What if the CV you keep polishing for the fourth time is the reason you're not getting hired?

Eight guests: from a Brompton CEO to a first-time founder, all landed their roles a different way than the job board suggests. Not one of them talks about the perfect CV. They talk about the novice's mindset that got them in the door, the adjacent title they applied for anyway, the portfolio habit that decides a candidate's fate before anyone reads a word, and the ten-year-old question that tells you whether you're even chasing the right career.

This short compilation strips out all the usual advice about formatting your CV and keyword-matching a job spec, and replaces it with eight much harder, much more useful questions to ask yourself instead.

Got a hiring story of your own, on either side of the table? Follow Why Design and tell us which guest's advice you needed to hear this week.

This episode is sponsored by Vax and TTi Floorcare. Kodu, is running the hiring. Recruiting for Vax for more than ten years, placing over fifty people including a VP of Engineering and a Head of Design. We know how they build. Right now they’re rebuilding their UK engineering and innovation function from the ground up: advanced development, design engineering and industrial design, all at once. We haven’t seen them move at this pace in a decade of working with them.

What You'll Learn

• 📄 Why the perfect CV can be a warning sign, not a strength
• 🎯 How to widen your job search beyond the exact title advertised
• 👀 What hiring managers actually look at first in a portfolio
• ✏️ Why sketching still beats software when you need to communicate fast
• 🌱 What it takes to be noticed as a junior in a consultancy
• 🙋 Why taking the role nobody else wants can pay off
• 🧭 How to know your own working style before you choose a path
• 🔁 Why career breaks and non-linear starts are not a disadvantage

Memorable Quotes

“We're all a bit fricking weird. Great. Come on board.” (Will Butler-Adams OBE, Brompton)

“I am a stereotypical industrial designer in the fact that I will look at the portfolio first and I will read absolutely none of it at first.” (Tylan Tschopp, Westinghouse)

“I would encourage people to... apply for jobs that are adjacent... because sometimes you're looking for someone who has a little bit of a superpower that's outside of the job description.” (Rich Thrush, Guitar Center)

“Apply to everything, go to as many interviews as you possibly can physically fit in, just to actually see how other companies operate.” (Paul Marshall, Rapid Fluidics)

“That's your flow. And if that happens to be making stuff and designing stuff, you're great to go... because frankly, you'll never work another day in your life.” (Mark Sanders)

“Take confidence in the fact that you probably know more than the people who are trying to recruit you.” (Vicky Lofthouse, Enable Sustainability)

Resources & Links

Resources and Links

Newlane : https://www.whydesign.club/episodes/S4E1

EN:ABLE Sustainability: https://www.whydesign.club/episodes/S4E2

Guitar Center: https://www.whydesign.club/episodes/S4E3

FutureWave: https://www.whydesign.club/episodes/S4E4

Diplik: https://www.whydesign.club/episodes/S4E5

Brompton Bicycles: https://www.whydesign.club/episodes/S4E6

Rapid Fluidics: https://www.whydesign.club/episodes/S4E7

Westinghouse: https://www.whydesign.club/episodes/S4E8

Motive Design: https://www.whydesign.club/episodes/S4E9

MAS Design Products Ltd. : https://www.whydesign.club/episodes/S4E10

🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube & Amazon - https://whydesign.club/

👥 Join the Why Design community - https://teamkodu.com/whydesign/

📸 Follow @whydesign on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/why.design_/

📸 Follow @_whydesign on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@_whydesign

📸 Follow @kodurecruitment on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/kodurecruitment/

🔗 Follow Chris Whyte on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrchriswhyte/

About the Episode

Your CV Isn't Supposed to Be Perfect | Why Design: Being Hired (Season 4) is a compilation episode of Why Design, the podcast hosted by Chris Whyte, founder of Kodu. Each episode brings together founders, engineers, and design leaders working at the frontier of physical product to talk honestly about what it takes to build hardware teams that ship.

About Kodu

Kodu is a specialist recruitment partner dedicated to physical product development.

We connect hardware brands and design consultancies with the very best design and engineering talent, from Industrial Designers and Mechanical Engineers to senior leaders across Product, Technology, and R&D.

Our clients range from well-funded start-ups and scale-ups under investor pressure to deliver, through to established businesses building serious hardware or innovation arms. They share a common challenge: they need to hire people who have actually built physical products before, and they cannot afford to get it wrong.

All-time NPS: +92.

Learn more: teamkodu.com

I I think if I had known them what I know now I might have prob I might have done

might have made a different decision.

How do you actually build a career in physical products?

Not the advice you read online,

what the people on this show actually did.

This is the why design being hired compilation.

I think it's also safe to say that I have a ~ growth mindset,

open mind, whatever you want to call it,

because ~ at that point, having no product experience,

I still believe that we could do it.

I I think if I had known then what I know now I might have prob I might have done

might have made a different decision.

But you know, to make it to in many ways,

and this isn't true of just products,

this is true of all kinds of innovation startup,

whatever you wanna call it, is if you are open to the possibilities rather than

close. So you're

Have a novice's mindset rather than rather than expert mindset.

The the parameters are there because you simply don't know.

And I think any sensible human being would have just gone random bloke on a bus,

I was like Middlesbrough, miles away,

forget it. And in those days emails.

But it's this luck you were talking about.

Opportunity passes us all the time.

All of us, there it goes. And most of the time we just go,

the challenge is whether we're prepared to get off our arse and grab it.

And I thought, well, what have I got to lose?

And I was trying to go to NCAD to do an MBA.

I thought my C V was a bit boring.

So I thought, All the cool people in London,

maybe I'll work for a company a couple of years and then do my MBA.

I have a broader background. But I I would encourage people to do that anyway

and and apply for jobs that are adjacent and and and look at those those things,

even if you're at a you know, sort of mid or or entry level,

because it's sometimes you're looking for someone who has a a little

bit of a superpower that's outside of the job description.

So that that that could be if if it's like ~ you know,

it w I I I think, you know, they wrote the best job description they could

for this this role. I'm not sure if they necessarily knew the right person for it.

I'm thankful that it came to me ~ and and ~ that that it was Yeah,

it's it's it's tricky, isn't it?

And that was that was always one of my concerns of how how do I get my foot

in the door, how do I find that opportunity?

I think where we are now in with society compared to where we were ten,

fifteen years ago, it's so much easier to get exposure.

You know, you know full well that I'm an an avid user of LinkedIn.

and as a a networking platform,

to give you exposure to anything you want to professionally,

it's there. It's there for the taking.

You know, you can choose your follower who you want to follow.

You can just f I use LinkedIn.

Obviously I use it to post and promote the business and and build things

up that way. But I use it as a source of news.

You know, that's that's probably my main reason for looking at it

to see what's going on in the industries that I'm particularly interested in,

which in this case is life science and health tech.

~ and it's so easy for anybody to see what's going on.

You

as as brilliant as it is to go to a conference and go to a trade show,

you can do it virtually, effectively.

You can do it in you know third person,

watch watch it through other people's eyes,

get opinions. That can start to help you build that network.

And you can I think it's easier now to learn what is available.

And I guess there's there's there is a whole mental attitude of don't

be restricted just because that's what you've always done.

There's absolutely no reason why you can't change.

~ it's it's it's totally possible to do these things.

That's why working with someone like you is is great,

right? Because it's a little bit of sounding board.

You can collaborate with someone who's more in the in the field rather than

if ~ you know, if when I go looking for a role or something like that,

then then I have my preconceived notions of what I what I might say about that role,

but it's it may not be the right terminology,

it may not be the right description that that draws the right candidates.

And and and very often I I I think you probably were going here is that a

lot of it happens through networking,

so it so it happens before the roles you can post it.

and and that is a big part of it,

yeah.

Please excuse this short interruption.

We'll get back to the episode in a moment,

but I first wanted to share something really exciting that we're working on.

Kodu are proudly partnering with Vax and TTI Floorcare to rebuild their

UK engineering and innovation function in Droitwitch.

A quick bit of history first. Vaxx started in Droitwitch in 1977 when Alan Brazier

built the first machine that let people wash the carpets in their own home.

A milkchurn.

A shower pump and a water heater.

A world first. By nineteen eighty seven,

it was the best selling vacuum cleaner in Britain.

So the company was founded on wet,

and wet product development is now being built in the UK from the ground up.

Pumps, impellers, ceiling, ingress protection,

mechanism design, plastics. Alongside it,

an advanced development team standing up as its own function,

and an industrial design and design research team that owns the front end.

Here's three things worth knowing if you work in physical product development.

You'd be building the team rather than joining it.

The people going in now decide how this works.

The brief is deliberately loose.

Explore, prototype, test the risky parts early,

prove it before anyone commits to tooling.

If you'd spent the last three years executing decisions somebody else made,

this is the exact opposite of that.

And it sits inside TTI.

A group turning over fifteen billion dollars with Milwaukee,

Ryobi and Hoover in the portfolio.

The scale behind it is real. Roles run from design engineer through

to senior leadership across advanced development,

design engineering, industrial design and electronics.

Every live vacancy is over at teamcodu.com slash jobs.

That's teamkodu.com slash jobs.

Right, let's get back to the episode.

For young designers, showcasing your skills and showing that you've committed

to the craft to develop those skills is really important.

I like to see growth when you look through a portfolio.

You want to see someone who, you know,

maybe their their form development,

their sketch rendering, or their thinking and process evolves

as projects go through. ~ it's it's more ~ I say more a negative if it's

all the same all the way through.

You wonder, you know, will they progress?

You know, I like to see that growth.

~

Attitude is really, really important.

This goes across any any team.

I think, you know, you want someone who's hungry and willing to contribute and asks,

you know, what else can I do? ~ seeing that type of energy is important to me.

~ really inquisitive folks too.

~ another piece is having a a design eye,

even just looking at another designer's inspiration,

you know, what gets them excited,

you know, what's what's ~ aesthetically pleasing to them,

you know, what they think good design looks like.

that's another really important thing too,

because you can see what they're aspiring towards.

~ and admittedly I've, you know,

seen folks that have really high talent,

but I would I would argue that the direction they're chasing is not one that

I think would be advantageous,

at least to work with me or my team.

So ~ let's see, what else? I like folks that are a little bit competitive too,

honestly. A a little bit of that competitive edge.

~ not in an unhealthy way, but

having sat on teams where people are you know kind of competing with each other

or trying to you know make the best the best design proposal or start.

~ it's just it's it's refreshing and it it helps everyone grow.

A little bit of that helps everyone grow.

I like everybody to be just a tiny bit uncomfortable occasionally.

It's it's fine. So I I'm always wary of perfect.

~ anyone who thinks they're perfect,

any product that is perfect, nothing is perfect.

And actually it's the imperfection

that delivers innovation. it's the grit in the oyster that creates

the pearl. ~ my least favorite thing and I I went through some portfolio reviews

recently with a a a school. I I won't mention who it was,

but three or four of the students said,

~ me and sketching have a love hate relationship or I hate sketching.

I don't like to do it. And I was like,

one, not something you say in an interview,

but two, I appreciate your candor,

but this is just not going to be a fit ever.

I mean, if you're s

a room with a either a senior leader or you're sitting there with manufacturing side

like and you need to solve a problem,

you need to like be able to throw down and communicate a three dimensional concept

by by hand in a matter of minutes.

~ that's just a requirement for me.

So if I you couldn't solve problems or be a good designer without that skill.

The bit I'm interested in is the human being.

~ what makes you tick? What have you demonstrated

in your life, not necessarily in your in your career,

but in your life.

The the the the positive is though I see interest.

I see when people come and join us,

they're like, wow, you know, I'd love to listen in.

I'd love to be part of that meeting.

I'd love to experience that. And and that's what we try to do.

And, you know, I will share with you one of the things that brought

us more back into the space post-COVID was me thinking to myself

as a younger me going, Boy, if I was just coming on now,

what would I do?

do and if I didn't have the opportunity to really go into

an exciting and interesting environment,

I think my career would be very different.

And I just I thought so hard about that that I shared with our team.

I said, guys, we really need, you know,

like we we want to have interns.

They can't be in their bedrooms.

They got to be here with us. They this is a this is a hands-on kind of business.

It's not every waking hour of the day.

You know, we've learned a lot from that experience.

But

It really makes a huge difference to sort of have those water cooler conversations

that people like to talk about and just be in the space.

There's so much early on in the career that's absorbed through just environment.

Probably ninety-nine percent me going and asking.

I I am quite assertive. ~ I think of things that I've I've done that maybe have even

created waves by by pursuing it.

not to say there weren't times when I was asked.

Actually later in my career I was very much pulled into

to more things. in fact, what my my last role I was kind of claimed into.

I was on a meeting and they announced that I was going to lead the hand tools

and storage court. And I no one had spoken to me about it at all before.

So definitely I guess a mix, but ~ I think you're responsible for your own career.

In fact that was something that that was preached to us there by Jeff Ansel when

you ran in the business. And ~ another thing that stuck out in my my mind that that

he said actually in in a in a town hall meeting was

~ take the role that nobody else wants,

like the challenging one that's actually valuable to the business.

And I definitely took that to heart ~ and jumped on roles that the licensing role

in particular was not viewed as an attractive one from the industrial design group.

~ and I jumped into that challenge ~ full force and it it paid dividends

for me personally. So so there's the there's the skills of coming

in and doing design. You know the

the nuance of really somebody who's just,

you know, they and and and some may not know.

They've been in the space, right?

And then you open that option up,

you know, because, you know, there's a there's the job of doing the design work

and working with the team and,

you know, and and in many organizations,

obviously you have more senior leadership that are handling

the relationships and the conversations.

As you push it down, then you can you can you could see if somebody's interested

and capable. And

And it's fine if they are and it's fine if they aren't.

I mean, the the our environment is full of people who some like to

be forward and some like to be back.

That doesn't change ~ their value in terms of the total operation.

That being said, in a consultant operation,

you do need people who are more forward.

You can you can have several that are,

you know, like, hey, you're amazing at what you do and you can be in

the room and you can be quiet and you can absorb and say three words that

are super meaningful. That's great.

Or you can be like me who, you know,

can't can't bear the silence and you know ~ needs to ~ articulate it

and at times should probably be quieter.

But ~ you know, I I always feel like it is somebody's job to manage a conversation,

especially in a in a business environment,

to move it along. And early on I learned that,

you know, like you people can look around the room,

but there's a lot of confidence that's given.

You know, when somebody really takes the lead.

And leadership is something where people give it if if it's offered up

and and if it's if it's done in a manner that's that's productive.

And I suppose I've always had this feeling that life is not ~ a practice run,

it's for real, you know. It's it's the wonderful light between

the two oblivions, which is what I believe in.

And make the most of it. It's your life,

live it. And and so I think one thing I try to do and I try

to kind of impress on on students and people I've talked to

is think about what generally what that ten year

old yourself was at ten year old,

~ gave your flow. What what really piqued your imagination as a youngster?

You know, what did you love doing?

What what could you spend an old afternoon doing without even noticing the time?

That's your flow. Now if that happens to be making stuff and designing stuff,

you you're great to go as

Why design, you know? Because frankly,

you'll never work another day in your life.

You know, I mean I hate to say that,

you know, ~ in fact most of the projects I've worked on,

~ even though some have paid very well,

I do for nothing. I just love them so much,

you know. You know, it's a question I get every single year and ~ because I

I t I have have ~ taught on this elective mo final year module for years and

I get sort of like forty to eighty students coming through and a good proportion

of them, they're like, this is really,

you know, this is really cool.

How do I how do I do more? And I would say up until about five years ago,

~ it was a really difficult question to answer.

And I always felt like felt like it's felt really difficult because I was like,

I can't really advise you because there is not very much out there.

~ and now it's completely different.

So ~ now I would say to people,

~ then there's lots of lots of different things.

If you've learned about sustainability at university and it's something

you know about, take confidence in the fact that you probably know more than

the people who are trying to recruit you or like the companies that you're going

to go into. And actually having the confidence to be that expert in the room

~ is a really great thing. So I attended ~ a design declares event

~ over the summer and spoke to quite a lot of different students.

They were students, sorry, they were graduates and they were super really keen and

really kind of interested in sustainability,

but kind of struggling to find their way a little bit.

And I my my kind of message to them was just be more brave and be more annoying.

So like be that conscious in the conscience in the room because actually

if you can get into a design role then you you're you know you've you've been taken

on because you've got the skills for the job.

But that doesn't mean that we should the job doesn't evolve over time

and that the design bus industry doesn't need to evolve.

And so and I think there's a lot of

talk about that at the moment.

There's some if if they aren't in Design Declares,

I'm definitely advise them to to sign up for that.

~ it's a really good ~ initiative that kind of helps kind of back you

in kind of what you think's important.

And ~ the they run events where you can go along and speak to like minded people.

~ so that's a really good place to start.

~ I would absolutely connect with anybody interesting,

everybody interesting on LinkedIn.

~

I think it's an it's a really good ~ platform for ~ just

can finding really interesting people who are doing stuff within sustainability.

~ and there's loads of free training out there.

If you didn't do much in terms of sustainability at college or uni and

you want to know more, ~ then there's some really great ~ all sorts

of kind of programs out there from ones that are offered by Oxford and Cambridge,

they're kind of like if you're embedded in a company and you want to

go and learn more.

they're really good programs if you're in that sort of position.

Or there's things like the AXA Climate School,

which are great for kind of upskilling a a large kind of audience of people.

This there's a cost involved to all of those.

~ but then there's if you can,

you know, like YouTube and LinkedIn and like there's all sorts of like training.

You can learn all sorts. ~ there's loads of free events out there as well.

~ and yeah, get into networks that talk about these sort of things and

and just kind of connect with people.

I think

think to get into anything that you want to do,

connect connection is is key. And as you said earlier,

if you can connect with people and you make a good impression and

you show that you're like interested and knowledgeable,

then ~ you know, opportunities will happen.

~ there's also actually kind of yeah,

kind of an obvious thing as well.

They look at people's sustainability reports.

You know, if they sound if they sound a bit flaky,

'cause there's a few out there that do,

~ then they're probably not the ones to be following up.

But there's lots of companies who are doing a loads more in terms

of sustainability now.

And if their sustainability initiatives sound really interesting,

then like reach out to them. They're they're good companies to be working for.

Certainly for me, certainly for people like Mozart and things,

you're you're most creative as a student and in your twenties.

But that takes confidence. And I think

you you're as a 20-year-old, certainly I didn't have that confidence,

but I did actually have the ideas.

I mean, ~ and

I wish I'd trust myself more on those ideas and push them forward and

not be struck down by the negative criticisms.

~ and apart from that, I would say follow your dreams.

And you know, it it i I would really recommend the career of engineering

and design that to me the two merge together,

because ~ it it's so creative and you get this feeling

of flow when you do it.

You know, when when you're sketching and CAD modelling or making stuff

in the workshop, there's nothing quite like it for you know looking at your wife

and saying, ~ five hours have gone.

Where's that what happened there?

And and and and and so that's advice.

~ be confident. Everyone on this compilation is linked below.

If any of them caught your eye for the right reasons,

the four episodes are well worth your time.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks for listening to Why Design.

If this episode gave you some new ideas,

share it with someone in your team who'd find it useful.

And follow the show so you don't miss what's next.

And if you're building a product team or looking for your next challenge

in design or engineering, that's exactly what we do at Kodu.

We help companies hire smarter and faster,

and help great talent find work that actually fits.

I'm Chris White. Connect with me on LinkedIn and let's keep raising

the bar for design leadership.

Until next time.

Stay curious, stay creative and keep asking why design.