Hiring in Design

Interview processes

Number of rounds 😴

I love driving efficiencies, so the idea of 5 or 6 rounds of interviews for Individual Contributors, or even Design Leads doesn't work for me. Who has the time for this? [Insert meme 😂]. Asking hiring managers to interview multiple people for this many rounds isn't an effective use of time in my opinion.

Design tasks 🎙

Unpaid Design tasks are an out-of-date practice. Asking candidates for presentations is more than acceptable, it helps you as a hiring manager to identify how the candidate thinks and works. After all, presenting, and selling in concepts with narrative and explaining rationale are our bread and butter in Design.

Salaries & packages 💰

There’s a demand for companies to show the salary of the role, which I agree with completely. However, in the UK and many other places around the world, it’s common practice that company policy restricts sharing this kind of information.

Instead, know your worth before embarking on an interview process. It’s beneficial to have an idea of what kind of salary and benefits you’ll need to accept an offer. When the interview starts, state what you want and if it’s out of budget they’ll let you know. Neither employers or prospective employees want to waste time in interview processes that won't lead to an accepted offer.

Diversity and Inclusion 🤗

Being an individual of mixed ethnicity, Diversity and Inclusion is immensely important to me, undoubtedly there has been progress but there's still much work to be done. To quote Arsene Wenger; “If you’re good enough, my friend, you play – no matter what your name or passport”. It's so important to adopt this way of thinking, embrace everyone and look to blend skills, experience and cultures. The outcomes are truly delightful. Creating Diverse and Inclusive working environments isn’t simply ethical but also immensely beneficial;

• +36% likelihood of financial outperformance
• Diverse teams are over 35% more productive
• Diverse teams make better decisions 87% of the time

Source: Linkedin Learning, McKinsey, D&I Global Market Report, Peoplemanagement

Interview structures

A structure for interviewing candidates I’ve found effective in the past for both Individual Contributors and Design Managers alike.

For an IC (Individual Contributor) - two-step process

1. Meet and greet (30 mins) This is a casual conversation to get to know the candidate Objective: Gain an understanding of who the candidate is, how they think and a brief conversation about their experience - treat it like a User Interview for a Research study, open-ended questions. Objective: Offer the candidate the opportunity to ask any questions about the role or organisation
2. Present portfolio piece (60 mins) This is a structured presentation interview - 20 mins presentation, 20 mins of questions from interviewers and 20 mins for questions from the candidate Objective: Gain an understanding of how the interviewee thinks and works. Understand their Design process, how they came to the decisions they made and how they validated that work; Research, Data etc. Interviewers ask open questions about their approach, process, rationale and outcomes of the presented work. Objective: Offer the candidate the opportunity to ask any questions about the role or organisation
3. Come to a decision after the interview: offer / no offer

For Design Management (Design Lead, Lead Designer) - three-step process

1. Meet and greet (30 mins) This is a casual conversation to get to know the candidate Objective: Gain an understanding of who the candidate is, how they think and a brief conversation about their experience - treat it like a User Interview for a Research study, open-ended questions. Objective: Offer the candidate the opportunity to ask any questions about the role or organisation
2. Workshop (90 mins) This is a structured task interview, we are trying to understand how the candidate thinks about given topics: Delivering great outcomes, managing conflict, driving standards, team development etc. 30 mins to work through the task solo of the interviews, 30mins to present back their approach to the tasks and 30mins of questions from interviewers and candidate Objective: Gain an understanding of how the interviewee thinks and works. Understand their Design process, how they came to the decisions they made and how they validated that work; Research, Data, etc. Interviewers ask open questions about their approach, process, rationale and outcomes of the presented work. Objective: Offer the candidate the opportunity to ask any questions about the role or organisation
3. Meet with collaborators (45mins) This is a conversation for those who would work closely with the candidate to get an understanding of how they collaborate and work effectively with different disciplines - Design superpower is collaboration Objective: Gain an understanding of who the candidate is, how they collaborate with other disciplines Objective: Offer the candidate opportunity to ask any questions about the role or organisation and other departments / teams
4. Come to a decision after the interview: offer / no offer

Reflections on this process

This process has been refined over the last 5 years while hiring for different businesses. It’s only possible to make this process efficient with a clear vision of what we were looking for in the first place. So what did we look for?

Attitude and behaviour

🤝 Collaborative - genuinely collaborative people who go above and beyond to help teammates and colleagues outside of Design

❤️ Passionate Problem solvers - if the Design challenge is creating a market-leading feature in our product suite or making Design workshops more efficient for other colleagues to facilitate, we’re equally passionate and willing to solve them to our maximum potential

📈 Developmental focus - understand that there is always room for improvement; design skillset, presentation skills, narrative and buy-in, stakeholder management, using data, working with Research, Accessibility knowledge, Design System knowledge, ways of working with product, innovation techniques, Research methods, politics, economics, ethics, diversity and inclusion, Service Design, working with ai - there is always more to learn, embrace that 😊

Skillset

Product Design

We looked to hire Designers with a 50:50 split between UX and UI. However, it’s important to understand most people aren’t a perfect 50:50 split. With that in mind, we included wiggle room to go 70:30 either way on any given individual, if they were the right fit for the team. The only caveat was that the overall group of Designers was a split of 60:40 on the UX side.

Additional Skills

Candidates who have experience of working with Research, Design Systems, Accessibility standards and working in Agile environments have the advantage over others.

Learnings

It’s important to find a way to match the culture of the team to that of the business. It helps build relationships and bridges of collaboration more easily when the cultures align closely. It is a challenge to mirror culture while maintaining inclusion and diversity but this is part and parcel of building great teams.

Over the coming years, I believe the skillset of Design individuals will continue to become even more T-shaped. Other areas like Service Design and Experimentation need to be adopted, in addition to Research, Data, Accessibility and Design System knowledge.

Building rapport and relationships with senior stakeholders who understand the landscape of the business is vital. We achieve this by speaking their language and I believe Design folks spending time gathering an in-depth understanding of the political, economic and social landscape enables this. There's a gap here in many Design folks, including myself in this, but we change that with curiosity and openness.