How to hire a Product Designer
Impactful ways to find the right person and avoid a bad hire.
It is almost impossible to calculate the exact costs of a bad hire. Costs culminate fast if we take into account the money and time you and/or your recruiter spends on the selection process: reviewing resumes and interviewing candidates then onboarding and training the new employee. The negative business impact of a bad hire is also the bad team morale and the loss of productivity for the overall organization, and then the time lost when it becomes certain that the company needs to replace them.
Companies want to avoid bad hires also simply because of their overall bad reputation when it turns out that they made the wrong decision by selecting a candidate that does not fit well in the organization and now they need to deal with the caused dispute on multiple fronts. I truly believe that every candidate can find the right organization where they fit well, and if a bad hire is made most of the time it is the fault of the company that made the hiring decision and not the newly hired person.
If a bad hire is made, most of the time it is the fault of the company that made the hiring decision and not the newly hired person.
In this article, I summarize the problems I see in the current hiring processes and give suggestions on how to do a better interview process that delivers more reliable outcomes. I know, the recruiting process may vary company by company, but I think most of these ideas can help everyone think through or (probably rethink) their current hiring process.
The problem with homework assignments
I attended many job interviews during the 17 years of my career as a candidate before I joined my current company, and the biggest problem I had was always with homework assignments and it seems like I wasn’t the only one. I remember every time I completed one I never missed mentioning at the pitch presentation that in real life this is not how I usually work. Actually, it was always the first thing that I said before even starting the presentation. I also mentioned every time that my work as a designer is always just as good as the collaboration within the team I work in.
The work of a product designer is always just as good as the collaboration within the team they work in.
In real life, when you are part of an organization as a designer, you operate in a team. You get feedback from the clients and users who you interview. You collaborate with a product manager and the developers of your team. All team members do their research and add their part both to the brainstorming about the problem you work on and to the solution in continuous iterative steps. Basically, you go through and solve the problem together. None of this is true when you work on your homework assignment as a candidate.
What it means, if we think about it, is that when you request a candidate to do a homework assignment, you ask them to work in a way that you would never want them to operate when they are already part of your organization as a designer. A designer who works on their own, and only comes back to you when they have a ready solution is the worst scenario any of us can think of. You actually want the opposite! That is quite a huge contradiction.
Requesting a candidate to do a homework assignment, is asking them to work in a way that no one would ever want them to work after they got the job and they are already part of the organization as a designer.
I even remember a time, when the assignment that a company wanted me to complete was to “Harvest low-hanging fruits” of the actual interface the company used. I can not think of a more horrible scenario than a candidate who needs to criticize the work that was previously done by the team they want to get hired by. That is the easiest way to get alienated from a team even before you started working with them. Giving a candidate a homework assignment with a problem your company needs to solve also feels a bit like a free consultation. Another note to add here: if you worked long enough as a designer, you know that there are no low-hanging fruits. Someone who previously created that interface made their decisions for a reason, reasons that you probably don’t know by the time you spent a limited time getting to know the scenario, but you should trust the person that they made the best version they could.
Take-home assignments are not ideal — What to do instead
You have several options to find out if a candidate is a great fit.
1. Case study review
The candidate is asked to pick and present any of the projects they previously worked on.
A case study demonstrates not just the candidate’s design, but also their thinking and design process and their ability to tackle complex problems. This is probably the easiest and least time-consuming way to interview a candidate and see if they fit. It doesn’t take more than 25–30 minutes and the full hiring team can attend. I’m sure all candidates have something they can present — even if it is just an imaginary project they came up with previously. Hopefully, everyone will have some kind of previous work to share.
Aspects to focus on during the case study review:
- Do they specify the problem they were solving and talk about their goals?
- Do they communicate clearly? Are they easy to talk to?
- Do they let you ask questions and stop occasionally to see if everyone can catch up?
- Have they done proper research and testing?
- Do they walk you through their entire thought process and design work or just jump straight to the solution?
- Did they measure the success of the design in any way? Was there any follow-up?
- Do they talk both about the strong and weak sides of their solutions? Do they mention what would they do differently now?
- The most important: how did you feel overall during the review? Would you like to work together with this person? Is the person a good cultural fit?
After the case study review, it is beneficial to do a 40–50 mins Q&A with representatives of the teams the candidate will work together with.
2. Whiteboarding exercise
The candidate is asked to perform an exercise live with the interviewers, explaining their thinking and decisions while solving a task.
In this scenario, the candidate gets 2–4 sentences as a description of a task. This description contains what the hiring team is looking for in a great solution. The overall process usually doesn’t take longer than 50–60 minutes, but because it is easy to get lost in the details, the candidate has to be mindful of the time. If you choose this task for the interview, you can come up with any type of challenge, there is no problem statement that is too crazy in my opinion. Just focus on not giving a problem statement that is exactly what they will need to deal with in case they get hired by your company.
The main reason why a whiteboarding exercise is better than a take-home assignment
At a take-home assignment presentation you only see the end result. However, in order to make a good hiring decision you also want to get a clear view of how the candidate thinks in the initial stages of solving a problem. Take-home exercises won’t allow you to evaluate skills such as critical thinking, communication, the ability to ask questions, handling feedback, and performance in a high-pressure environment. So you might want to swap the take-home exercise for a whiteboard exercise. In a whiteboard exercise, you can also see what ideas the candidate has, how they handle suggestions, and how they work in a team.
With a whiteboarding exercise, it is possible to get a clear view of how the candidate thinks in the initial stages of solving the problem.
Aspects to focus on during the whiteboarding exercise:
- Does the candidate ask any questions? If so, are those good and relevant questions?
- Do they try to involve you or any other person who is present at the interview to participate like “Ok let’s brainstorm together”?
- Do they communicate clearly? Are they easy to talk to?
- Do they come up with multiple solutions? If so, how do they decide which solution is the best?
- Do they examine the problem from a business perspective?
- Do they examine the problem from different angles or viewpoints?
- Do they follow any process?
- Do they define user needs?
- Are they exploring out-of-the-box solutions beyond the obvious ones?
- Do they set goals for measuring the success of the outcome?
Disclaimer: These aspects are based on what my team used when hiring a new team member. Although most questions I just came up with, some of them were created previously by my wonderful colleagues.
A whiteboard exercise can be completed on a physical or a digital whiteboard
I know that a whiteboard exercise seems like a task that can be completed onsite only but with tools like FigJam or Miro it can be easily completed remotely as well.
After the exercise, it is best to get together with the team and discuss how the candidate accomplished the task. You will most likely get a great amount of feedback from the team.
How does your company hire new designers?
I wrote this article because most companies still ask candidates to do a homework assignment, while I think there are better and less time-consuming ways. I hope the hiring process at these companies will change in the future as our way of work has also significantly changed. With that, I’m curious, how does your company hire new designers? If you have any feedback or great ideas about hiring, please feel free to share them in the comments!
