As I recently shared, I’m back on the job search journey again after over 6 years of happy employment, and boy oh boy, is the market is such a shitty place right now. About half the post on r/UXDesign are complaints. There was a thread about leaving the industry, that then got reposted into a viral post in LinkedIn, before eventually got reposted back into the sub again, truly a wild ride. And then there’s also this trend of visualizing one’s job search journey on Linkedin that spawns a bunch of follow ups.

This highlights just how low Linkedin is as a employment platform these days, but that merits its own post, on another day. Anyway, back to my own story. As I said market is completely flooded with shitty job posts, mostly low-paying jobs for entry level designers or low-paying jobs for superhuman designers with every skills in existence listed in the JD (for those who don’t know, these were probably made by recruiter who have zero understanding what’s the difference between visual designers and front end engineers). But once in a while, you spot 1 or 2 job posts for senior positions where the recruiters actually know what they’re looking for. Those are the ones where I sent out my CV to.

Most of them ghosted me, just like the people on UXDesign reported. And the ones who did respond are, well, not exactly stellar either. Today I’ll tell you about my interview process with a company whose name I won’t be mentioning here for obvious reasons, just know it’s yet another generic Singaporean startup.

I went through the entire process, didn’t get selected. That’s fair, I’m not mad about not being selected, it’s something to be expected in this journey. I’m mad because how much time that whole thing took. I went through 4 friggin’ rounds of interview (5 if you count the initial call with the recruiter), did a 2-part design assignment that took a whole week, with zero compensation for my time (remember I did this in a work week while still fully employed by my current company). I remember last time I was on a job search, Gears Inc. offered to pay for my assignment if I didn’t get selected despite it being only a 2-hour task, that is completely unrelated to the company’s real business. This one took over 20 hours to complete, included a 2-part design challenge that involves the actual features that the company is looking to implement in their product. I had to perform competitor analysis, best practice check and then present my work on 4 separate calls with the Header Product Manager, 2 different PMs and the tech bro CEO himself. Why the CEO is involved in the recruitment of a designer, your guess is as good as mine.
Now that I come to think about it, this might’ve been one of those companies that utilizes the interview process to score free labor.

Anyway, at least I still got to do what I love, designing and prototyping, even for free.
I’ll be giving away the design and the prototype for part 1 of the assignment (since it’s all my design). I can’t give away the second part obviously since it contains their private asset. Hit me up if you need early access.

P/S: after going to read this post I feel like I came off as being pissed after being rejected from a position, I just want to assure that is not the case. Well I am pissed but not because I got rejected, these kinds of things happen in a job hunt, sometimes you’re a good fit, sometimes you’re not, no matter how competent you are. I am pissed because there’s companies like these who don’t have the decency to compensate a candidate after dragging them on a 2 week process, with a week-long assignment.