How we build our teams is about to change one more time.

All indications suggest that the UX job market is about to explode. Organizations, large and small, profit and non-profit, have all discovered they need to deliver better online and offline experiences. The way people work, shop, attend school, travel, and live out their lives is undergoing massive change, and organizations will need teams that can address that change. UX professionals will be in more demand than ever, which means we’ll need to be far more strategic when we hire for our teams.

In this session, Jared will discuss how all this change will affect how we hire our future team members. He’ll show why the teams that get the earliest start — even before they’re ready to start interviewing — are the ones who will land the best applicants, the most qualified candidates, and quickly get their new team members on board.

Before the talk gets started:

• How this discussion will go:

  • 20 - 30 minutes short presentation on the today's topic.
  • Remainder of the time discussing your questions.
    • Please put your questions in the chat.
    • Please change your Zoom name to your actual name.
    • Jessica Ivins will collect the questions and pick the ones we'll answer today.

• Things to keep in mind with Zoom:

  • If the little Chat pop-ups get distracting, feel free to open the chat window.
  • Please put your microphone on mute.
    • If Jessica chooses your question, you can unmute to talk about it with Jared
  • Zoom's Speaker View will let you keep Jared visible and you'll see what he's presenting on the screen.
  • This session is closed captioned.

We will post the recording for this session within a day.

Notes for today's discussion:

How we got to now

Before 2020:

UX hiring was at its peak

Organizations realized they were in the systems business.

The products and services they deliver were built on systems.

All those systems delivered a user experience.

Many of those user experiences were not up-to-par.

Substandard experiences were costing the organizations.

Older organizations, especially, were being hit hard.

Banks, universities, insurance, government, and others.

They were realizing their systems were now critical to success.

Both public-facing online systems and back-stage information systems.

Organizations couldn't hire UX folks fast enough.

There weren't enough experienced UX folks to go along.

We started to see traction at hiring early-career folks.

In 2020, the pandemic hit:

Jobs were frozen.

Some teams were laid off.

However, the pandemic also showed that existing systems weren't up to the task.

Supply chain, customer service, self-service customer systems failed under the pressure.

There's new awareness of long-term organization sustainability needs.

UX and technical debt is seen as a big problem now.

Systems not only need to work, they need to work under stress.

This wasn't just commercial business.

Universities and schools realized their classroom systems didn't support the demands of remote.

Government (particularly U.S. state and local) realized digital service delivery was vastly under invested.

Systems are now critical infrastructure.

At the front of those systems is the user's experience.

Doesn't matter how great the tech is if the UX sucks.