us, and then the remainder is only due upon placement. So it's a shared risk model between us and the clients and allows us to spend a lot of time and attention on each and every candidate. And what's great is that at Academy, every candidate that applies to a role with us, whether that's through our general opportunities or for our active roles that we're trying to place, they're going to get some form of feedback. We can't give everybody specific feedback. We get thousands and thousands of applicants. But depending on the stage you are at in your career, if you're at the earliest stages, you're going to get some clear articles that we've written on our blog to help educate people about the things that we look for, our evaluation criteria, how to build a great portfolio, et cetera.
- If you're a mid stage candidate, you're going to get some written feedback, maybe even some verbal feedback in our phone screens or maybe even a Loom video that we record going through your portfolio and helping advise on things we would change before you get to become an approved candidate with academy, or if you're an advanced level candidate, you're going to get direct feedback. We're going to get on the phone with you, we're going to spend an hour with you and we're going to talk you through all the things that we would do to improve your chances of landing a role.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The model, did you say container containment?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, so it's called a container model, although there isn't a whole lot of documentation about this out there. It is also sometimes commonly referred to as retained search, but every agency or recruitment firm does their own kind of spin on this, but a lot of executive search firms will do a model like this.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You may not have industry-wide access to the margins, for example, of your closest competitors, but if we do sort of an intellectual exercise here and you try and step out onto the balcony and look at the way that you are operating in the container model and how other firms, we were talking about earlier, FIFA placement basically, and it's a free for all and it's just as many candidates as I can push you away, one might stick type approach. If you look at that dispassionately, which business model wins in terms of margin, which is the more financially successful, not necessarily emotionally rewarding, but which one do you think wins in a drag race?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, I mean we've of course done a lot of analysis on all of this, and I would say that probably in a drag race, when you have cheap labour and you don't care about your talent and you frankly don't care about the people that are working for you, probably a pure contingency model with enough resources thrown at it ends up earning the most margin. We do make some sacrifices on how much money we earn in order to just provide a better quality experience.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Tell me about that then. And this is a theme that's consistently come through from our conversation around decisions, right? That's not an accident. What is it about that that's important to you?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah. Well, I'd say when we hire people at academy, everybody is expected to become, if they're not already an expert in the field of UX, we find that our competitive advantage lies in the fact that we're able to be to call ourselves experts. We're able to advise people and speak their language and help them grow as talent. And that not only helps them, but that helps our clients too, who then get a great candidate out of our experience working with them, and that benefits us. So it's a nice circle there. So I'd say that with other firms who may not invest the time and resources that we do into that process, that is just one way that we really improve the quality of our work, but sacrifice on our margin because we have to spend extra time and resources to do it. If you are maybe a, what do they call it, like a meat processing plant of staffing or recruiting agencies, you might hire very cheap labour that is coming directly out of college. You'll train them on the basics and then expect them to produce crazy results at very, very low pay. And also probably be on some sort of, what is it called in sales when you're working just for the pay that you earn from sales?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Totally what you kill.
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, I can't remember. There's another word, but yes, what you kill model. We don't operate that way. That's another thing we do. We pay our recruiters hourly for their services instead of or on salary depending on the type of engagement we have with them. That way it aligns them to be one open to collaboration and not be like sharks in a tank competing with each other. And two provides I think a higher quality experience to our talent as well as our clients themselves. So I think those are just a few of the ways that we sacrifice from a expense perspective, but as a result, the quality of our work is way higher, and we're not just this chop shop recruiting organisation. Well,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let's talk about the talent side of things more now. So something that I understand that you do and that you've invested a lot in is developing your own interview process for candidates. So your own intake interview for lack of a better term, and you were inspired by the practises that you saw at companies like Airbnb and Google. What was it that you borrowed from them and what have you done uniquely in your own way? What did you add or change from what you saw on those companies processes?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, so we did need to make a bunch of adjustments just because when you go and interview at Airbnb or Facebook or Meta or Google, you're likely going through six to eight different interviews by the time we're done. So we needed a way to kind of consolidate all the best parts of that into a much shorter interview process because if we were going to require talent come interview with us first, we didn't want to add too many more steps. And even since we first started, we've made adjustments to how we do that. So with us, one is that we kind of grounded in three different things. One is behaviour strategy and execution. And we've borrowed a lot of these terms and ways of evaluating talent from all these different companies that we benchmarked against, either from going through the interview process ourselves or reading about it online.
- And some have done a wonderful job Intercom. I think we borrowed a lot of stuff from really documenting that process. And it usually starts with a portfolio review. We want to see is this person capable of the work, right? And a portfolio is really the single best way to do it. And that can be from a designer like a product centre, it can be from a product manager, it can be from a researcher. Any of those folks can have a portfolio. And I think that's a common misconception that only designers have portfolios. That's completely incorrect because ultimately we want to see how the work gets done. Now we don't refuse any talent who does not have a portfolio to show if it's NDA or something special. We'll make special considerations for that person, but we will be evaluating their background experience before we decide to move forward in any regard if they do not have a portfolio, because otherwise how are we to know that they're great at their job?
- We would just then be relying upon some of the things that they tell us anecdotally in their experience and then their resume, which we don't think are the two best measures of whether a person's capable of doing the job. And there's all sorts of other biases that I think are introduced with that as well. So what we do is we start with the portfolio review, we determine if they are at the level we're hoping. We also look at some of their past experiences to determine if we think roughly speaking, they have the skill and the experience to be able to do the jobs that we are hiring for. And if they pass that part, then we'll agree to either for general opportunities, we start them out with just a simple phone screen to teach them a little bit about how we work, and then we'll move them into a 60 minute portfolio interview.
- But for people who are applying directly to a role, if you pass kind of the initial portfolio review, they move into directly a 60 minute interview. And in that interview we're going to cover a few things. We'll tell them a little bit background about us and how we work in that, what they can expect from the process. We tell 'em about the role and the opportunity in the team, and then we give them a chance to present their work, right? We'll go through one case study together, and at the end of that call, we will give them actual feedback about how they did and any pointers we think they could do before moving on in the process. If we think they're not ready yet, we'll tell them explicitly, you need to do these things before we're presenting you to our clients. And if they do them, we present them.
- If they do not, then we usually will have to pass on them. And when we do, we give them specific reasons about why we've passed. So we have a whole templated system to make sure that every person gets some level of feedback, as I mentioned. Lastly is once we've presented them to the client, we work with the client to understand what was it about their candidacy that they like or dislike, and then either communicate that feedback back to the candidates or if they want to move forward with an interview, we help coordinate that interview with our clients and then help shepherd them throughout the entirety of the process.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Let's go back to the first step in that process, the portfolio. When you've received the portfolio, there will be a bunch of people listening to this that have sent out portfolios or applied for jobs and being ghosted. You talked about that being rife in the industry and won't have any real clue as to why. Was it the portfolio? Was it something else that they did? But if we think about the portfolio now, what is it that the portfolios that have stood out the most to you in recent memory are doing that, helping those people to move into that next step, helping them to get the interest of academy, get on the phone, get into that interview process?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, so I'd say it's a number of things. One is having a proper structure for us, and we document all of this stuff. We send it to people in advance as an interview guide, what we're expecting to see. We also publish things on our blog about exactly how to build a great portfolio, but usually it needs to have some sort of structure. It needs to identify who the client was, what was the big problem you were trying to solve, what was the process by which you went to uncover those problems and solve them? What were some of the solutions that you came up with and what was the impact of that work? That's usually the structure that we're looking for when we see people's case studies, the length of which some people get super, super detailed, some people are not detailed enough. I think it needs to be some sort of happy medium between the two.
- But some of the things that we do look for, are you showing iterative work? Are you crediting some of your peers that you've worked with? Are you showing a clear connection between the problems you identified early on and the solutions that you came up with? I think that's one of the biggest things that's often missed. There's a lot of time talking about a problem, but then when you get to the solution, nobody can remember any of the problems because you're not familiar with the project really. You're just kind of like a bystander of listening as the hiring manager, right, doing your best. So I always tell people, make sure you reiterate what the problem was in the solution so that way it's super clear about why you did this. So I think those are some of the ways from a structural standpoint that people will stand out. I also think that paying close attention to visual design is critical. People, especially designers, like looking at pretty things and whether you're a designer or UX manager, or sorry, a product manager or a researcher, design's important. So I advise people, Hey, look, you may not be a designer, but there are lots of great templates out there that you can pick from and just buy a template and plug in your stuff. Don't try to go at it on your own. So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're saying the cover does, the cover does matter, it really does
- Adam Perlis:
- Matter. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, of course don't judge a book by its cover entirely, but I do think it does matter. If you go to the grocery aisle and you're trying to choose between, I don't know, different types of peanut butter or something, you're going to pick the one with the nicest design bottle in most cases. I think that those things are probably just the basics of what makes people stand out in terms of getting a hiring manager's attention. One of the things that I often see is we'll get applications. I'll get maybe a LinkedIn message being like, I applied for role. Here's my resume and my portfolio. I'm like, great, I've gotten a thousand of these exact messages. You put zero time and effort into writing this message. What am I going to do with this? I usually just tell this person, thanks for writing me a message.
- Please make sure you apply on the site. My team will get back to you. But other people who take time to write me a very thoughtful, personalised message about why they want this job or something that their passion aligned with mine because they heard me in a podcast or a blog post, talk about something, any of those personal touches, I get back to them personally. I write them a note. If they want a phone call conversation, I agree to a phone call, and I'll tell you that I've said this on multiple podcasts, multiple times that, and only 1% maybe of the people actually take me up on this. But if you write me one of those personal notes, I will get back to you personally. I will make time for you. You put in the effort, I put in the effort, but those who are going to be super transactional about it, I honestly don't have that much time for you. It doesn't mean you're not going to get the job, you're just not going to get my attention.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a huge point, and it really isn't a huge ask, what is that five, 10 minutes to think about? What is it that Adam would be interested in receiving? I mean, it's probably a bit cliche, but that's a little bit of design really, isn't it applied to your job search and also maybe just a little bit of humanity in the whole process. How important is it really for you to get this job? If you are looking for work, then spending that little bit of extra time putting something personal together. And I'm sure that people are doing this who are listening as well, but if you're not, it's probably something worth considering what Adam is saying.
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, and I've talked a lot about this in some other blog posts, which I can share with you and some LinkedIn posts as well. So there's some specific examples of how people have done it well. So I think it'll be worth looking at it for your audience.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've talked about before how you're not a huge fan of hustle culture, and this was pretty endemic in online circles, certain online circles, possibly more in the entrepreneurial online circles than elsewhere, but the likes of Christo, for example, at the future, sort of come into the design adjacent or design sphere as well. And you've said, and I want to quote you now, you've said, I'm not a big proponent in general of hustle culture, but I do think that putting in the extra effort on certain things, very strategic, targeted things can yield extremely high results. Now obviously we were just talking there about an example of a little LinkedIn outreach to yourself and how a little personalization goes a long way. What else is it that you feel though that designers, whether it's getting on the radar for a job or whether it's through the process of applying for a job, what is it that you feel is worth them sweating a little bit more over that you're just not seeing enough of at the moment?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah. Well, I think I'll first talk about the things in hustle culture that bother me. I think the Elon Musks of the world who think that waking up at 4:00 AM every single day, having a schedule from four till 9:00 PM per night working, working, working, working is going to yield positive results. And look, maybe it works for them and certainly they have the financial success, business success to back that up. But I think the most important thing here is that you have to do what's going to make you the happiest and waking up at 4:00 AM every single day and working a maniac and having worked dominate my entire life is not my personal idea of happiness. And so that's, I think one of the things that is important to find about what I mean by not being a big fan of hustle culture in terms of the little things that you can do to stand out.
- Of course, we talked about writing a personalised message to each of the potential hiring managers that you are interested in working with. Another exercise that I really encourage people to do, and again, this is going the extra mile, but this is the stuff that works to land you a role. Go and I actually did this exercise with my wife, find a company you're interested in working at, go and create a case study about them in whatever field that you're interested in working in. For her, she was interested in becoming a content marketing strategist. And so I was like, why don't you create a whole content marketing plan around this particular company and look at their strategy and see how you would change it. And she literally built a 33 page deck and sent it to the CEO, the chief of staff, the chief, the head of operations, the head of sales and the head of marketing, and wrote personalised notes to each one of them to see if she could get, elicit a response from one of them.
- And guaranteed, if you do this 10 times, one out of those 10 is going to respond to you and give you a meeting to talk about it. So those little things really can get you that foot in the door where you have nothing on your resume, nothing in your experience that says you should get this job, but you want a way to stand out and get in that meeting. If you get in there, you can close the deal, you should be doing it. And I know that sometimes that can come across as like, well, you're doing free work in the design community. I think there's a lot of backlash around doing spec work. I think there are some ethical considerations when doing that. When asked to do that for a company for example, they're like, Hey, can you design this feature for us that we're actually working on right now?
- Yeah, I think there's an ethical concern there. I get it. But if they want to give you a design exercise that's loosely tied to their business but not really related, I don't see any issue in that. If you want the job, go the extra mile, do the design exercise, or if you're trying to get your foot in the door, put in the extra work, show them that you're capable of doing the job. I can't tell you how many times hiring managers pass on candidates because they don't believe they're capable of doing the job in a particular field. Let's say you're a great designer. You've worked at Apple your entire career, but you never worked in e-commerce, even though you're a fantastic designer, worked at Apple, one of the best places for designers to work. An e-commerce company may not want to hire you because don't have any e-com experience.
- So how do you get e-commerce experience? You have to create a project for yourself or work with smaller clients, build up that resume and show that you can do the work and then present that as a case study to a potential e-commerce company. I think it's one of the biggest things that a lot of people miss in terms of opportunities, and they spend a lot of time clicking apply on LinkedIn to all these millions of jobs, and frankly, it's a giant waste of time. I think a more targeted approach of very specific companies that you want to work at with very specific hiring managers, you're going to try to attract their attention, will yield a much higher result. It's spearfishing or rather it's like snipers instead of shotguns, I think is probably a better analogy.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The word that was coming to mind for me when you were describing that more targeted approach and just thinking about the broader context of what's going on here between candidate, other candidates, employer, is the word competition, rightly or wrongly, how do you think about describing the dance or what word or words would you use to describe the dance that's going on here in the present market between the candidate and their objective of getting a job? Is competition the right way to describe it, or is there a better way of framing what needs to happen for candidates so they can be more successful?
- Adam Perlis:
- You mean competition among each other, like
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Product designer, product designer, yeah. Is it really a competition at the moment? Are there fewer roles available than there are candidates applying? And therefore, this is really not a question. I'm clearly giving you what I was hearing there, but therefore, do candidates need to be willing to go above and beyond of their own volition and to do things like you just described that your wife did when trying to reposition herself in a new industry?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, I mean, I think there's no two ways of saying it here. It is what it is. It is a competition. Anytime there's some sort of scarcity, there is, and it's pretty much almost always, there's never an endless amount of jobs available. There's always going to be a supply and demand issue when it comes to acquiring a job of some sort. I think you do need to treat it as a competition as much as we would like not to. If you don't get the job someone else will. And so in order to give yourself the best chance of landing that role, you're going to need to do things to stand out. So I think that people should thinking about things in that mindset, as unfortunate as that sounds.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Speaking of things that are unfortunate, it's no secret that the job market has been challenging over the last 12 months or so. And I was listening to something that you recorded six months or so ago in which you said, and I'll quote you again now, Adam, you said companies are simply not hiring, they're not opening up their budgets. They are in some cases being asked to either cut headcount or cut expenses. It is a bit doom and gloom at the moment. And before we were recording, or perhaps it was during the recording, you mentioned that Google has just announced another layoff of a thousand people from their UX and design teams. So thinking about what you said six months ago, what if anything, has changed in the six months since you said that?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, I mean a lot of things have actually changed. I think some of the themes we're seeing, or things we've at least heard are the right sizing of teams. There may have been, I dunno if it's perception or truth, that teams were essentially bloated and that there was just excess amount of hiring being done and over resourcing, especially in some of the larger tech companies that kind of ballooned in terms of the size of their design or UX orgs. Whether that's true or not, I'm not sure. It's hard to say if they were actually oversized or not without being directly involved in those particular companies. But anecdotally, that's what we've heard In regards to the market itself, it continues to be a challenge. I mean, I will say that we're actually doing a little bit of research right now about the UX job market. We've been tracking through Google jobs, the quantity of jobs for product designers, UX researchers, product managers, design ops professionals, and I think I said product managers.
- But yeah, anyways, the core jobs in the UX field, and what we found was at least from December to January, that's when we started tracking, there was actually a massive increase, 56% increase in full-time jobs that were listed on Google jobs in the United States. So definitely a very positive sign. Full-time jobs are coming back. Anecdotally, I've been seeing a lot of people getting new jobs on LinkedIn. I've seen a lot of postings happen on LinkedIn and other places that were not as prevalent before and now they're starting to pop up. Ironically, in the data that we saw, product design was actually down month over month. But in the other areas, management, design, ops, UX research, those are all significantly up over a hundred percent increases in terms of quantity of jobs. So actually we're building, we're calling it a UX job market heat index that we're going to keep track of month over month so that people can see it to understand is the market hot or is it not at the moment, might be a good indicator of whether or not to be searching for a job.
- There is a bit of a lagging indicator because it's usually from the month before. It's not presently exactly how many, but I think it should give some sort of clear picture what's going on. We're hopeful these signs of improvement are happening. And usually, I mean, it's funny though, usually what happens is people get laid off, companies don't have budget to bring on full-time people, they start to hire contractors. And in some companies we've heard anecdotally that that is happening, although we haven't seen it on our side of the table, which usually people come to us when they do need staffing roles. We've seen a lot more full-time roles, ironically. So usually staffing roles come back first and then full-time roles. But it's been a weird market, to say the least. So right now we're seeing most of the attention focused on hiring full-time people back. And it's likely because companies realise, Hey, we saved a lot of money on our budgets because we don't have all these people on our books anymore. We have a lot of work that we need to get done. There's a whole backlog that needs to be worked on, and now we need to hire UX professionals again to help go do that work because our developers aren't really great designers.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, a hundred percent. Hopefully the hiring practises matched more keenly to the appetite or the ambitions of the organisations time round. So there's not such a violent, this is one way of framing it, violent correction if the market does change. Again, one of the aspects I was curious to get your insight into, if you do have some insight into this, is that it seems to me at least to be many senior leaders, and I'm talking about mid, but more to the late stage career design leaders who are looking for work at the moment. And these are people that have also made, some of them have made public contributions to the field. So I'm talking about people that have written books and spoken at conferences, these types of contributions, right. In the market that we're currently experiencing, or at least over the last say, 12 months. In your experience with it, what role, if any, has age or perhaps ageism played in the way in which companies have been evaluating the rehiring or the new hiring for roles? Is there an out with the old and with the new type of attitude out there at the moment?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, I mean, I think there's actually multiple parts to that that I'll address. I think one of the things with ageism, and I don't know if it's necessarily has to do with age, but it is also kind of the mentality that we've seen with candidates who maybe have been in our roles of leadership for a very long time, and they've maybe been very secure and hadn't needed to enter the job market again, and it's been some time since they've done that. So the field has evolved quite a bit since then. They're not really understanding that, oh, I need to actually create a portfolio of my work and have clear case studies about my leadership, not just what an individual contributor might do, but more about a leadership approach. How did I help the team grow? How did I help my people grow? How did I manage the success of the product that we were helping build?
- These are things that an individual contributor is not going to be concerned about when telling its story, telling their story, but a leader needs to, and oftentimes, I think the mentality for more senior leaders has been, well, I've got a great resume. I can just rely on that and that will get me a job. But I think companies are of waking up and being like, no, we need to see the proof. You're great at this, not just that you've got a great resume. So I think that's one of the things. While I don't think it's a bias in regards to ageism, I think it is a mentality thing that needs to be considered. In terms of, I also want to talk about some practical things. There's the quantity of jobs, the quantity of senior leadership jobs is going to be naturally because of the way organisations structured smaller in quantity than lower level jobs.
- It's a fact. It's just the way organisations are structured in the hierarchies. So I'll say that generally speaking, it is harder. We're seeing a lot of, as you said, very accomplished design leaders not acquiring jobs for over six to eight months, where in the past it would be probably a three month maximum timeline to get a new job. I think that's another thing that needs to be considered in terms of ageism to directly address it. Are companies looking at design leaders and saying, well, they're old. They're not with the times. I don't know that that affects product design and UX as much as it did like the traditional creative industry. I think age and wisdom and experience is actually really valued in our field. So I haven't really seen much of that. It's certainly not a factor with us, but I will say there are times where somebody is maybe very senior and they're applying to an individual contributor role, in which case we may say, this isn't probably the best use of your time to try to apply for that type of role. We advise them, but in terms of companies, and if you applied for that role and you were very senior and it was an IC role, they may reject you just right off the bat because they're like, well, that's not going to be the right fit. I mean, to say that ageism isn't a factor, I think that would be naive. I think it definitely comes into play to some degree, but it's certainly not the only thing to consider when it comes to evaluating whether talent is a good fit for a
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Role. Interesting. It sounded there, you felt it was more of a factor when it came to IC roles as opposed to manager roles?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don't think age is really going to come into play that much. If it's for a manager role, yeah, there'll be other benefits to a company. It may be cheaper to hire somebody with less experience for a particular role, in which case they get a kind of a discount and all that. But yeah, I don't know. I think there's also value in experience. So it really depends on the mindset I think, of that particular company. So yeah, like I said, it may play in as a factor, but ways to combat against it are to show that you're very capable of doing the work, and that means having a great leadership portfolio. We created a whole UX leadership portfolio guide that I'm happy to share with you guys, totally free. And we work with a lot of leaders, especially ones who maybe haven't been in the market for a long time and have spent hours on the phone with them, helping them combat against any of those issues.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, wonderful. If you could send that to me. I'll make sure I put that in the show notes. Adam, I'm just mindful of time. We've not got a lot of time. In fact, we're at time. I just wanted to ask you one last question, and this is about a panel that you facilitated last year at 15 seconds, and it was called Designing with ai. What is the impact of AI on the design industry? And the panel, my take on it anyway, was the panel felt very optimistic about the impact that AI would make on the industry, that it would not take jobs away, or that it would at least add more jobs to the design industry than it would remove. Now, I want to quote something that you said here during this panel discussion, which was, I'm feeling very optimistic about the future of design, especially as we start to think about how the problems we're going to have to solve given these new tools that we are building. So I feel really good about it, and I think the people in this room should too. I'm assuming the people in the room, there were designers or people in the industry. So try and take a step back now from running a company that generates income from placing people in design jobs. I mean, clearly you've got some self-interest at play here. What is it specifically, if you can isolate it, that designers should feel so good about when it comes to AI over the next couple of years?
- Adam Perlis:
- Yeah, I mean, AI, every day is evolving. I mean, from where we were when I helped facilitate that conversation to where we are now is already, there's been huge leaps and bounds. But I will say one of the things that's become pretty evident is that while AI is definitely evolving very rapidly, it's still not quite there yet in terms of coming close to, I think replacing a lot of jobs. I think what we found is that it's helped make a lot of processes more efficient. I certainly use it on a daily basis for my work. It's made me incredibly efficient. It has in some cases, replaced certain tasks that I might have to pay someone else to go do. So in that way, it has replaced some jobs, I guess you could say. But for the most part, it just makes me have superpowers, and whether that's running my company or I think also a lot of more design professionals out there that are tactically working on the work these days have been using it to help them honestly design and work a lot faster.
- I think in that way, it is helping improve the quality of the work and the efficiency of the work in the industry. Now, with that, that means work will get done faster, which means that perhaps they don't need as many people. So it could have larger scale impact on the industry as a whole in creating job reduction. So I won't say that it's not going to take away some level of jobs, completely replace as a function. It would be very hard for an AI to do all the jobs that a UX team, for example, does, right? From product management to product design to research. It'll certainly assist in a lot of those functions, but to completely replace would be like, I don't know. It would have to be a pretty remarkable feat for an AI to be able to do it. But yeah, I think that's where I stand today. It's a tool. It's helpful. It's not replacing us, but I think there are larger order effects that we'll start to see a few years down the road in terms of the industry size, probably decreasing a little bit over time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Interesting prediction. Maybe I'll catch up with you in a few years and we'll see. We'll shake it out and see where the industry landed.
- Adam Perlis:
- I hope that I'm right, rather it take a small haircut than basically do a hair transplant.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. Yeah. Wouldn't we all, and everyone listening to this would probably agree for sure. Adam, it's been great to hear your perspectives today and for you to shine a light for us on design recruitment. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me,
- Adam Perlis:
- And thank you so much for having me, Brenda. It's been such a pleasure talking to you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Absolutely been. My pleasure. Adam, if people want to connect with you and find out more about what you're doing about Academy and all the great things that you are doing with Academy to help people get the right kinds of jobs for them, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Adam Perlis:
- Sure. If you want to learn about Academy, you can go to our website, academyux.com. We also have a blog, blog.academyux.com where we have a lot of amazing content. And then of course, our podcast, "How We Scaled It: For Design Teams", where we talk to design leaders about really their journey of scaling a design team from, well, zero to a hundred. And so those are some of the ways. And then from a personal perspective, if you wanted to follow along, I do post a lot of content on LinkedIn, so you can find me on LinkedIn. I think it's just at Adam. And yeah, those are probably the best ways to connect.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Wonderful. Thanks Adam. And to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered, including where you can find Adam and Academy, all of that will be in the show notes, so don't forget to check those out.
- If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, and also now design recruitment, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe and tell someone else about the show as well. That's probably the best thing that you could do.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn. There's a link to my bio at the bottom of the show notes, or you can head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.