90% of designers are unhirable?
Why your cookie-cutter portfolio doesn’t cut it and framework on how to fix it.
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Today’s topic is a hot one.
Why 90% of designers can’t land jobs at top companies. Curious? Good. Our guest author, Matej Latin, breaks it down in his viral piece. He’s reviewed 1,000+ portfolios and has thoughts—sharp ones. Design’s messy reality doesn’t match the tidy process most candidates sell. Big players like Airbnb want more. Matej’s here to tell us what.
What we’ll cover today:
Why linear design processes flop in real-world gigs
How to spot (and fix) portfolio red flags
What “hirable” means at design-mature companies
One shift to join the top 10%
A free e-copy of printable case study framework
I tapped Matej for this because he’s the real deal. Senior Product Designer. Author of Better Web Typography for a Better Web. He’s built design systems, mentored talent, and isn’t afraid to call BS. 👀 His piece hit a nerve online, and I knew you’d vibe with his no-nonsense take.
So, grab your coffee—let’s see why 90% miss the mark and how you can stand out.
Matej Latin is a self-taught designer proving that you don’t need a degree to have an illustrious career in design. He went from being a graphic design freelancer to working for big tech companies as a Lead UX and Product Designer. He now mentors designers and helps them start and advance their careers through his UX Buddy project: https://uxbuddy.co/
90% of designers are unhirable?
Here’s the harsh truth: I’ve reviewed more than 1,000 portfolios in my design career so far, and I turned 90% of them down because of one thing — the linear design process.
By “linear design process” I mean cookie-cutter case studies that always read the same. The designer learned about a problem, conducted user interviews, created user personas, proceeded to sketches, then mockups and wireframes, made everything beautiful through visual design, created a prototype, and tested it with five users. Everything was perfect so they also created a design system which is not a design system but a style guide. But they call it a “design system” because it’s trendy and a keyword for the recruiters.
It’s like finding a product that you want to buy online and it only has 5-star reviews. When everything is shown as perfect it loses credibility — are the reviews fake? It’s the same when I review your cookie-cutter portfolio — when everything’s perfect I wonder whether it’s all fake.
The 90% is my estimation based on the many portfolios I reviewed, I don’t know what the exact number is, but it’s high. Most UX and product design portfolios have two case studies that are the same, it’s just the details that differ slightly.
I posted a much shorter version of this post on LinkedIn a couple of months ago and it went viral. Many experienced designers agreed:
Many case studies read to me like school homework: they knew what the answer and the process were “supposed to be” according to the textbook, so made up the story to fit. In reality, as you point out, it’s never smooth and linear. It’s messy and loopish. If you’re doing a good job, you rarely end up with anything remotely like you anticipated when you started out. (Source)
A design manager shared their perspective:
If I see another case study that walks me through personas, walls of sticky notes, photos of customers being interviewed, and sketches from a notebook… I’m going to lose my freaking mind and pull out my hair. (Source)
When I review such portfolios I can’t help but think that the designer behind them is either inexperienced, lacks a passion for design, or simply can’t communicate the value of their work. Sometimes, all of the above are true but even if only one is, it’s enough to be turned down by design-mature companies. This brings me to the second point.
A shallow portfolio with cookie-cutter case studies may get you a job in UX. But it’ll most likely be a job with a design-immature company that doesn’t fully understand design. You get stuck doing boring design work and your career stalls because the quality of your work never increases so you don’t have anything better to put in your portfolio. You get trapped in a loop.
When I say 90% of designers are unhirable, what I mean is they’ll be turned down immediately by design-mature companies.
Design mature companies, on the other hand, look for designers who can solve problems in creative ways. Taking the design process that you learned in the UX boot camp and using it to solve every problem you face just won’t cut it for them. When I say 90% of designers are unhirable, what I mean is they’ll be turned down immediately by this type of company.
We teach designers the design process and how their case studies should be structured, but that’s not how design works in practice where it’s a messy, non-linear process. Following this conclusion, there are two major problems when it comes to designers’ processes and how they present their work:
Designers’ processes are truly linear
Designers’s processes aren’t linear but they think that case studies need to be linear and perfect
Let’s take a closer look at both of them.
Designers’ processes are truly linear
My assumption, based on interviewing and speaking to designers, is that a relatively small amount of these are truly linear. The rest of them are embellished to seem perfect because designers think that that’s what hiring managers want to see. Or they simply think that’s how case studies should be — a perfect, linear story with a happy ending.
This probably aligns with seniority (or lack of experience), I estimate that 20–30% of designers really use a linear design process. (That’s how many identified as junior or intermediate in my research for Why Designers Quit 2023). I have witnessed such designers. You tell them that an interaction in a UI needs to be redesigned. It’s a small task but they’ll start talking about conducting user interviews and creating personas.
The design process doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It can start at either of the steps of a design process (so numbering them is misleading, top example in attached image), and it never really ends (so it needs to be a cycle, bottom example). This also means that you don’t have to go back to the beginning of “the process” every time you get asked to do something.
A truly linear design process would mean that designers are in full control. Eduardo Hernandez explains this beautifully in Death to the Double Diamond.
The more control you have over influencing factors, the more predictable the problem-solving process can be. The less control you have over influencing factors, the less predictable the problem-solving process can be.
So even the double diamond design process which has been often cited as the design process doesn’t reflect reality. It’s the perfect ideal that designers strive for but rarely achieve. Designers simply don’t have that much control over the influencing factors so a design manager reading through a perfect, cookie-cutter case study, even if it uses the double diamond process, knows immediately that it’s fake.
Doing the double diamond lacks purpose, continuity and context because the designer isn’t reacting to the unexpected and emerging questions or situations they find themselves in rather the double diamond offers answers to questions designers often don’t have, Hernandez elaborates.
Recommendations for these designers
So what should you as a less experienced designer do? You were taught to use a process but now I’m telling you to scrap it.
Here are my recommendations:
In the early years of your career, try to find a balance between being assertive and adopting a learning mindset. It’s time to take off the rose-colored glasses, open your mind, and face the reality of what it means to be a designer.