Career Strategy Podcast with Sarah Doody | UX, Product Design, UX Research 166 - UX Hiring Insights Dan Maccarone on Thinking Over Tools & UX Career Reinvention
UX hiring insights from a UX veteran with 25+ years in UX and product. In this episode, Sarah Doody interviews Dan Maccarone, co-founder of Hard Candy Shell and Charming Robot, fractional Chief Product Officer, and a UX expert who's worked on products for Hulu, Rent the Runway, Foursquare, and the Wall Street Journal. In the episode Dan shares about what he actually looks for when hiring UX people (spoiler: it's not your Figma skills).
Dan shares why he doesn't care about tools, why he conducts interviews over drinks instead of in conference rooms, and how he evaluates candidates based on curiosity, empathy, and how they think, not what software they know. He also gets into career reinvention, the rise of fractional leadership roles, and why your hobbies outside of UX might matter more than your case studies.
If you're a UX or Product professional navigating your next career move, this conversation will challenge what you think hiring managers care about.
What's discussed in this episode:
- Why Dan has hired people who didn't know Figma — and doesn't care
- What curiosity and a humanities background signal to a hiring manager
- Why Dan prefers to conducts interviews with candidates over coffee or drinks, not in conference rooms
- How he uses observation and empathy cues to evaluate candidates (the same way you'd do user research)
- Why he hates design assignments and considers them insulting
- What "career reinvention" looks like after 25 years in UX and how to know when it's time
- The real requirements for going fractional (and why it's not for everyone)
- Why your identity and hobbies outside of work actually make you better at your job\
- How he's re-invented his own UX career multiple times
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