Inside a Recruiter’s Search: How We Find Top Designers
Article summary
Recruiters aren’t fortune-tellers, when we're hiring designers we rely on the clues you leave across LinkedIn, portfolios, and the wider internet. The stronger and more relevant those clues, the faster we can match you to the roles you actually want. This article breaks down three things:
Why craft matters to recruiters, too. The human side of our job, why we love the hunt, and how a well-tuned profile helps everyone win.
Recruiters have a specific way of searching. We use Boolean strings and filters. We also do some detective work. This helps us find designers, project managers, researchers, and other product professionals.
What makes a profile attractive? It includes clear storytelling, proof of impact, and visible work samples. It helps to show something, even if you have a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).
You’ll leave with a checklist for tightening your online presence, examples of punchy work blurbs, and proven ways to be “findable” without resorting to keyword soup. Implement just a few of these tweaks and you’ll start hearing from recruiters about roles that match your ambitions.
About the author
I’m Kelly Norris - a recruiter, former recruiting leader at Meta, and talent sourcer at Microsoft, now proud to be part of the design recruitment team at Good Maven.
Over the past 10 years, I’ve reviewed thousands of CVs and helped countless candidates land their dream roles. At Good Maven, I get to work with a team that values making meaningful matches, and now I want to share some of the ‘secrets’ of how we search, so we can make the process smoother and more successful for everyone.
First Things First
Let me clear something up before we dive in:
🔊 It’s not about doing our job for us — it’s about giving yourself the best shot at being seen for the roles you actually want.
I’ve been doing this for over a decade and yet I still get a kick out of the moment a hiring manager meets exactly the person they needed, and it's a quiet sense of joy that I was the person to uncover them. Three reasons that keep me going:
Spotting hidden potential Good recruiting is one part pattern matching and often one part belief. We see a designer who has limited experience in fintech and we know they can design for complex regulatory workflows because their portfolio of work screams “systems thinker.” And when that bet pays off it’s still exhilarating.
Career Catalyst moments Few jobs let you witness someone’s “life pivot” in real time. The email that says, “I accepted the offer, I’ve dreamt of this role for years, thank you for reaching out to me!” Those messages are why I still search the internet for hidden gems.
Thrill of the search Every role and search is a puzzle and I love solving them! Finding creative ways to uncover hidden talent, testing new approaches and seeing a hiring manager light up when we find “the one” is what makes this job so rewarding.
That love of the search is why I’m writing this – to offer you a checklist of things to help you. The better your breadcrumbs, the quicker we can place you where you’ll thrive.
Recruiter & Candidate: A Two-Way Craft
Recruiting is a craft, it’s not just endlessly staring at peoples profiles. We study what the needs of a role and the industry are.
What does API vs CLI design mean? [hint: API design defines how software systems exchange information, while CLI design shapes how developers interact with a tool through commands]
What is a Design System? [A design system is a reusable toolkit of components and rules that keep a product’s UI consistent and efficient]
Or what does effective partnership between PM, PD and Engineering actually means? Why? Because candidates deserve a recruiter who gets it, and clients deserve a shortlist that actually fits their role.
When your profile broadcasts those same nuances (domain, depth and impact) we spot you fast and are able to pitch you better.
How recruiters search
Me: “Tell me, why did you respond to my message? Were you actively looking?”
Candidate: “Your outreach hit the nail on the head. It aligned perfectly with what I’m doing, my background, and what I’m looking for.”
I’m paraphrasing the quote a little, but this is the type of response we love hearing, it shows us we’re headed in the right direction.
And here’s the thing: we found them because of their profile. It clearly described their experience. The right language was there. It didn’t take guesswork.
But it’s not always that easy. Often, we’re scanning profiles that are too vague to know what someone actually does, or so overloaded with keywords that it’s hard to tell where their actual strengths are. So what does a Recruiter search for when using LinkedIn?
Let's get started.
Basic boolean searches
Boolean search is how recruiters use logic-based keywords to find specific people faster. We plug combinations of words into search tools (like LinkedIn or Google) using terms like AND, OR, and NOT to narrow or expand results.
Boolean search gives us precision. It’s the difference between saying “find me a designer” and “find me a designer who’s worked on checkout flows, in mobile, and has front-end skills.”
Below are some examples of basic searches we might start with to help narrow down a search. Do any of these keywords resonate with your profile?
Senior Product Designer (e-commerce, mobile)
("product designer" OR "ux designer") AND ("checkout flow" OR "shopping cart" OR payments) AND (iOS OR Android)
What it does: Narrows to designers with direct cart/checkout impact on native apps
Principal Product Manager (developer platform)
("product manager" OR PM) AND (API OR "command line" OR CLI OR SDK OR devtools) AND (runtime OR "serverless")
What it does: Surfaces PMs who have shipped developer-facing tools
UX Researcher (Product focused Growth Experimentation)
("ux researcher" OR "user researcher") AND ("growth experimentation" OR "A/B testing" OR multivariate OR "conversion optimisation") AND (SaaS OR "subscription model" OR "recurring revenue")
What it does: Finds researchers with quantitative skills inside subscription models
Filtering and what we focus on
Once Boolean gets us in the right zone, filters help us zero in, by experience level, location, and industry context, to make sure we’re surfacing candidates who align with the actual constraints of the role.
Geography & time zone – Many roles are remote-friendly but still require ±3 hours overlap with the core team.
Seniority bands – We filter by years of experience to match Senior +, Leadership or IC roles.
Industry pools – Fintech, healthtech, AR/VR… each has its own talent graph. We filter these if we need talent in specific industries first. We draw back if the market is too small.
The human factor
After Boolean comes the eyeball test. Even with great filters, what makes someone stand out is often visual or visceral. We look for a clear headline, accessible work, or signs of craft and curiosity in how they show up online.
Headline & banner – Does yours hint at domain expertise? “Product Designer @Paypal | Growth | Checkout & Conversion”
Pinned work / portfolio link – The less clicks it takes me to find your work the better.
Activity feed – Thoughtful comments about design systems or dev-centric discovery? Gold.
Give Us More Than a Title
You were a “Product Designer” or “Product Manager” at a well-known company or even a not so well known stealth start up? This is great. And I may reach out if I know the companies you’ve worked at enough to guess you may be open to the roles I’m recruiting.
But I’d rather have clearer guidance before engaging:
What did you design? What did you build?
What platform, product, or user problem did you work on and solve?
What made you confident that your work had the intended impact? How did you track or measure that?
Two or three sentences can prove impactful:
📝 Designed habit-tracking features for a wellness app with 4M+ downloads. Partnered with research to address drop-off points, helping boost daily active use by 15%.
📝 Designed key user flows for a mobile e-commerce app used by over 2M customers. Partnered with PMs and researchers to improve checkout conversion. Led design changes that increased completed purchases by 18%.
📝 Designed the onboarding and dashboard experience for a B2B analytics platform. Worked closely with PMs and customer success to streamline setup and surface key insights faster, helping reduce new user drop-off by 30%.
📝 Launched multi-environment deployment workflows for a developer platform, enabling teams to test and release code 40% faster. Defined roadmap and led cross-functional delivery across engineering and design.
📝 Led generative and evaluative research for a subscription-based fintech app, uncovering insights that increased onboarding completion by 25%.
Simple, but powerful. Your actions and thought processes are clear.
Be Findable for the Right Things
We often search LinkedIn using keywords tied to specific skills or experience in a job description.
So ask yourself: Does my profile reflect the roles I want?
✅ Mention relevant tools, domains, and frameworks in your summary.
✅ Use language you see in the job descriptions that interest you.
🚫 Avoid keyword stuffing. Just listing “UX, UI, strategy, research” doesn’t help us understand your actual strengths. Instead use specifics like, ecommerce, developer tools, SaaS, mobile, AR/VR, etc.
🚫 Skip the empty buzzwords like Passionate, hard-working, results driven - trade them for evidence. We learn who you are as a person once we begin a conversation, but first we need to find you.
Top tips
Find postings for roles that feel aspirational but realistic.
Highlight the recurring tools, methods and domains, look for patterns (Design Systems, Component Libraries, Mobile-first, Developer tools)
If these things align with your experience, mirror those terms in your own bullet points. Work them in naturally to your profile and portfolio:
“Redesigned checkout flow with a mobile-first approach, leveraging our existing design system to maintain consistency.”
“Partnered with engineering to create scalable component libraries for our developer tools platform.”
“Ran usability tests on our enterprise dashboard, improving task completion rates by 30%.”
You are not gaming the system - you are making sure your language matches the role you actually want.
Make Your Work Visible (Enough)
You don’t need a flashy personal website.
Designers: Please show us your work. The same goes if you are a Product Manager. We want to see what you’ve built.
✔ A Dribbble, Behance, or Simple portfolio page is totally fine.
✔ Even a 1-page PDF with selected work and high-level context helps.
🚫 A profile that has no portfolio or information? It’s not an automatic no, but it’s much harder to say yes to when we’re scanning quickly.
We understand NDAs and some work cannot be public. Perhaps you just don’t want to have your entire catalogue of work online.
Information can be redacted or blurred. We’re not looking for perfection or totality – we’re looking for signals. Even a brief look at your process is helpful.
Keep It Concise, but Not Sparse
Long blocks of text on your profile can be hard to parse. But a profile that’s only job titles and dates leaves too many blanks.
Aim for that sweet spot: Concise + Clear + Contextual.
Give us:
🌟 What was the problem space - “Redesigned checkout funnel and payments workflow for cross-border shoppers”
🌟 What your role was - “Led end-to-end UX, collaborated with eng on Web-to-App handoff”
🌟 What kind of impact you had - “+18% mobile conversions YoY”
Aim for 50-70 words per role. You don’t need an essay, just enough for us to picture you in the role we’re hiring for.
In Short
We’re not just looking for keywords. We’re looking for clues about how you think, what you’ve shipped and the context you thrive in. Think of your profile as a product brief: clear problem, clear solution and measurable outcome.
So next time you update your profile, ask yourself:
Am I giving recruiters just enough to get curious?
If the answer is yes, trust me, we will find you, and we’ll show up with the roles you actually want.
Further Reading and Resources
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