3+1 steps to find your next UX job on X / Twitter
This year around February I’ve realized an interesting phenomenon. Every third tweet on my feed was about some kind of UX role posted by someone I follow, or the friend of someone I follow.
Never being really good at networking myself — but quite active in Twitter discussions (holla #designtwitter 🙌)- it made me curious how many of these job tweets are flying around on Twitter on average, so I’ve started a spreadsheet collecting these “Our startup is growing like crazy, but our design s*cks, we’re looking for a product designer. Send us a DM.” type of tweets to collect my own data.
The results were pretty interesting. During the course of 3.5 months time there were over 700+ tweets by an employee or company, who was looking for a hire in UX, product, graphic or visual design in a tweet, which means on average around 5–6 / day. These were mixed both permanent positions and smaller UX gigs.
I found these really interesting for people interested in switching roles or transitioning into a new field due to the direct communication with a potential colleague, but it’s also a chance to get a good ol’ stalk on company culture, plus the freedom to ask anything.
Enough mumbling, because I didn’t want to keep this experiment and information for myself I’ll show you the steps I took to filter the tweets, so you can do it too and see where it leads.
Steps 👣 — How to do it?
1. Advanced search 🔎
You were right of the bat if you guessed the process will start with some kind of search, but not so many regular Twitter users aware of a “hidden” advanced search over the microblogging platform, only available on the desktop as far as I know.
Even on desktop it’s not easy to find — within search filters — so the best is just to use this direct link to land there.
2. The right search terms 🤓
This is where the fun starts. You face yourself with a myriad of parameters to change like date, the words you wish to exclude or which accounts you’re interested in and although Twitter has a description about its usage, personally I’ve found this article way more helpful.
At first naively I was trying to search only for the exact term “UX designer job”, which didn’t work out, so after analyzing a number of these recruitment tweets I’ve found a common pattern. When companies / individuals wanted to be the bridge between the candidates and the job opportunity, then they always mentioned to direct message them too to get the applications directly (no LinkedIn, no fluff just nice referral bonuses).
With this in mind, I’ve modified my search term to be “UX designer DM”, which meant any tweet containing both the position = UX designer and both the intent to get in touch = DM. Perfect! 👍 My search results with these small additions got way better already.
3. Filtering further 👀
Due to the nature of headhunting the results can be quite flooded with with the same exact tweet re-tweeted several times by different accounts, so that’s something to take care of with “-rt” so now our search term finalized as this:
Because Twitter is not just a place for jobs, but also a perfect place for a little self promotion, I’ve found it useful to add these terms to the “None of these words” section (just to exclude the competition for you 😝) too: ‘exclusive collection’, ‘hire me’, ‘you need’, ‘you looking for’.
Only one thing left, to disable the replies in the search modal se we can get our nice tweet feed of UX designer jobs.
3+1. Send nice direct messages & replies 🗣
Now as you have all the opportunities listed and also starting with the latest probably, it’s time to send some nice replies or DMs to these accounts. Remember to not overcomplicate it since these people are looking for your message. Be genuine (but not flattering) and don’t forget to send your portfolio ahead, so they can take a look early as possible. Good luck! 🍀
Small disclaimer 🙃
For the time being I couldn’t really find a way to combine multiple UX roles into one search: like product designer, user experience designer, ux researcher or interaction designer in one search. So for now the best you can do is to do the search for every single role you might be interested in.
** I’m happy to update this article if someone finds a way, send me a DM on Twitter and I’ll call you out superhero!
Thank you for reading this far! 🤩 I hope you’ve learned something valuable with this process, so you can find your next role in UX soon and able to make genuine connections.
Please let me know if you succeed with this search method, I would be happy to read some stories finding full-time, part-time or anytime employments through Twitter.
Not so long ago I’ve been busy writing articles about salaries in the US & Europe. Since you’ve landed here, you might be interested in those too.
