Five things a good designer hiring process never has

1. 🚩 Homework, Spec work, whiteboard tasks, etc. - This has been spoken about endlessly so I won’t go on too much about it, but suffice it to say if the only way a hiring process can establish the qualifications of a designer is to get them to sit down and do some design work, then the process is broken and is likely leading to terrible hiring decisions fuelled by a self-selecting candidate pool of the segment of the designer population who are willing to do this stuff.

2. 🚩 Interviews with adjacent technical disciplines - Unless an organisation is too small to offer up a large enough set of designers to run a proper hiring process, there is no reason an engineer, data scientist or other technical staff member should be interviewing designers. In my experience it speaks to a few dysfunctions:

   1. A lack of trust from leadership in the design discipline and its ability to make good decisions. This is not the kind of environment you want to work in.

   2. A lack of understanding of the highly specialised and technical nature of the role of a designer - Naturally a non-designer in a designer interview is going to end up focussing on the aspects of the role they can understand which will be a narrow wedge of the venn diagram between their own job and your job.

   3. A lack of maturity in the design discipline - in and of itself this is not automatically an issue, but you should go into a business knowing where you’d plot it on the Design Maturity chart, and this is a useful data point to help inform that.

3. 🚩 Inhospitable scheduling - You should assume that if an organisation is willing to have you sit in front of a screen at 10pm when they are hiring you, that they are going to expect you do that once you’re on the payroll too. Sure, sometimes it is unavoidable, I once interviewed for a job in Europe whilst living in New Zealand, and understandably that was a scheduling nightmare, but that should be the exception, and should be treated as such, not just blithely dropped into your calendar like it’s fine.

4. 🚩 A myopic focus on disentangling the “we” and “I” of previous work - Everything a designer produces is a product of inter-and-intra-disciplinary collaboration and designers in high functioning organisations should be rewarded for this kind of co-working. Businesses which obsess over personal contribution often have hostile performance management systems which are looking for evidence of designer contributions which run counter to productive ways of working.

5. 🚩 An interview panel made up exclusively of men - There is never a good excuse for this. Either the business has failed to hire women in a discipline which has quite a lot of them, or the women who have been hired are not deemed senior enough or responsible enough to be put in front of prospective candidates. Neither of those is a good basis for a healthy team, nor a design team which creates good products.

Good luck out there 😬