The hackathon I wrote about last week did not come out of nowhere. I had a reason to be teaching myself to build, and the reason was that a few months earlier my job had ended.
It was October. My daughter was one year and seven months old, and I notice, writing this, that I date everything by her age now. The email said they had tried to reach me by phone. There had been an email before it, saying the job was ending, and only afterwards came the terms: a team-level redundancy I could take part in, if I agreed, with twenty-four hours to reply.
I set up a call for the next morning while my husband was still home, because I did not yet know how to run a meeting with a small child in the house. After the call I went looking for a lawyer trained in Romanian working law, to cross-check every fact, and I remember exactly where I was while I looked: on my phone, walking out of Bank station. I weighed the options and settled on a mutual agreement to end the contract, with six months of maternity leave still left to run.
I am telling you the facts and only the facts, because the facts are the only part that belongs in public. What a company decides is a company's story. What I did next is mine.
The letter
Before I touched my CV, I did something that mattered more than the CV. I wrote to a handful of colleagues I trusted and asked them for recommendation letters, posted publicly, addressed not to a hiring manager but to the future me, the one who would return to work when her daughter was around two. I did not yet know what I would do. I knew I would want evidence of who I had been. That letter deserves its own issue, and it will get one.
The CV, three times
The redundancy came with a placement company and six months of help, and their materials had been prepared with great care for a market that no longer existed: pre-AI advice, formats from the wrong country. So I built my own panel of readers instead.
Basic, and it needed to be, because a basic CV that exists collects feedback and a great one in your head collects nothing. I moved my old LinkedIn profile into a document by hand, asked ChatGPT what it thought, researched UK formats, and had a close friend from my team read it.
Good came through Ivee's trainings and its automated feedback, another layer on top.
Great came from a person. A researcher friend from the Amazon design community, now back in Singapore and job-hunting herself, gave me the piece of advice I have never forgotten. She did not correct lines. She told me to choose the three things I am strongest at and make the whole CV tell that story, so every line carried it forward, down to the order of the bullet points. Nobody had spoken to me about my CV as a narrative before, and I could not unhear it.
Then the advice I resisted longest. Everybody said tailor the CV to every role. Everybody except my husband, who kept saying: send the same one, the rewrite is not the work. Jason, a mentor from ADP List, later said it with the weight of someone who has watched a great many searches: keep one sharp version, send it everywhere it genuinely fits, and do not apply where you do not fit, because a rejection from a role that was never yours still costs a week of hope.
The funnel, honestly
More than a dozen companies invited me to interview. A fintech, a bank, a delivery company, a handful of other product companies, and the UK government's digital service twice, once for a lead role and once for a senior designer role. The top of the funnel worked.
The middle is where the honest part lives. At the fintech I was screened and never passed the recruiter loop. At the bank I reached a late stage: recruiter, panel, hiring manager. At the delivery company the hiring manager reached out to me herself, because their recruiter had left and no one was carrying my application; by the time a new recruiter arrived, the company had been through layoffs, the role had been rewritten, and I no longer matched what was left of it. Somewhere else, a recruiter went on an unplanned holiday and said a colleague would take over. Nobody did.
None of that was personal. All of it was time.
And once, a recruiter was so warm that I let myself believe the offer was coming, and we started looking at nurseries on the strength of it. The offer never came, and I am glad of it now. It meant we chose a nursery properly, on our own schedule, with real criteria and visits and a vote my daughter cast herself. It also meant she did not begin five days a week at two years old, which would have been wrong for her and wrong for me.
My working diagnosis, which I hold like any research finding: I was applying, in part, to deep-craft senior roles, and I am a breadth designer, a lead of all trades. Recruiters liked the story; portfolio reviews sometimes wanted a depth I had chosen not to specialise into. Mismatched applications inflate mid-funnel rejections. That is not a verdict on me or on them. It is a dataset, and I am still reading it.
Isabel
One next stage asked for a Loom video walking through my portfolio, and I had never made one. I asked in the Ivee Slack channel, and a coach called Isabel Pollen answered, a woman with an enormous heart who looked at a stranger's problem and simply decided to help. She talked me through that first video, and later coached me on interviewing itself, and gave me back something I had quietly lost: the ability to say out loud, without apology, what I am good at. We are friends to this day.
My first Loom took seventeen takes and the better part of two nights. The second, months later, took thirty minutes and four. Basic, good, great, measured in takes. But the real gift was not the video. Each interview afterwards became an exercise of memory, remembering the old me, the projects, the value I brought, and confidence, it turns out, is mostly retrieval.
The lesson
My preparation stack grew as I went: ChatGPT, then Gemini, then Claude. Then came the lead designer challenge for the government's digital service. Twenty-four hours, their documentation, their design system. I gave it a night, reading everything, watching talks, brainstorming the delivery with Claude, and folding in a talk by one of the people who built the government's website.
I came close, and I did not get it, and the two halves of that are worth keeping apart. The part they praised was the part I had brought: they liked how I had spread the project across departments, designing for teams that needed to talk to each other, and that idea did not come from a model, it came from a night of reading and a decision about how those teams actually work. The part I lost was a behavioural question I answered too briefly, and no tool prepares that for you.
Which is the whole lesson, narrower and more useful than "AI helps." AI can do a great deal, and what makes any of it original is the idea you bring. The machine supplies velocity. You supply the piece of you. And nothing at all supplies the part where you have to speak for yourself.
The pivot
Accessibility kept resurfacing through all of it. It had earned me a promotion once. It had come home with me, too: my daughter started talking fluently and holding real conversations before she was two, because I had narrated the world to her since she was a few days old, exactly as those review rooms had taught me to narrate what I see. And one late night, researching a training, I found a talk by Jonathan Hassell, a legend of UK accessibility. I went to the Product Group, had a great time, introduced myself, and came away with his book, Inclusive Design for Products. I start his extended trainings in September.
Interviewing might work out. It might not, and nursery bills do not wait for pipelines. So I registered as a sole trader and built a studio with accessibility at its spine, not as a chapter, because accessibility keeps paying me back and I have stopped calling that a coincidence.
This week's move
Write down your three strongest skills. Now look at the first three bullet points of your CV and ask whether they tell that story, in that order. Reorder until they do. Bullet order matters, and that one idea was worth more to me than every template I downloaded.
So the question is not how many doors you have knocked on. It is whether the person opening one recognises, in ten seconds, the story you decided to tell.
Alexandra