Hiring Best Practices in UX

Lena Kul started in product design recruitment, then crossed over to spend a year as a UX researcher at Miro, which she describes as the experience of finally living inside the thing she'd been pitching for years. She now runs her own agency from Portugal and thinks of the work as a bridge: helping companies hire and helping candidates get hired, mostly by saying the same things repeatedly about how much the rules have changed and how few people have noticed.

On the company side, she pushes back on the idea that design maturity and hiring maturity are the same thing. A team can run great discovery and still hire badly, especially in a market where layoffs convinced employers they can hold out for a unicorn who does copy, research, UX, and UI at a senior level for one salary. When a client tells her they want a designer from Spotify, she doesn't argue. She asks what they actually mean by that, and then asks the question she considers her best tool: how will you measure this person's success in their first weeks? If a team can't articulate what the hire will do or why, she'd rather surface that early than spend their money finding out.

For designers, her advice is to stop firing resumes into the void. Direct applications can work, but only if you're fast and the fit is real. Otherwise the leverage is in your network, including the non-designers you worked with, and the recruiters who interviewed you but didn't hire you. Her system: pick five roles you actually want, find people who work there, and have real conversations about the culture before you ever apply. She's also watching reporting lines shift, with design leaders moving into product roles to reach VP and CPO titles, and more startups putting the head of design directly under the CEO as founders want a closer grip on product and design.