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Best interviewing experience?
over 3 years ago from Taylor Palmer, I do the UX
Samantha S, over 3 years ago nailed it.
Taylor Palmer, over 3 years ago
I know everyone has bad design challenge stories (I have my own), but let me play devil's advocate to this comment for a bit:
Take home challenges are ridiculous and no one should do them. It shows an extreme lack of respect for peoples personal time
Is this really true? I don't think we should take advantage of people, but by that logic isn't the interview itself an invasion of someone's time? If time is the concern, why bring them on site at all?
the challenge is either loaded in a way where the interviewers presuppose way too much domain knowledge or assume the the interviewee has some baseline context that they may or may not have
This sounds like a poorly designed exercise, not a problem with all exercises everywhere.
where I was supposed to design a new dashboard for their enterprise product
We tried doing things like this once and quickly found it has many problems, but it's also inappropriate to ask a candidate to do work for you. Again, it's a specific problem with that challenge, not with all challenges everywhere.
I've seen people who've interviewed great end up being terrible employees
Doesn't that make you feel like there should have been something in the interview process to root that out?
Appreciate the thoughts, keep them coming.
Gabriel Sturk, over 3 years ago Is this really true? I don't think we should take advantage of people, but by that logic isn't the interview itself an invasion of someone's time? If time is the concern, why bring them on site at all?
Come on... Showing up for an interview is a choice the candidate actively made.
Yeah yeah, I know this is hyperbole. But completing the exercise is also an active choice.
We’ve also used a take home challenge as a second chance as well. If people don’t do well in the interview but our gut says we missed something, we’ll give the candidate the option of a take home challenge to show us a different skill set.
A candidate can drop out at that point. Some do. But we can’t move forward until we’re confident in that candidate.
Lee Williams, over 3 years ago It 100% shows a lack of respect of peoples time and it's extremely biased against people with families, people who teach, volunteer and illustrates general lack of understanding of a good work/life balance. I have a toddler and a disabled mother in law that we care for. I do not have free time after work...
As for white boarding, step back for a second and critically look at what you learn from a 30 minute whiteboard session? What have your learned that you may not have from asking them really good questions about their portfolio?
The problem isn't the interview process, the problem is people. Humans are bias and association machines. We can render a kinda sorta ok surface level judgement based on very limited information, but beyond that we become extremely inconsistent. More information often makes our decision making worse... I'd encourage you to read the latest Malcom Gladwell book talking to strangers.
lastly a big part of UX is try and eliminate our extreme inability to make good personal decisions/judgements. You aggregate data, you look for patterns, more often than not ignore what people say and focus on what they do, and it's good practice that the person who actions on the research shouldn't be the one performing it...
John P, over 3 years ago
I was once asked to whiteboard a series of harry potter apps
Christ... the only response to that is "Read another book"
Dave C, over 3 years ago Totally agree with Lee, I’ll add - the trouble with all interview techniques seems to be that they aren’t a realistic litmus for how well somebody can do the job.
No matter what the format, it’s always a bit of a punt - some people will interview well and perform well in the role, yet others will interview just as well and perform poorly. It could be them, it could be you, it could be the company and all round dynamic. (It doesn’t help that every ‘product designer’ role is interpreted differently at every company!)
Even if somebody is extremely good at their job they might not perform for you - think about a major sports star who has changed teams and not been able to replicate their previous form at their new club. Did they suddenly get bad at their sport?
Whiteboard ‘challenges’
I just don’t understand these at all. What is it supposed to measure? How good somebody is at getting up in front of a group of strangers and doing some fictional work on a whiteboard? Is this how you design in your actual job? I hope not!
Take home ‘challenges’
Little bit insulting if you have any experience and/or a portfolio. It’s supposed to show your ‘process’ I guess. But what does that mean? Why doesn’t your portfolio show your process? And as everybody is just going say they do Lean UX/design thinking/design sprints/UCD etc are you really learning anything?
Taking it one step further, your process will largely be determined by the organisation you work for, the time and resources you have at your disposal and the deadlines you have to meet. And er, despite what the conference gurus tell you, results are obviously more important than process.
As Lee says, look through a portfolio, have a chat for an hour or so and you should be able to make a decent judgment. But you will never achieve certainty and it will always be a bit of a gamble.
the more experience I have doing interviews and interviewing others the more I'm convinced it's a process with extremely little merit. I can gain 95% of what I need to know in order to hire someone based on their portfolio and an hour in person design review where they present to me and some coworkers and we ask a lot of questions. Whiteboard challenges have limited use and often the challenge is either loaded in a way where the interviewers presuppose way too much domain knowledge or assume the the interviewee has some baseline context that they may or may not have. I was once asked to whiteboard a series of harry potter apps (I've never read the books or watched any of the movies, so that was great...). Take home challenges are ridiculous and no one should do them. It shows an extreme lack of respect for peoples personal time and the expectation that someone should only spend a couple hours on a project is absurd. I was given a take home project on a Friday for an interview on Monday morning once where I was supposed to design a new dashboard for their enterprise product. This is absurd on many levels, but most of all because a dashboard at it's heart a summary of the entire product, a hierarchy of needs to for every single thing your product does and in many ways functions as navigation. Sure let me spend 3 hours on that for you...
I've seen people who've interviewed great end up being terrible employees and I've seen the opposite where I had low expectations and they crushed it. You can't know. So does their work seem intelligent? Do they seem sane and fairly socially adjusted? Yes? Ok, hire them.