The right mindset over the right resumé

Our approach to writing a more engaging, more human job description

At the end of last year, we ran an extensive search to find Parsnip a senior/founding product designer.

Generally, we’ve tried to use our networks as much as possible to find people that come strongly recommended. In this case, however, our designer network wasn't very big, leading us to cast a wider net.

Over the years, I’ve absorbed several perspectives on how to write job descriptions more effectively. Here, I reproduce this one mostly verbatim, with additional commentary below about what we were trying to achieve. Let us know in the comments if this was helpful or interesting to you! 👇

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AI learning startup seeks senior (or founding) UX/UI designer that loves food 🥘, loves learning, and will lead design for our early-stage team.

Hello there! 👋

We’re Parsnip, an AI learning startup founded by Andrew and Dan, two PhDs from Harvard and Stanford. Our mission is to combine science, engineering, and human-centered design to create a better way for people to learn new knowledge and skills — anytime and anywhere — that’s as fun as “leveling up” in a game.

Parsnip’s first product has been called the “Duolingo for cooking” and has 4.9⭐ in the App Store, rave user reviews, and over 80k downloads across iOS and Android. Under the hood, we’re also building a revolutionary new LLM-powered, knowledge graph-based learning system that will teach far more than just cooking, to anyone in the world, in a personalized way.

We’re looking for a product-centric UX/UI designer with a breadth of experience, a love of food, excitement for AI, and empathy for humanity to join us on our journey to both build this mobile app and the novel AI system that underpins it. This designer will work with us to bring the joy of cooking and a love of learning to as many people as possible.

🛠️ Things you might do:

• Own Parsnip’s design system: Build on our existing design language to deliver a consistent user experience across our mobile app, website, and marketing materials, and in alignment with product and business goals.

• Conceptualize UX for a substantial AI system: Collaborate with scientists and engineers to conceptualize a web frontend for our knowledge graph-based AI learning platform, working with us in particular on data visualization and interaction design. You’ll also develop an intuitive understanding of how our AI system works and how to make it user-friendly.

• Create, iterate, and ship: Design user flows, wireframes, and high-fidelity mockups for our mobile app and/or AI system, iterating quickly and trying many new ideas along the way.

• Collaborate with engineers: Work closely with our fantastic engineering team to ship your designs quickly, participating in project management as needed to help move things forward.

• Understand our users deeply: Talk to our users, conduct user research, and create prototypes to guide product development from a design perspective.

• Contribute beyond just design: While design is your specialty, you also enjoy getting involved in broader company discussions, contributing to product strategy, content, or marketing when necessary.

• Pick up new tools: while you’ll primarily work in Figma, you’re comfortable picking up other tools for animation, prototyping, and other needs outside of design.

• Document and communicate: Clearly articulate design choices, thoughtfully document your work, and communicate effectively both orally and in writing.

😊 Who you might be:

• A design generalist: While you might have a focus in either UX or UI, you can do both and enjoy solving problems from user flows to interface design. You’re passionate about good design and are engaged with the broader design community.

• Experienced in relevant areas: You’ve worked on mobile apps, particularly those with game mechanics or social features. If you’re working on our AI system, you might have experience with data visualization, interaction design & prototyping, or knowledge-based software systems.

• Self-driven & intrinsically motivated: You thrive in an early-stage, fast-paced environment, taking initiative and solving problems independently without needing to be told what to do next. You take pride in doing great work for its own sake, and have developed significant hobbies and interests outside of your primary vocation.

• Growth mindset oriented: You’re a lifelong learner and know that unfamiliar, uncertain situations belie great learning opportunities. You know that “mistakes” are part of the process, and “failure” is just a stepping stone to future success. You’re open to — or even look forward to — receiving feedback as part of a culture that values and encourages this growth.

• Iterative & experimental: You believe people are precious but ideas are not. You're comfortable experimenting, iterating quickly, and discarding ideas that don't work, knowing "done is better than perfect”.

• Comfortable with ambiguity: You embrace challenges as opportunities, optimistically looking for creative solutions rather than emphasizing what isn’t possible. You’re excited to build what benefits humanity in the rapidly shifting landscape of AI and new technologies.

• Empathetic toward your co-workers. You value relationships and care about people beyond just the work they do. You listen empathetically, communicate openly, try to understand others’ point of view, and approach differences of opinion with humility.

• Empathetic toward our users. You try to understand and anticipate user needs, bringing empathy to your design decisions. You're invested in creating a product that users love and that genuinely improves lives.

• Excited about our mission: You’re excited to bring the joy of cooking to as many people as possible, and to build a platform to bring learning out of the classroom and into real life.

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There are a few ways that we sought to make this job description different from the typical one that comes with a large list of qualifications and very specific responsibilities. Instead, we tried to aim for describing the roles you’d play on the team and the type of person you’re likely to be. In other words — instead of describing a bunch of constraints you’d need to satisfy, we laid out our best guess of what you’d be doing.

We did it this way for several reasons:

• It’s quite hard for early-stage startups to attract great people, but one strong draw is the team one would get to work with. This allowed us to highlight how we operate and stand out from more tedious job descriptions.

• There’s no standard candidate for this designer role at such an early stage, and we didn’t want to pigeonhole or exclude potential applicants if their background didn’t fit a pre-specified list of qualifications.¹

• Two schools of thought arise commonly in startup hiring: (a) “hire someone who’s done the exact job before”, and (b) “hire for potential, not experience”. Here, we wanted to be explicitly open to the second case.

Moreover, it was paramount to find someone that fit into our culture. So, we also spent some time defining our current and aspirational culture², and used that to encourage self-selection toward those who’d be a better fit.

We had over 150 applicants write in — from early-career designers, to mid-level, to senior/principal, and even design leaders who were just curious about Parsnip.³ If you’re reading this, please know that we sincerely appreciate every one of you! We read each of your notes to us, and I apologize that we weren’t able to get back to everyone.

So, who is this awesome new member of our team? We can’t wait to share that with you, soon. In the meantime, we’re also looking for an additional designer or two to join our team in spring 2025, and welcome you to get in touch or share this post with a friend.

Please share your reactions or thoughts on early-stage hiring!

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Many apologies to our readers about the long time since the last post! We’ve been very heads-down doing some foundational AI work for Parsnip. There will be lots more to share there soon, and you can expect more regular posts shortly.

1. There’s this oft-cited, sometimes debated statistic that women are more stringent about whether they meet job qualifications than men are. If this is indeed true, we hope our approach would mitigate that bias.

2. One helpful starting point for us was Superhuman’s company values exercise, which we further adjusted for our own needs. We’ll write up our process in the future!

3. If you’re looking to hire a designer and have exhausted your own network, we learned that one of the best places to post a job is on read.cv. As one friend put it, read.cv is “the place where designers look for jobs that care about design”. Thanks for the pointer, Raffi!