With no professional design experience and a bootcamp portfolio only a few months old, I decided not to use job boards at all.
Through the normal channels I would be one of hundreds of more experienced candidates, so I went directly to cold outreach. I spent two weeks researching technology companies in Barcelona, reading their press coverage, looking at their product pages, and taking notes about what each one was really building. I wanted every email to sound like it came from somebody who cared about their work. I wrote to about 20 companies. Every email was personal. I mentioned something specific from their recent press coverage, said what interested me in their product or their design decisions, and added a link to my bootcamp portfolio with a short note about one project relevant to them. Writing those emails took real time. Some of them I rewrote three or four times before I felt confident enough to send. I kept a simple spreadsheet with who I contacted, when, and what I wrote, mostly to avoid repeating myself, but it also helped me improve my approach. Twenty emails became two replies and two interviews. The first was with a founder, a general conversation about the direction of the company and about how I think about ↓