Hey! Recently laid off this month lol, but we have a similar background (5+ yrs working in B2B SaaS). Is it cool if I DM you to connect to ask some more Q's about your process/journey?
Sure thing!
Laid off late last year, 6+ years of experience in B2B SaaS with a background in marketing design. Didn't use AI much in my last role so knew that was somewhere I needed to immediately ramp up.
Don't have exact numbers but I applied to probably 180-200 openings, had 25-30 first rounds, 10-12 that went past recruiter screen, 6-7 that went third round or further. At the end was talking to 3 companies and got one offer, vertical SaaS startup (series A and profitable).
Things I did/learned:
Happy to answer any q's.
Hey! Recently laid off this month lol, but we have a similar background (5+ yrs working in B2B SaaS). Is it cool if I DM you to connect to ask some more Q's about your process/journey?
Sure thing!
Can you share which course you took?
The one he is selling
The initial one I took was the live course from https://www.craftamplify.com/ but he's also got a free course that's really solid. I've also recently started working through the course at https://heyneuma.com/ and it's very good.
Still exploring some others as well.
Among those 180-200, what was the response rate (%) between remote and hybrid? I'm curious if there is any difference for companies how to hire - they prefer hybrid or remote.
That's a good question, and the data would be somewhat skewed as I wasn't really seeking out hybrid roles but was open to the possibility when recruiters reached out. One was a local recruiter who had reached out to me in the past when I wasn't looking, I dropped them a line and went to the second round with that company. I'd say there was definitely a higher success rate with hybrid roles, but that likely also varies if you're in a high, medium, or low density tech area (I'm toward the high side of the middle, Austin area). My assumption would be that having a smaller eligible pool of designers who can actually come into the office helps.
Link to that ai coding for designers course?
See my other post.
This is the best advice you will read on this website today:
Drill down to the thing that you do and position yourself as that, make yourself different than other designers. When I started applying to roles more intentionally I got much better results. Pro tip: also use that positioning on your website instead of "I'm Bob and I make experiences better for users."
100% agree. More designers need to learn this. I’ve been a “niched down” designer for \~5 yrs now and both times i’ve had to find a new job it took \~2-3 months with almost zero applications submitted (all recruiters reaching out to me on linkedin) and ultimately had my pick where i wanted to go.
Unfortunately one of the things I used to specialize in is one of the things that everyone feels they can do with AI: data visualization
Are you open to share your portfolio?
Feel free to DM
Thanks for sharing!! I’ve been on maternity leave for this entire year so I’m definitely out of touch with AI. Did you feel that it was necessary to redesign your portfolio using AI? I currently host my portfolio on webflow and it definitely doesn’t have any animations, micro interactions and etc. Also, did you get the job by cold applying to jobs? Thanks for posting this!! Very nervous to go back to work 🥲
I don’t think you have to necessarily build a portfolio with AI (though it does make it a lot easier), but you need to show some AI skills to be competitive for most current roles. It’s really just diving in and learning, very few places have truly figured it out at this point. Of the 3 final roles I was interviewing for, 2 were totally blind applications. The role I landed I applied for blind, but I had liked the post on LinkedIn when the hiring manager posted about it and I saw he looked at my profile. I don’t know if it was posted in LinkedIn jobs so don’t know how many applicants there were. We also had a close connection that I didn’t realize we had that definitely helped.
Have you ever asked previous interviewers of what stands out? And why the current employer wanted to hire you?
Feedback I got along the way from different interviewers was that my storytelling was strong, I presented clear problems with evidence/data based decision making, and I showed I was able to operate in complex spaces with a lot of ambiguity. Asking my new employer what stood out would be interesting, I'll try to do that this week and report back. I will say this is one of the few times when I've been interviewing where it felt like the company genuinely wanted to hire me and was excited about it, rather than just "you got the job".
Thanks for the post. Any feedback on my portfolio guys? www.sevenshurygin.dribbble.com
Fantastic advice. Thanks for sharing. Going through same process now!
I'm in a similar position and journey- didn't take AI course but have been using Claude Code regularly to build my website and portfolio. I'm in my 3rd month of job hunting, and my market is a bit scarcer than the US but hanging in there. I think bc my market does not have that many ops, I've been a bit more broad too -scared to niche down.
Can I ask you about this bit:
-> Did you do this with claude code? Did you get some libraries and stuff? I've been looking into adding more motion to my portfolio, but I don't want to overdo it!
For my portfolio, I started off in Figma nailing down my color palette, type, and general look and feel. I then connected to Claude via MCP so it could see the exact screen and had it build the static home page. From there I added in transitions between cards on the homepage, then used that homepage framework as the base for the case studies and other pages. Didn't use any libraries, but I did end up building a tool in Claude that let me adjust and test animations using sliders, then I could copy/paste that code and tell Claude to use those specs to animate things on the portfolio. After launch I made tons of revisions on my case studies as well as other little tweaks along the way. I also replaced my initial "fun" hamburger menu with a top menu after finding out a few people had missed the menu entirely. One note: if you're familiar with HTML and CSS (highly recommended BTW), I find using Cursor much more convenient for minor edits as it's very easy to directly access the code and make small changes as opposed to burning tokens with Claude.