What to Expect When You Apply to UX Studio

Hello! My name is Bianka, and I’m the Hiring Manager at UX studio. In this article, I’ll be walking you through our recruitment process, and I’ll share good-to-know things as well as some tips and tricks. So buckle up and hopefully see you soon in an interview! :)

Who are we looking for

The UX studio community is very strong with great talents from all over the world. We're looking for like-minded enthusiastic professionals, who share our values and attitude toward work. We're young (and some young-at-heart) people, who like to proactively find solutions and create products that make people’s lives easier.

When you apply to one of our open positions, you’ll see that we ask everyone to fill in a short questionnaire. We also ask for a CV or your LinkedIn profile as a formality — we don’t care about how many years you worked at what company. Numbers don’t make a person: we are only curious to hear your story. (Please note: while we don’t base hiring decisions on CVs, we’ll calculate your salary offer based on your years of relevant experience, so make sure it’s up to date!)

Every candidate has a different path, and there are lots of career changers and restarters, so we welcome everyone’s application. Even if you don’t have any professional experience I would urge you to still try — I have personally recruited people just finishing school or boot camps!

We do have a few requirements you need to meet though:

• Advanced English language skill is a must: we work in an international team, mostly with international clients, so official communication is always in English.
• +/- 4 hours from the Central European time zone: we welcome applicants from anywhere within this time range, as we found that this is the maximum time difference that still doesn’t negatively affect our collaborations or your work-life balance. You can still apply if you are outside of this requirement, but you would need to be ready to relocate to Budapest, Hungary to work with us. We offer relocation assistance and support.

How to make sure to land a phone interview

When submitting your resume make sure it’s up-to-date! Even if you don’t have relevant experience, show everything: your background, your education, skills, courses you took, and any job you did. I always prepare for our initial interviews based on the materials you submit.

For certain positions, we might ask for a portfolio. Make sure you present some of your best relevant work, and if you’re applying for a designer position, also include case studies. We want to see how you solve a task, and how you approach a problem, and we won’t see it from a mockup only. If you don’t have any client projects that you can show, try populating your portfolio with pet projects or designer challenges.

In the short questionnaire we are curious about your motivation, so make sure you include everything you deem necessary. It’s good if you can show how passionate you are about your future position at UX studio. It doesn’t have to be formal, long, or short, but we aren’t looking for one-word answers. Your portfolio could be amazing, but if we don’t feel an effort in your answers, we won’t proceed to the next step.

What’s an introductory phone interview

We call it a phone interview, but it has evolved into a Google Meet video call since the pandemic. The interview will be in English and can take up to 15-30 minutes. I always come prepared with some questions based on your submitted materials. I’ll tell you a bit more about the position and the recruitment process, then you’ll also have a chance to ask me questions.

The goal of this chat is to get to know each other a bit more, check your English skills, and get to know your salary expectation. It’s good to come prepared for this interview — read more about the position and company on our blog, it will make the Q&A much easier.

I like to touch upon the salaries this early in the recruitment process because I don’t want to waste your or our time if we cannot meet your salary expectations at the end. We do offer competitive salaries in our region - which can be great in some countries such as ours where living costs aren’t as high but wouldn’t be enough in Western Europe for example. If you are curious about the numbers, you can compare prices via numbeo.com.

What to focus on during the challenge

After the phone interview, you might receive the challenge task as the next step. This is usually a professional project always unique to the position you applied for, and you’ll have 7 days to complete it.

We do this challenge to test the skills of the applicants and see how they approach a problem. With the challenge we can test skills that are not visible in a well-curated portfolio, and we never hire anyone without completing it.

The challenges are always evaluated by people in the same position within the company, and we always give personalized feedback on your work. It’s also important to mention that this work will remain your intellectual property, and we only use it for recruitment.

Final Interview

If we think your skills will be suitable for the position, we’ll invite you to a final interview in the form of a Google Meet video call. You’ll meet your future team leader and some of your future colleagues in the same position. The interview has three main parts:

1. Introduction, questions from the team: here there might be some recurring questions about your background, but we also prepare some exciting ones.
2. Challenge: you’ll need to present your challenge in roughly ten minutes, so have it ready in a separate tab for easier screen sharing. Please practice screen sharing before the interview to make sure that there are no technical difficulties during our call. After your presentation, we’ll ask some questions about your challenge.
3. Q&A: you’ll also have the opportunity to ask us questions regarding the position, the company, or anything you might be curious about.

Decision and offer calculation

After the final interview, we decide with the team who were on the call. Sometimes it can be a hard decision, but we only hire candidates we are fully confident in. We always let everyone know whether they succeeded or not, and where they can sign up for email notifications about future job openings.

When we want to hire someone, we do a salary offer calculation based on the previously submitted resume. We have a set system on how to calculate a starting salary:

• We consider the same positions with a 1x multiplier.
• Relevant positions are calculated as 0.5x, e.g. academic research for a UX researcher position.
• Anything that has something to do with the position or some of its tasks, but not closely related are calculated with 0.25x, e.g. graphic design for UX designers, or HR interviews for researchers.

Unfortunately, we can't count internships, school, or volunteer work.

By the end of the calculation, we get a result, for example, 2,4 years of relevant experience. We match the number with our salary table, and we offer the salary bracket the candidate falls in. The salary brackets also determine when a candidate will have their next automatic salary raise — depending on the level it can be every 6 or 12 months.

Our current salaries are the following:

• 0-2,5 years experience: net 420.000 - 575.000 HUF
• 3-5 years of experience: net 635.000 - 760.000 HUF
• 6-10 years of experience: net 840.000 - 1.135.000 HUF

After the decision

In our field of work, it’s important to be open to constructive feedback, and not take it to heart if you don’t succeed. We always welcome everyone to try again in future recruitment, there were many cases when we hired people for their second or third try. We always give feedback to our applicants on the whole process, including the challenge, to help them determine in what areas they need to improve.

Want to be part of our company?

If we got your attention and you want to join the team, please check out our open positions or subscribe to our email list to get notified when we open a new recruitment!