The IQ PARTNERS Blog

For User Experience Designers, your portfolio is your number one tool for showing potential employers the work you’ve accomplished and the skills you bring to the table.
On the flipside, if done incorrectly, your portfolio can also be you what turns an employer the other way.
As a recruiter in this space, there’s nothing more unfortunate than meeting a strong UX designer who’s portfolio doesn’t effectively showcase their capabilities. To make sure this isn’t you, here are some high-level tips to help you develop an effective UX portfolio:

IQ PARTNERS is proud to be named a PROFIT 500 Fastest-Growing Company by Canadian Business and PROFIT for the fourth time. Published in the October issue of Canadian Business and at PROFITguide.com, the PROFIT 500 ranks Canadian businesses by their five-year revenue growth.

We created a seven step guide to recruiter-proof your business using research and first-hand interviews with top companies like Google, Deloitte, LoyaltyOne, TD Bank, and Achievers. Each month we’ll share a little from each of the seven steps. This month: why it’s important to create a culture of transparency and seek employee feedback!

A lateral hire is someone hired “from the side”, meaning at the same experience and wage level as their previous job. As most hiring managers and HR professionals know, luring a top candidate away from their current job to one with the same salary and title can require a bit of finesse. Here are my top tips on how to complete a successful lateral hire, starting from the first point of contact, the job posting.

Perhaps you’re late to the interview, you haven’t had a chance to review the candidate’s resume, or you call him “Dan” instead of “Derek”. This is a senior level position, Derek is a seasoned professional and you can tell he’s annoyed.
The best thing you can do is apologize and be upfront. Say something along the lines of, “Please excuse my tardiness, you’ve caught me on a bad day. Would you like to reschedule or are you okay to continue?”

What question do I need to ask a candidate to find out if they’re a good fit for your organization?
Believe it or not it actually stumps the majority of my clients… I usually get “Oh, I don’t know, let me think about that…” And then when they do, whatever they come up with is almost always the key to successfully recruiting on that role.

“I’m working on getting better at presenting to large groups of people by presenting to my team every week. It’s getting easier, but to be honest it’s always been a challenge for me, which is a lot of the reason I went into this field… I was the only sixth grader I knew with a deep passion for Excel spreadsheets.”

Like only Vince Vaughan can, he and Owen Wilson’s character ramble their way through the Google interview question, “You’re shrunken down to the size of nickels and thrown into a blender – what do you do?”

Takeaway: In the face of even the most ridiculous questions, don’t try to ramble your way through it – 90% of the time it will be nonsense. We’ve all been there. Stop, think, and start over.

“I’ve lost four employees to you headhunters in three months. None of them would have left if a headhunter hadn’t lured them away!”

As headhunters, we hear this a lot. The reality is, there just isn’t enough A+ talent to go around, so they will always be in demand… and headhunters will always call.