Finally signed my employment contract last week!

For context, I got told I was being made redundant in December 2025 and started looking between Nov to Feb 2026, so 3+ months. I was in my previous company for 5.5 years as an in-house designer, which was my first proper job out of uni.

I had some agency experience working freelance from Oct 2025 and continued this while I was job hunting during the period. Added this to my resume in Dec and felt this has massively upped my odds of securing first interviews come Jan (though it could entirely just be that Nov-Dec's a quiet month for hiring).

I gave myself a goal of sending at least 10 applications a week - I wanted to land a job as soon as my last work day in March (had a 3 months notice). So hustled my ass off - worked freelance on top of also working out my notice period full-time, and completing all the design tasks I was getting as part of recruitment processes. Got really burnt out a couple of times in the process, but I can finally say now that it paid off.

I primarily applied for in-house jobs as these had the most vacancies. Generally used the LinkedIn job board, and the occasional design job boards like If You Could and Instagram. Most of the time, I relied on LinkedIn Easy Apply if it's available and don't really bother with sending my application through the company's career page, and I do hear back from these quite a bit (all 3 of my offers originated this way). Pretty surprising as I know it always feels like it gets sent to the void using this lol.

One of my biggest takeaways is how much design tasks have become a norm in the process. I loathe the practice when we have portfolios for a reason, but sadly it's become way more common than when I first started job hunting out of uni. In my experience, only one didn't have this as part of the process. Sad to say, but I have worked a total of 40 hours unpaid doing these tasks alone. I was in a desperate situation so couldn't say no, but I did find that some of these quickly became work that I could add to my portfolio (especially if there isn't a lot of recent work you're proud of on your portfolio).

It hasn't been easy, but hopefully this gives some hope and solidarity!

My job search journey as a mid-senior level graphic designer (London)