Genius Hours Career Success Edition #5: Sharpen Your Interview Skills | Recap
ADPList Genius Hours: Career Success Edition is where design mentors come together to provide tips and insights into the how-to’s and what should I do’s of building and maintaining a successful career that aligns with your goals.
On the 28th of July, ADPList hosted an awesome 100% female panel on honing your interview skills! Interviews are key for landing your next job, but not everyone knows how to ace them and stand out in the pool of candidates. I’m here to recap some of the invaluable advice shared during this session, and hopefully, at least one of you feels more confident in facing your next interview!
Introducing our guest speakers:
🌟 Mehak Sharma (she/her) is a Senior Product Designer leading the Growth and Marketing team at Agoda. Fun fact! She is a certified scuba diving instructor. 🤿
🌟 Jen Enrique is a Staff Product Designer at Slack and a mentor to creative professionals in the tech industry. Fun fact! Last year, she spent over 270 hours playing Animal Crossing. 🐶
Introducing our ADPList host for the session:
🌟 Ying Yao (she/her) is a UX and product designer at Honeywell. Fun fact! In her previous life, Ying broadcasted smooth jams through the airwaves of Atlanta as a radio DJ. 🎧
The Hiring Funnel
Before we dove into interview tips, our panel gave us a breakdown of what the hiring process involves. The hiring funnel is a series of stages that a candidate goes through when they’re being considered for employment. It typically follows the format in the image below:
For this event, the focus was on the third stage: “on-site” interviews. Being fully prepared for an interview can help you efficiently communicate your experience, skills and thought process.
“The majority of interviews are set up to ask questions about your process, design quality, your behaviour, and approach to design and mindset.”
- Jen
Therefore, rather than viewing interviews as just another hurdle on your path to employment, think of them as an opportunity to really showcase your enthusiasm for the company and role. It’s not just the hiring manager who will be interviewing you, but you will also be interviewing them!
Mehak shared some great tips on how you can take the initiative during your interview:
- Ask expectations for how you will work on-site (or remotely!).
- Be ready to present 1–3 projects using a slide deck.
- Prepare questions to ask your interviewers.
How to Prepare
It’s good to be familiar with what kind of questions you could be asked in an interview and how to frame your responses. Jen and Mehak did a fantastic job of breaking down the three types of interview questions and how to approach answering them.
[Jen] Process Questions: How you work and solve problems
Companies want to hear:
- Why does your project matter (the business needs?
- What do you understand about the users (identifying needs and pain points)?
- How do you solve problems?
- What design activities you used to solve your problems?
A bonus point would be mentioning how you managed stakeholders and considered data-informed design during your project.
Example questions:
- Describe your typical design process that has produced the best results.
- Tell me about a time you were surprised by users’ reactions during user research.
A pro tip shared by Jen is to mention data points that support your design. They don’t always have to be hard numbers, and can also be qualitative insights you identified.
Common missteps:
- The why, what, and how don’t map back to the final work.
- Don’t explain or justify the activities you chose in your design process.
- Focusing too much on the context instead of how you solved the problem.
[Mehak] Design Quality Questions: Show the output of your work
Companies want to hear:
- How do you simplify complexity?
- How do you design within constraints?
- How do you make intentional colour, pattern & typography choices?
- How do you tease out edge cases and solve for them?
“It’s very essential that in interviews where we have really limited time to explain, just prepare the story that you are going to tell to the interviewer and what are 3–4 edge cases that you want to highlight. So that it’s very easy for the interviewer to also understand, in those given 15 minutes, what your project was about.”
- Mehak
Example questions:
- What were some of the challenges you faced during the development of your design?
- How did you incorporate feedback from partners and designers into your work?
- Why did you choose checkboxes over a dropdown?
Common missteps:
- Not giving credit to team members.
- Lack of design critique of your own work.
- Lack of thoughtful use of interaction patterns, user flows, colour, typography.
It can be really tempting to prioritize aesthetics over everything, but it’s important to justify why your visual design choices were valid. Be detailed and be descriptive! Any design choices made should tie into your problem statement(s).
[Jen] Behavioural Questions: Handling conflict & collaboration
Companies want to hear about how you handle the following:
- Interpersonal conflict and how you work with people.
- Difficult project constraints and how you creatively work within them.
- Missteps and recovery time.
- Time management
As Jen explained, we’re all human and workplaces aren’t perfect. Not all personalities will get along smoothly and automatically. You can use those complex circumstances as a learning point to highlight in an interview.
Example questions:
- Describe a situation in which you were able to use persuasion to successfully convince someone to see things your way.
- Give me an example of a time when you set a goal and were able to meet or achieve it.
- Tell us about a time you ran into obstacles on your last project and how you worked through them.
For tips on how to approach responding to these questions, Jen recommended using the S.T.A.R method (Situation — Task — Action — Result).
For example:
“Before working on on a new sign-up flow I learned the front-end developer had a reputation for being difficult to work with. I wanted to ensure this project made its deadlines and that the team felt invested in the work. I decided to ask for their feedback throughout my design process so that they were excited to do the work. He ended up suggesting some pretty good creative solutions, and we ended up releasing early.”
Common missteps:
- Vague stories without a clear beginning, middle or end.
- Not answering the question directly.
- Talking negatively about your teammates or users in any way.
- Inability to admit to making mistakes or mishaps.
Mindset
One thing to remember is that job hunting is a vulnerable and draining process; you are putting yourself out there and hoping to get a positive response in return. Maintaining an optimistic and resilient mindset is important. Sometimes we convince ourselves that we didn’t get the email back or the job offer because we weren’t good enough.
It’s important to look at outcomes as learning experiences. Use what you learn today to improve upon your next application or job interview! Mehak also explained that hiring managers are looking for people with growth mindsets. The more you can show that you are open to learning and improvement, the more likely for a team to want to include you.
As a closing note, interviewing can be hard and grueling, so remember to prepare yourself and be open to learning from your mistakes.
“Be kind to yourself. No one is perfect because we’re human. You are a Work In Progress. You are learning new things all the time and incorporating that into improving for the next time.”
- Jen
Interested in learning more from our lovely panel? Check out the Q&A segment in the replay! Or book a session with them below:
🌟 Book a session with Jen Enrique.
🌟 Book a session with Mehak Sharma.
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