Hey and welcome back to a new week!

Very few regular full-time roles this week…but tons of internships! Usually I don’t include these in the newsletter for space reasons but since we have so many and so few regular roles I decided to flip it and include them. Go get one!

In this issue:

🐻 BERLINERS! LET’S MEET!

I’m hitting the road in September—multiple times.

First I’m gonna be at Employed.world’s third Community Gathering which I already attended for the last edition. I’m gonna host a masterclass on “Case Studies that Survive the 30-Second Skim” which you can still sign up to. But even if you don’t want to attend that, I will also be part of the mentor circle to answer you any questions you might have and generally be available to chat.

When? September 4, 17:00 - 21:30

Next I will be attending Hatch conference again this year—something I’ve been anticipating for a long time as last year was a blast. Hatch is sold out so sadly can’t invite you to join my roundtable there but I teamed up with Darshan from Product Disrupt to host a free mixer event the night before the conference. No Hatch ticket needed, it’s free and you’ll even get drinks. BUT hurry up - spots are limited and we are already at roughly half capacity.

When? September 17, 19:00 - 21:00

You got the interview. Maybe several of them.

That already tells you something is working. Your application, portfolio, experience, or a combination of all three gave someone enough confidence to speak with you.

But then the process keeps ending before the offer.

The frustrating part is that most rejection emails tell you almost nothing. You get a polite sentence about another candidate being a closer match, and you are left wondering whether the problem was your portfolio, your answers, the design challenge, your experience, or simply the way you came across.

You cannot diagnose every rejection. Sometimes another candidate had more relevant experience. Sometimes the role changed, an internal candidate appeared, the budget disappeared, or the chemistry was not there. Hiring processes are not controlled experiments.

But repeated outcomes can still give you useful information.

If three different companies move you past the recruiter and then reject you after your portfolio presentation, I would look closely at that presentation. If you repeatedly lose momentum at the first call, rebuilding your case studies might not be the first thing to fix.

The question is not only, “Why am I not getting an offer?”

It is: Where does the process usually end?

It is difficult to see a pattern when every interview feels like its own emotional event. Write the process down instead.

For each role, track:

Do not reinvent your interview strategy after a single rejection. One outcome is not a pattern. But if the same stage keeps ending the process across similar roles, that is where I would investigate first.

Each stage is trying to reduce a different kind of uncertainty. Understanding that makes it much easier to prepare for what is actually being evaluated.

The recruiter screen can feel informal. It is often short, the questions sound straightforward, and the person you are speaking with may not be a designer.

Do not mistake that for a stage that does not matter.

The recruiter is the gateway to a busy hiring manager. Their job is to decide whether your experience, motivation, expectations, location, salary range, and communication are close enough to the profile to justify the next conversation. If they already believe the match is weak, they are unlikely to pass that uncertainty on to the hiring manager.

The question you will almost always get is some version of:

This sounds like a request for your biography. It is usually closer to:

That is a much harder question, especially when you are early in your career.

If you have completed relevant internships, freelance work, or junior design roles, you already have material to work with. You still need to choose what matters rather than narrating your entire CV in chronological order.

Career changers have a more difficult framing problem. Your previous jobs may not have had “designer” in the title, but they can still contain relevant evidence: working with customers, handling competing priorities, explaining complex information, collaborating across teams, using data, running workshops, or making decisions under constraints. You need to connect that experience to the new role clearly. Do not expect the recruiter to make every connection for you.

Before the call, study the job description closely. Pull out the requirements that appear repeatedly or seem specific to the team, then map them to evidence from your own experience. AI can help extract and group those requirements, but the examples and claims still need to be true.

Half an hour of focused preparation is usually enough to make this conversation much stronger. You do not need to memorise a speech. You should be able to give a relevant, confident answer about your background, explain why this role makes sense, and support the most important requirements with real examples.

If you keep losing the process here, practise that opening answer first.

The hiring-manager interview is still partly about fit, but the questions become much more specific.

Can you contribute to this team? Have you worked on similar problems? How do you approach design? What did you actually own? Can you explain your decisions? Does the way you work fit the environment they are building?

Some of this is chemistry. If the conversation feels wrong on both sides, there may be nothing useful to “fix.” You should also pay attention to that feeling. Interviews are a two-way evaluation.

The controllable part is how clearly you present your work and experience.

If you are asked to show a project, do not casually open your portfolio and read the case study from top to bottom. A website designed for scanning is not automatically a good presentation.

Always have slides ready for your projects.

Create a larger, modular deck containing the strongest material from your case studies, then tailor the version you present to the role. If research is central to the job, keep the slides that show how research changed your decisions. If the role emphasises interaction design, make room for prototypes and detailed flows. If the team does not need designers to code, your AI-prototyping section probably does not need ten minutes.

The goal is not to hide parts of your experience. It is to spend limited interview time on the evidence most relevant to the team in front of you.

Your presentation should make your role, decisions, constraints, collaboration, and outcomes easy to understand. It should also be something you have practised aloud. A good project can still land badly when the story is unclear, too long, or delivered as though you are seeing the slides for the first time.

If several processes end after this conversation, ask yourself whether the projects are wrong—or whether the way you present them is maybe hurting you.

The next stage is often a whiteboard challenge or a take-home task. They are different formats, but both are trying to see how you handle an unfamiliar problem.

If I had the choice, I would usually prefer the whiteboard challenge.

It shows more of the collaboration that real design work requires. You can ask questions, hear how the team responds, clarify assumptions, and involve other people in the process. That is valuable for the company, but it is also valuable for you. Their answers give you a small preview of how they think and what working with them might feel like.

If whiteboard challenges keep going wrong, the issue is often not a lack of visual polish. You may be jumping into solutions too quickly, staying quiet instead of narrating your thinking, becoming too nervous to ask basic questions, or trying to make everything perfect until you run out of time.

Practise the structure rather than memorising solutions: clarify the task, define the user and goal, identify the most important constraints, explore a direction, and explain the tradeoffs as you go.

Take-home tasks create a different problem. It is easy to do far too much because there is no obvious stopping point. Or you may underestimate what a convincing submission needs and send something underdeveloped.

Clarify the expected scope before you begin. Timebox the work. State your assumptions. Show enough process to make your decisions understandable, but do not produce a fictional three-month product programme for a task that was meant to take a few hours.

When this stage repeatedly stops you, look at both the work and your calibration. Are you solving the right problem? Are you explaining your thinking? Are you respecting the scope? Are nerves or perfectionism preventing you from finishing?

A mentor that can analyze your past take-home tasks can be worth gold here too. They might spot patterns you are not able to see.

Late-stage interviews often focus on team fit, values, motivation, leadership, or the company mission. At a smaller company, you may speak with a founder or CEO. At a larger one, it could be a senior design or product leader.

There is less generic advice for getting these interviews “right” because alignment is genuinely part of what they are testing. Sometimes your priorities, working style, or expectations do not match theirs. That is not automatically a failure, and forcing the match would not necessarily help you.

You can still prepare.

Read the company’s mission and values. Look at how those ideas appear in the product, job description, and public communication. Do not memorise the values and recite them back. Prepare real examples that demonstrate the qualities they care about.

If a company puts a strong emphasis on empathy and keeping work human, an example of how you handled disagreement thoughtfully will be more convincing than saying, “I am very empathetic.” If they care about ownership, prepare a situation where you noticed a problem, acted without perfect instructions, and remained accountable for the result.

Use the interview to test them too. If something about the culture already felt off, ask about it. If the answers become vague or uncomfortable, that is information you should take seriously.

And remember: the further you get, the more likely it is that several remaining candidates are capable of doing the job. A final-stage rejection does not always expose a missing skill. Sometimes someone else had slightly more relevant experience, a stronger connection with the team, or better timing.

Maybe one process ends at the recruiter screen, another after the challenge, and another in the final round. That does not give you a clean diagnosis.

Do not invent one.

Look first at whether you are applying for similar roles. A startup searching for its first designer, an enterprise hiring into a mature design team, and an agency looking for client-facing visual work may evaluate you very differently. Rejections at different stages may simply reflect different requirements.

Your sample may also be too small. Three interviews can feel like an enormous amount of effort—and it is—but they still may not reveal a reliable pattern.

Continue recording what happens. Ask for feedback when appropriate, although you will not always receive it. After each interview, write your own notes before the rejection or excitement changes your memory of the conversation.

Then change one thing at a time.

Practise the recruiter introduction. Tighten the opening of your case-study presentation. Run a whiteboard exercise with a friend. Prepare stronger examples for values questions. You will learn much more from a specific adjustment than from tearing down your portfolio, rewriting your CV, changing your positioning, and learning three new tools at once.

Repeated rejection is exhausting. Looking for a pattern does not make it pleasant, but it can make the next step more concrete.

If you are getting interviews, something is already working. Your task is to identify where confidence drops during the process and what evidence that stage needs from you.

Sometimes the fix is straightforward: prepare the recruiter call properly, build a presentation instead of scrolling through your website, practise narrating a whiteboard challenge, or bring better examples into a values interview.

Sometimes there is no clear fix because the outcome was not entirely about you.

Both conclusions are useful. One gives you something specific to practise. The other stops you from rebuilding your entire career strategy after every rejection.

Look for the pattern. Work on the stage that keeps stopping you. Then give yourself enough attempts to see whether the pattern changes.

If you need a fuller explanation of each stage and how to prepare for it, read The Ultimate Design Interview Guide for 2026.

For specific stages, these guides go deeper:

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Jessica Hsu is a Seattle-based product designer with a background in Human-Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington.

She designs information-rich products where business goals, complicated workflows, and high-stakes decisions meet.

Her work spans enterprise SaaS, fintech, banking, aviation, and an Uber-sponsored project focused on large-event pickups. These are products that can become dense very quickly.

Jessica knows how to keep them readable.

Her case studies are light on body copy, deliberate with headings, and generous with visuals. Alongside that disciplined business work, her portfolio has cursor effects, playful interactions, crafts, experiments, and a small product she shipped herself.

That contrast gives the portfolio much of its character.

Two parts deserve a closer look.

That’s it for this week—thanks so much for the support! ♥️

Do you want your own portfolio reviewed in-depth with a 30-minute advice-packed video portfolio review? Look no more. I do offer these as an async service you can book directly with me here.

Keep kicking doors open and see you next week!
- Florian