How the Gousto Product Design team innovated on the interview process
Step-changing our process to better assess candidates
Picture the scenes. You’re a product designer who is sailing through the hiring process. The company you are interviewing with lets you know that the next interview stage is a 2 hour live design task with eight people on the panel scrutinising every pixel you dare to move. Gulp. Or better yet, you have a take-home design task that takes days to complete, despite being advised to spend no longer than a few hours on it. Didn’t want to go to bed anyway.
The Gousto Product Design team recently re-assessed a step of the interview process, working with Gousto’s Talent Acquisition team to make sure they were getting the best out of the candidate. YuXin Y (Product Designer), Kelly Batchelor (Lead Product Designer) and Jacques Moussafir Jacques Moussafir (Product designer and one of our most recent members of theproduct design team 🎉) share their thoughts on the process.
What has been your experience with product design interviews in the past?
YY: I’ve previously applied for roles that have many interview stages — everything from initial chats, case study presentations, whiteboard tasks, take-home tasks, final chats and everything in between.
The whiteboard tasks I always saw as a great opportunity to learn more about a business, but they usually never feel like enough time to pick up on context, properly define a pressing problem and come up with ideas. I’ve had as little as 30 minutes to complete a whiteboard task in the past, which is definitely not long enough and can often feel like a test rather than a back-and-forth conversation. There wasn’t sufficient time to discuss ideas or represent them visually.
KB: My experience has been similar to YuXin. Despite always spending way too long on take-home tasks, I’m usually most nervous about a whiteboard task as it’s an hour of thinking on the spot, which is often not when my best ideas come to mind.
Any whiteboard tasks where the facilitators deliberately don’t engage with the candidate also makes it difficult for me to gauge what it would be like to collaborate with my potential future teammates. I do believe the facilitators would get a lot more out of me if the session was more of a discussion — a learning that many of us in the product design team wanted to promote.
What did you do to improve one of the steps in Gousto’s Product Design interview process?
KB: Our current whiteboard task meant it was hard to get a flavour of how the candidate would collaborate, facilitate and vibe with the team. We wanted to get a view of how a candidate thinks and processes information whilst collaborating, and this wasn’t happening with our current setup. We worked with the Talent Acquisition team to tweak this interview step; thereby maintaining the best possible candidate experience whilst also achieving better outcomes for the hiring team.
YY: In our weekly design meeting, we ideated on different ways to improve on assessing the candidate based on the criteria Kelly just mentioned. There were a bunch of ideas that excited us, from asking the candidate to walk through one of their Figma files, to a design jamming session, to exchanging critiques on each other’s work.
YY: The team gravitated towards the idea of running a critique session and pairing this with a form of ideation. Design critiques (or design crits as we like to call them) are such an established part of our culture in the Gousto Product Design team that it felt natural to extend this out to the interview process and understand how the candidate fits in. We also wanted to inject some playfulness and creativity into the session, which is where we thought ideation could play a part.
KB: A group critique and ideation format also had the potential to take away the unnecessary pressure that came with an interactive whiteboard task. It promoted more of a conversation between the interviewer and the candidate. We felt this was important because we’d then get to see a truer side to the candidate and how they gel with our team.
How did you shape this new step of the interview process?
YY: Once we had a solid plan of action the team were happy with, Kelly and I started to bring it to life. I took on shaping the critique part of the session whilst Kelly planned out the ideation. We crafted this all within Figma as that’s our go-to tool.
To keep the critique impartial for both parties, we wanted to avoid using anything Gousto-related and instead dropped in a couple of common flows from a well known product. The critique should feel more like a conversation between everyone than an interviewer-interviewee dynamic, so it was made clear that everyone in the session should participate. There were coloured post it notes for strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, as well as (fictitious) data points underneath a few of the screens to probe on the candidate’s level of product thinking.
KB: The other part of our assessment criteria was to understand the candidate’s ability to collaborate and facilitate. Asking the candidate to run an ideation session would help demonstrate these skills whilst still flexing their creativity muscles. To avoid the entire session from feeling disconnected, we made the ideation section relate to the Spotify critique. Candidates were asked to pick a problem they’d identified in the critique, create a problem statement and run an ideation session with the interviewers.
We were deliberately hands-off at this stage to allow the candidate to have free reign on how to run the ideation effectively. Product designers at any level in Gousto often run workshops as part of their day-to-day, so it was important to understand if the candidate felt comfortable with this.
So, how did it go?
JM: Given that I was slightly nervous (and by slightly, I mean incredibly) before the interview and had little prior experience with design challenges, the critique format was a SUPER pleasant and relieving surprise!
I think formality and the ability to test a candidate on the spot are helpful for any company to assess how they handle pressure and think on their feet. But that formality can stifle creativity, especially if you have to ideate on the company’s product (which I wouldn’t advocate for). Critiquing something unrelated to Gousto and ideating with the interviewers allowed me to accurately demonstrate what I’m like to work with. It let me detach from the fact that it was an interview and frame it like I was jamming on an idea with coworkers.
YY: I was buzzing to try out this new design task format! I enjoyed being able to work collaboratively with candidates and treat them as team members. It was also really interesting to see the huge diversity of great ideas people came up with. Most importantly, it was an accurate reflection of what a day in the life of a product designer looks like at Gousto.
KB: The vibe felt relaxed yet engaged, which like YuXin has mentioned is typical of the environment we work in amidst other product designers at Gousto. It was important to get that across, and was an added bonus to hear candidates say they genuinely had fun too. You never usually hear the word ‘fun’ and ‘interview’ in the same sentence!
What did you learn from the process?
JM: In hindsight, the entire process showed me the true Gousto. Culture was one of my highest priorities when moving jobs. During interviews, companies sometimes talk the talk but don’t walk the walk, specifically when it comes to culture. They only show their true colours once you’ve accepted the offer.
However, the design critique (and the whole interview process overall) gave me insight into what working at Gousto would be like. I learnt about the supportive design culture they embody, which emphasises learning over failure and encourages a team dynamic (as opposed to working in silos, or worse, having to compete against each other). It let me evaluate if Gousto was the right fit for me (which is easy to forget as a candidate), and I’m happy to say the expectations set that day definitely match the reality of working here!
YY: As someone with relatively little experience as an interviewer, I have to admit I was initially apprehensive about how it’d go. Once we’d rehearsed the new format between ourselves and started running interviews, the whole process went really smoothly. Like anything else we do (such as releasing a new product feature!), it’s important to rehearse and test out a new process or format to refine this, before launching it.
KB: My number one learning from innovating on the interview process is that making a candidate feel relaxed and at ease definitely gets more out of them. The more the conversation flowed between the group, the easier it was to understand how the candidate thinks and collaborates. This was especially important for this part of the interview process, and something we’re taking forward for future hires, so watch this space.
