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Intro

There are only 5 times throughout my career where I was in the situation of needing a new job.

The first of which was right after graduating from Drexel. The next was 3 years later, when I was moving across the country. Following that was to escape a toxic work environment. Then, I needed to get promoted to the next level. And now looking for what’s next.

Each search brought different challenges. For example, I had just hit the 3-year mark as a Visual Designer when we packed up and moved to Los Angeles in 2017. I found a job within 3 months, an insanely fortunate timeline that has forever ruined my other searches.

Job Market Factors

Before we get into the best and worst, here are a few of the many factors that affect the job market.

51,000 tech employees have been laid off by 112 companies in 2025, making this the most competitive job market I’ve ever seen.

My Best Interview Experience

Ironically, the best interview experience I ever had was with a company I really wanted to work for, but didn’t get an offer. I had applied to this company a few times over the years before with no luck, and was fired up about getting the opportunity to interview.

In the end, despite being gutted about not receiving an offer (and years of reflection on this experience), the one thing that made this experience memorable for me was the hiring manager.

She was the Associate Creative Director, and was in my second (just her) and third (her + others) interviews. My interview with her was a case study presentation. Pretty standard, nothing special. It went well and a couple days later I received an email saying I was moving on. What surprised me was that she outlined what information I should keep, change, and omit for the next round based on what she knew the others on the panel would want to hear about.

There are many ways in which I think interview processes can be improved (that can be for another post), but the way that this hiring manager set clear expectations around their process and what she was looking for is something I wish was more widely adopted.

While this didn’t end in my favor, I appreciated the level of generosity that she showed through the interview process. 9/10 for me because I didn’t get the job.

My Worst Interview Experience

I received a message from an internal recruiter one day who was hiring for a Senior Product Designer. It started with the standard “we love your resume, background, and work on xyz project” and some very scripted information about the role.

We started to discuss my work a bit, and she began asking about previous work experience as if she hadn’t looked at my resume. What threw me off was when she asked me to evaluate myself on many aspects of design on a scale of 1-10.

She would ask, “On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your visual design skills?” and “On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your typography skills?”

I forget how many I made it through before I asked if she had actually looked at my portfolio. Unfortunately, it was clear she hadn’t. I ended up cutting the phone call short as this rubbed me the wrong way, and I quickly lost interest in the role. This may have been my first experience thinking, “Candidates are expected to jump through hoops during interviews; the least you could do is be familiar with who you are interviewing.”

A Mistake That Cost Me An Offer

I have definitely made more mistakes during all my searches, but here is one that is still fresh in my mind.

Showing Similar Case Studies

This one partly cost me an offer from yet another company that I really wanted to work for. While I didn’t fully agree with the feedback at first, it has made me iterate on my approach to presenting case studies.

I was asked to walk through two case studies during a third-round interview with a group of people. Again, standard.

The two projects that I chose to show were a redesign of the Mailchimp pricing page (a project that resulted in a 13% increase in paid bookings) and a redesign of the in-app homepage (a massive undertaking that involved many teams and resulted in double-digit increases of key metrics like first emails sent and imported audience lists).

The reason I chose those two projects was that they were recent, they were large projects both in terms of resources needed and also in terms of the hypotheses we were trying to prove, and because I had metrics to go along with them.

Here’s a before and after of the first project.

And here is the second.

The reason I have changed my approach to case studies is because the person that beat me for this offer had presented a more “technical” project which made the hiring panel more confident. It makes sense, but still sucks.

So, now I share one project that is a bit more visual, and another that is more technical to show a broader range of skills.

Nick Cuda is a Senior Product Designer with over 10 years of experience working at early-stage startups and large companies with millions of customers. This is his story, duh duh. www.nickcuda.design

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