Raising the interview bar without design challenges

Mohamed Imran
6 min readNov 30, 2020

We’ve all been there. Some of us have been on both sides of the fence.

As a hiring manager, I’ve been guilty of asking candidates to take a task home to design something as a means to assess their design chops, their process and their thinking. As an interviewee in the past, I’ve also been asked by hiring managers to work on features for their products to see if I can live up to my word. I’ve realized there is a better way to all this.

I was recently at a design meetup where the panel (recruiter, designer looking for a job, and a hiring manager) were discussing the infamous topic of design challenges during the interview stage. We hear the common stories:

They say there is so much competition

For any job application, especially in these uncertain times, there are so many applicants that companies feel the right to demand candidates put in the hours to showcase their strengths. Candidates need to stand out. Hiring mangers need to objectively judge everyone on the same scale. A design challenge puts candidates on a level playing field.

Unfortunately, this is so common that nobody would bat an eye to this response. In my humble opinion, hiring managers and organizations with this approach haven’t done their due diligence. It’s the lazy way out. Hiring managers are not putting in the effort to have structured conversations or interviews with key assessment criteria's and use the design challenge as the holy grail to give someone a pass.

They say it helps us evaluate a candidates potential

In most cases, Any design job requires candidates to submit their portfolio. Hiring managers assess a candidates portfolio, but it is hard for some hiring managers to assess them based on what they’ve shared in the portfolio. A design challenge puts the designer on their toes. They are given a task that is out of their realm, mostly (and sadly) related to the new companies line of business. This helps hiring managers evaluate the candidates “true” potential.

The good designers know how to sell their work and get the message across. They prepare in-depth case studies of their past work. While I agree judging candidates on just some dribbble/behance screens is difficult. In most cases designers would have a back story to their work. It just requires some probing and a bit of nudging to understand that. Candidates definitely need to be prepared to share more in-depth work, and hiring managers as well need to step up their game to understand a candidates past work better. Throwing a new challenge at them can often lead to bias based on pre-conceived notions that a hiring manager might have and more importantly, it is not the ideal way a designer would work in normal circumstances.

They say they are not judging the output, they only want to see how candidates think.

While candidates pour hours of effort into understanding the brief and finding the right solution, a hiring manager is trying to understand the thought process behind the solution. This thought process, that the candidate has gone through to come up with a conclusion is often done alone, and somehow this magically helps hiring managers assess the candidates ability to apply a similar scenario in real life working conditions. They’ve analyzed their product thinking abilities, their ability to structure the conversation and sell their idea and their ability to think through the numerous challenges that the brief might throw at them.

While the premise for this “excuse” is fine. In the real world, no designer works in isolation. No designer should work in isolation. So all the work they put individually into the design challenge is best done in collaboration with others. How can hiring managers assess the candidates “true” potential in listening, bouncing off ideas, iterating collaboratively, taking feedback, etc if they require candidates to work on a design challenge, often within a time boxed window. Candidates often work in the wee hours of the night after they’ve finished their day jobs.

Photo by Kevin Ku on Unsplash

Unfortunately, design challenges have become a common practice and both hiring managers and candidates have taken it as a norm. However, the influential amongst us should stand for a fairer approach.

Fixing the design interview

Having abolished the design challenge practice myself and having spoken to designers at big tech companies across the globe, here’s some things you can try in your organization:

Create your interview panel and get the setup right
Understand who in your team is capable and trained to interview designers. This requires a keen attention to detail and an ability to get candidates to share more deeply not only about what they do, but focusing more on why they do it and how they do it. Prepare key points for every round of interview that must be covered and have a unified scorecard to measure candidates.

Portfolio assessment
Get a candidates portfolio. Study it. See what decisions they’ve made. If you only get a few screenshots, ask the candidate to prepare a short case study. This is ok and better than asking them to do a new challenge. The case study can end up being an asset they use for other interviews. This way, hiring managers can learn more not only about their design chops, but see the inner workings of what goes on in the project.

Candidates, if you are new to the field and don’t have a portfolio, create one! Do some pro-bono work for organizations you believe in. Create your own fictional (or real) products to build a portfolio. This will get your feet in multiple doors faster than doing design challenges during interviews.

Portfolio presentation
In an interview setting, get the candidate to present their portfolio. Get them to walk through the problem, the hypothesis, the assumptions, the solutions, the trade-offs. Explore their contributions vs what others in the team delivered. Go deep and ask all the relevant questions here.

Design critique
Find another product, something that is disconnected from the candidates work experience and something that is further away from your product offering as well, but a product the candidate is familiar with. Use that to run a critique session. Understand how they analyze product design. See what they notice, and what they don’t. Get them to critique the product and the design. Choosing a different product however is a must. This allows lesser bias from the hiring manager and makes it more interesting for the candidate to dissect.

White-boarding
Run a design jam session. Work together with the candidate to solve an interesting challenge on a whiteboard. See their process and analyze how they uncover the problem to come to the solution. Add some constraints to see how candidates navigate around them. Bounce ideas off of each other. Collaborate on making the solution work.

Make interviews fun again

Interviews are stressful. The candidate comes in with a lot of hope to make it through. The hiring manager comes in with a lot of determination to find the right teammate. This shouldn’t be a competition. The best interviews I’ve had and the best interviews I’ve conducted are the ones where both parties are relaxed and having a fun conversation about design.

Thanks for reading! If you are a hiring manager working with design challenges or if you are a job seeker working on design challenges, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

If you have more to add on other ways to make interviews effective and fun, I’d love to learn that as well! Comment below and let’s have a chat!

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Mohamed Imran

Product Design Director @nana. Previously - first designer at @Careem and at @dubizzle. Startupper at heart with a love for starting things!