I’ve been looking for a product design job for a while now, and one thing I underestimated at the beginning was how much work job searching becomes on its own. You find vacancies, adjust your resume, fill in the same forms, message people, prepare for interviews, do assignments, follow up — and somehow you’re also supposed to remember which version of your resume you sent to a company three weeks ago.

At first, I mostly relied on LinkedIn and assumed I just needed to apply consistently. After a few weeks, I had dozens of applications, several versions of my resume, saved jobs everywhere, and very little understanding of what was actually working. Over time I changed quite a few things about the way I search, and some of them made the process noticeably easier. This isn’t a formula for getting a job, because I don’t think there is one. It’s just a list of things I wish I had started doing earlier.

Don’t make LinkedIn your entire job search

LinkedIn is still the first place I check, but I stopped treating it as the place where my job search happens. In my experience, LinkedIn Easy Apply is especially deceptive: it takes seconds, so sending 20 applications feels like a productive evening, but very few of mine ever turned into conversations.

I started searching in more places instead. In the US, that might mean checking Wellfound for startups, Built In for tech companies, Y Combinator’s Work at a Startup, Indeed, or even specific communities for your profession. In Europe, I also look at local job boards and communities for the country or city I’m targeting. Some of the most relevant vacancies I’ve found never appeared in my LinkedIn recommendations at all.

Company career pages are also worth checking directly, especially when you already have a list of companies you’d genuinely like to work for. LinkedIn is useful for discovery, but I wouldn’t assume that what you see there represents the whole market.

Set up alerts so you don’t spend the whole day searching

There was a point when I was opening the same job boards several times a day because I was worried I would miss something. Apart from being exhausting, it wasn’t particularly useful.

Now I try to automate this part wherever possible. I use job alerts, saved searches, newsletters, Telegram bots and community notifications so new vacancies come to me instead of requiring another manual search. For roles that receive hundreds of applications quickly, knowing about a vacancy shortly after it is published can also be useful.

It doesn’t completely remove searching from the process, but it changes the routine. Instead of spending hours scrolling through jobs I have already seen, I can check new matches and spend that time on applications that are actually worth the effort.

Ask people for referrals, even if it feels uncomfortable

This was probably one of the things I resisted the longest. Asking someone for a referral can feel transactional, especially if you haven’t spoken in a while or don’t know the person particularly well.

Eventually I realized that I had been making it much more dramatic in my head than it needed to be. If I see that someone I know works at a company with an open role, I ask whether they would feel comfortable referring me. I also message people I don’t know occasionally, although I try to give them a reason to respond rather than sending a generic “Hi, can you refer me?”

Not everyone replies, and not every referral leads anywhere. But it gives an application a different entry point than joining a queue of hundreds of resumes, so I think it is worth getting over the initial discomfort.

Tell your friends you’re looking

This sounds almost too obvious to include, but for some reason I didn’t do it properly at first. I was searching quietly and only mentioning it when someone specifically asked about work.

Once more people knew what kind of role I was looking for, they started sending me vacancies, introducing me to people, or mentioning companies I hadn’t considered. Your friends don’t need to work in your industry either. They have friends, former colleagues and partners working at other companies, and sometimes that second-degree connection is exactly the useful one.

I now try to be specific when I tell people what I’m looking for. “I’m looking for a product design role in Barcelona or remote in Europe, preferably in a product company” is much easier to remember than “I’m looking for something new.”

Keep a DOC version of your resume

As a designer, my natural instinct was to make my resume look good. I had a carefully designed PDF, spent time on typography and spacing, and assumed that was the version I should use everywhere.

Then I started paying more attention to how application forms parsed it. Sometimes information ended up in the wrong fields or disappeared completely. I also noticed that many applications ask you to upload a resume and then immediately make you enter the same experience again.

Now I keep a simple DOC/DOCX version alongside the designed PDF. It has straightforward headings, normal text and very little formatting, which makes it easier to reuse content and gives automated systems less to misunderstand. I still use the designed version when I know a person will actually open it, but I don’t expect one resume format to work equally well everywhere.

I also keep several versions for slightly different roles. The experience doesn’t change dramatically, but the title, summary and emphasis might. A Product Designer vacancy and a UX Designer vacancy can describe very similar work using different language, and I want my resume to make that match obvious.

Track every application from the beginning

I waited too long before doing this. With ten applications, you can remember most things. With thirty or forty, company names, recruiter conversations, resume versions, interview stages and follow-ups start blending together surprisingly quickly.

I first used a spreadsheet with the company, role, link, source, application date and status. Later I started tracking more context: which resume I used, whether I had a referral, salary information, notes from interviews and where I originally found the vacancy.

The useful part wasn’t only remembering what I had applied to. After enough applications, I could start comparing them. I could see that one source was producing interviews while another was mostly producing silence, or that certain types of roles consistently moved me further through the hiring process.

That’s also why I eventually started building AB Job. I wanted the tracker I was already using for myself, but without constantly maintaining a spreadsheet: applications in one place, stages that reflect the actual hiring process, and analytics showing how the job search converts from applications to interviews and offers.

Don’t treat every application equally

Tracking also made me realize that application count was a pretty bad measure of whether I’d had a productive week. Ten Easy Apply applications and two applications to companies where my experience matched extremely well are not really the same thing.

I started separating vacancies mentally into different levels of effort. If a role looked particularly relevant, I would adjust my resume, find the recruiter or hiring manager, check whether I knew anyone at the company, and spend more time on the application. For weaker matches, I could still apply, but I wouldn’t spend an hour trying to make myself look perfect for a role that probably wasn’t realistic.

This also made rejection easier to deal with. Instead of seeing 50 applications and thinking “50 companies didn’t want me,” I could see what had actually happened at different stages and which experiments were worth repeating.

Prepare for the company, not just the interview

For product design interviews, I already had a portfolio presentation with my main cases. What helped was stopping myself from treating it as a finished deck.

Before an interview, I now change the emphasis depending on the company. If they are hiring someone to work on growth, I spend more time on experiments and metrics. If the role involves building something from scratch, I show more of the research and early product decisions. I also usually add some context about why this particular company makes sense for me.

The underlying projects are the same, so this doesn’t require rebuilding the presentation every time. It mostly means choosing which parts of my experience deserve more attention for the conversation I’m about to have.