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Jay will be a guest speaker at UXA’s Career Prep Weekend! If you have any burning questions to ask him after this interview, feel free to RSVP and come by this Sat-Sun :)

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I interviewed Jay Fanelli, the professor of a Design elective I’m taking called Preparing for Design Practice, 51-374. His LinkedIn can be found here. Jay has a lot of experience across the design field other than teaching at CMU, from doing punk band design work, to designing for startups, to being a hiring manager at Duolingo. Who better to teach such a class?

So what exactly did he do at Duolingo? Well, when you’re a hiring manager you don’t actually do a lot for the creation of products. Instead of being heavily involved day-to-day with the product, Jay was tasked with building the teams that actually did the design work.

“Most of what I did at Duolingo was building said teams, hiring people and designing the hiring process itself.”

Though his most recent industry experience involved recruiting, he also has previous experience that had more to do with designing, and I imagine that the lessons learned from his start-up experience would be more helpful to students who are still trying to figure out what they want to do career-wise.

What do you look for in a design portfolio/resume and what turns you off an application immediately?

“The easiest way to say no to someone, in particular when looking at their portfolio, is when they’re applying for a job that they’re clearly not qualified for, either because of a lack in skillset or seniority. So there are times when I see communications designers who don’t have the strongest UI/UX background or product design experience, and are strong in say, branding or motion, yet they’re applying for tech product design jobs, even to ones that vary in scale. The kinds of places that usually only hire–even for juniors–people who have a certain education or level and type of experience. Not knowing where your resume is applicable or not is an easy way to send applications to companies where you would be the wrong type of designer. Another thing is when you clearly don’t have the experience and yet you’re trying to apply for a senior role.”

I took this to mean reaching too far above your station:

“Reaching too far. And I found that even students will sometimes…not overstate but hold an inflated sense of their seniority. Like ‘I had an internship, and I did this personal project on the side for the last three years, so that makes it okay for me to apply for a senior role’. When most jobs are at scale, if you’re coming straight out of university, aim for entry level.”

Of course, it’s easy to quantify things like concrete skills or years in practice, but what are the more subjective, vibe-check things that turned you or recruiters in general away from an application?

“We talked about this in class, but all companies are different and hold different values and cultures. As an interviewer or recruiter you’re looking for people who are parallel to the culture at your company. Not that there’s anything wrong with standing out or having a different way of working per-say, but particularly at the entry level it’s about “can you work like we work?” and can you learn to communicate and talk like we talk?”

Communicate that you’re malleable based on context. Jay adds more on that in the following: