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- Antara Dave landed a senior product designer role at Microsoft after getting rejected a year prior.
- She gained the necessary user experience skills at Home Depot before reapplying to Microsoft.
- Dave said getting that experience and standing out in the interview helped her land her dream job.
The first time Antara Dave applied for a job at Microsoft, her dream company, she was rejected. But a year later she landed the role after picking up experience the company had said she was missing.
Dave joined Microsoft in 2022 and is now a senior product designer who leads user experience for AI tools. She told Business Insider that when she was rejected from in 2021, she was told she needed more real experience building products that impacted user experience.
Dave, who was working as a data analyst at Home Depot at the time, moved into a role within her company that would get her the experience she needed to land the Microsoft job.
When she cold-applied again in 2022, her new résumé included a year of experience as a UX designer, showing Microsoft she had worked on getting the experience she was missing.
“When I applied again a year later, I did not have any referrals inside the company. I just applied to the Microsoft portal and got a call and went from there,” she said.
Once she made it to the interview process, she used the five-hour day to showcase her design work as well as her critical thinking skills and ability to problem solve.
“There was a one-hour interview where I presented my work to a bunch of people on the team, around 20 people. They also asked me questions about my project to understand how I made those design decisions,” she said. “They wanted to learn how I approach and think about problems.”
Dave said her undergraduate and master’s degrees helped her develop the critical thinking skills needed to be a good product designer. She also said the nearly seven years she spent at Home Depot in different roles helped her ultimately land the job at Microsoft.
In addition to having a résumé that shows the impacts of your work and standing out in the interview, Dave said anyone who wants to work as a designer at Microsoft should be very familiar with AI tools and vibe-coding, or using an AI chatbot to produce code.
Here’s the résumé she used to get her job at Microsoft:
Do you have a story to share about your career or landing your dream job? Contact this reporter at kvlamis@businessinsider.com.
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