Or: Lessons in Perseverance
So. Tiny little humble-brag: I recently managed to land my first UX job as a Content Designer. Eeeeeeeeeeeee.
I fully did a dance while I was on the phone with the hiring manager when he told me the news. I also fully told him that that’s what I was doing. Unprofessional? I say ‘enthusiastic’.
BUT. While I am beyond excited to take my first 'official' steps into the world of error messages and empty states, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts on the process of actually getting to that point.
Because applying for a new job – especially one in a field like content design, where the never-ending array of job titles is, almost too ironically, a case in point for why consistency, clarity, and conciseness are crucial if you don’t want your user’s (or in this case, your applicant’s) mind to actually explode – can be, what I like to call, ‘a full nightmare’.
To exemplify, a few stats. Between November 2021 and April 2022 (that’s 6 months exactly, you’re welcome), I:
Applied for 35 Content Designer, UX Writer, Content Editor, Content Specialist, Customer Experience Specialist, Content Strategist, and UX Copywriter roles (see aforementioned mini-diatribe on unnecessary-range-of-job-titles-ludicrousness)
Completed 16 pre- or mid-interview tasks
Attended 6 interviews
Received 5 rejections after interview
Experienced a bucket-load of ghostings
Questioned my abilities / skills / self-worth / value / general adeptness at being a capable adult human on countless occasions
Cried many, many tears
Ate many, many, many consolatory Jammie Dodgers
Considered packing it all in and moving to Italy to make mozzarella on a mozzarella farm at least 567 times
Got 1 job offer, and
Subsequently danced around an enormous amount.
In short, applying for a new job can be a draining, laborious, exhausting and seemingly endless process. In shorter: it's often really not very fun.
That being the case, I wanted to share a few of the things that I found helpful at various points since I started applying for Content Designer roles. I’m not an expert, and I’m at the very start of my content design journey – but so was every Content Designer once. And I for one would’ve appreciated hearing a bit more about how they managed to find the buried treasure in no-one’s favourite game of ‘The Job Hunt’ while I was playing the game myself.
So, here are a few thoughts on how to keep at it with content design and not go off to become a mozzarella maker on a mozzarella farm (though that does sound excellent and if that’s your true dream please do pursue it):
1. Put ‘Content Designer’ on your CV
Let me be clear – if you are looking for your first role in content design and have never had that kind of job title before, I am in no way advocating that you straight up lie and pretend you have. Never a good look.
But, I do think it’s more than acceptable to back yourself enough to call yourself a ‘Content Designer’ in a little blurb at the top of your CV. This is what mine looks like (and this is the CV that ultimately got me that job offer, just saying):
Even though I’ve never had the job title of ‘Content Designer’ (until now, wheyy), not one of those things is untrue. I have designed and edited content that is user-centred, based on research, feedback, and data. I have taught myself a lot of things about UX design through books and online courses. And I have delivered the content that people need when they need it, both in my professional and personal life. I am a Content Designer. And, if you’ve done any of those things, so are you. I think, therefore I am and all that.
2. Show them you know your stuff
The first pre-interview task I did, I must have spent about 16 hours on it in total over one weekend. Incidentally, I also had one of the worst colds of my life that particular weekend, and safe to say I was Quite Grumpy and not really in the mood to use my brain. But, I wanted to show that I had done my research and that I knew what I was talking about – and although I didn’t get the job, I did get some great feedback on how thoroughly I’d researched the company and how I’d shown the breadth of my content design knowledge in the task.
The tasks I did all involved looking at a piece of content and making suggestions for things you’d do to improve it from a content design perspective. The things you’ll end up writing about will obviously depend on the task you get, but some of the points I was able to consistently highlight in my tasks included:
Front loading the most important information
Headings (properly tagged and ordered in the document’s HTML)
Short paragraphs and sentences
Simple and relatable words (particularly in legal text)
Basic grammar and spelling (including things like consistent use of headline or sentence case for product names)
Consistency (of the words and content patterns used in an individual piece of content, as well as within the wider content ecosystem, like other parts of the same website)
Layout (things like white space and breaking content into manageable chunks)
Accessibility – which is aided by all of the above and more
3. Show them that you can see how the role of a Content Designer fits into the wider UX design process
I think this is a really good thing to be able to do, even – or perhaps especially – if you’re just starting out. It shows that you’ve done your research and have at least some understanding of the other people you’ll be working with as part of a UX team, including developers, product owners, user researchers, and designers.
You don’t need to know all the ins and outs of these roles – for now, it’s enough to know that they exist, and that you’ll need to work with them to make sure the content you create is factored in at every stage of the design process.
4. Show them why you love it
I found this really difficult in some interviews, especially those with strict requirements to follow the STAR technique (Situation, Task, Action, Result) when answering questions.
There was very little room when answering so-called ‘competency questions’ – things like ‘Tell me about a time when you managed conflict in a team’ or ‘Tell me about a time when you had to prioritise to complete a project’ – to talk about all the things I really liked about content design as a professional practice, what excited me about it, the books I was reading about it in my spare time, or the courses I’d done to teach myself the fundamentals of UX writing.
Whenever I had an interview where the questions were more open and less formulaic, I talked about my passion for content design as much as I could. And in anticipation of some interview questions being more restrictive, I essentially wrote my cover letters as love letters to content design.
Enjoyment is more than half the battle – if I didn’t have a real passion for content design, I wouldn’t have kept going after the first, second, third, twentieth, etc. rejection. If you love it too, show it in your applications and interviews – it cannot hurt.
5. Kill ‘em with kindness – send nice follow-up emails
Sending a follow-up email after an interview is a nice, polite thing to do, with the added bonus that your interviewers will take note of the gesture even if you don’t actually get the job. After sending the following …:
… I got a gorgeous message back from one of my interviewers:
That kind of feedback and those kinds of confidence boosts are invaluable, so collect them where you can. Which leads me nicely onto my last bit of advice…
6. Do. Not. Give. Up.
This is a massive cliché. But just because it’s unoriginal does not mean it doesn’t hold 1000% true. Do. Not. Give. Up.
Have a massive cry. Shout and swear at the rejection email. Eat all the biscuits, then all the chocolate, then all the Nutella straight from the jar. Vow that you genuinely really actually will just go and be a mozzarella maker on a mozzarella farm this time (please note, I am starting to doubt myself that mozzarella farms are actually a thing, but I'm too invested in the idea to change the joke now).
Take a big, big, big breath. Dust yourself off. And Do. Not. Give. Up.
If you were one of the lucky few to get feedback, take a look at it (after you’ve dried your eyes and put the Nutella back in the cupboard) and see what you might be able to do in preparation for the next application. If you didn’t get feedback, ask for it. If they don’t give you anything helpful, or if they don't respond to you at all, conclude that this one wasn’t your door, and that there is another, better door propped open for you somewhere else.
Oh, and last but very much not least – tell your inner critic to go stand in the corner and think about what it did.
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