Designing for design hiring: Reimagining Instacart’s take-home assignment for content design candidates
By David Zandman, Senior Content Designer
Historically, hiring someone required a bit of a leap of faith. You could talk to them, like them, be impressed with their resume — but still not know whether they could actually handle the day-to-day work for the new role. So-called ‘take-home’ assignments were designed to fix that. Still rare (or unnecessary) in many industries, they’re a standard step in the interview process for many roles in tech, from coding to writing to design.
Used primarily to evaluate a candidate’s craft, these assignments have become polarizing among the parties involved. Recruiters and hiring managers rely on the extra signal about a candidate’s skills and commitment to the role, but many candidates bemoan the extra work, especially when it feels less theoretical and more like free freelance.
This frustration is compounded by two factors. One, especially in highly competitive hiring environments, jobseekers may have multiple simultaneous assignments, which can take a mental toll. Two, creatives already field frequent requests for free work from family and friends. If every writer, photographer, and designer had a nickel for every time they’ve been asked to design a logo or shoot a portrait or draft an email for free…well, they’d have more than nothing, I guess.
Given this sentiment, we sought to reimagine and set the standard for a candidate-friendly, yet still strongly insightful, take-home assignment for everyone who interviews with our Content Design team.
Not starting from scratch helped
Our existing take-home assignment asked candidates to apply their skills directly to mock Instacart product screens. This was the first content design exercise created at the company, and it was created at a time when:
a) there were not yet content designers at the company
b) the company was going through a hyper-growth phase as online grocery shopping soared during the early pandemic and
c) due to a and b, its creator was stretched impossibly thin across multiple high-priority projects
An excerpt from the original exercise:
While this MVP certainly helped accomplish the goal of hiring a skilled content design team, it became clear that we needed to revisit the exercise when it came time to scale the team again. Having encountered a cleverly-designed exercise when interviewing for a previous role, one that created a proxy for the product’s core UX challenges, I volunteered to lead the redesign.
The goal of the exercise wasn’t changing, of course: it still needed to give us a good sense of how the candidate would approach problems relevant to our day-to-day work. But Instacart, with its four-sided marketplace (customers, shoppers, retailers, and brand advertisers) has a fairly unique operating model. To truly mirror the work our team does at Instacart, the proxy would also ideally need four players.
One day, in a much-needed epiphany, I realized the solution was right under my nose.
Instacar (the pun was too perfect) would be an app that allows car buyers to hire negotiators (or negotiator-drivers, to represent the dual roles at Instacart) to purchase and deliver cars on their behalf. Dealerships would stand in for stores, and car brands for CPG brand partners. Now that I had my proxy, it was time to translate the existing exercise into the Instacar product world. The exercise needed to give us a sense of how the candidate would work in both the customer and ‘shopper’ sides of the marketplace, as well as their understanding of various UX principles — but not take longer than 3 hours to complete.
As someone who works in product design but isn’t typically responsible for defining features, specs, or layouts, it was exciting to work those muscles of my brain as the Instacar app experience took shape in Figma. (As a side benefit, this project also gave me an opportunity to hone my Figma skills, especially when it came to working with the Instacart Design System.) There were times I even needed to quiet my inner PM, and allow for some suspension of disbelief as I conjured functionality out of thin air. But once I got going, the Instacart analogue came together quickly.
Once I had a draft of all sections, I shared it with the other members of the content design team for feedback. They gave some helpful input, and flagged a major component of the project that had escaped my attention: namely, creating an ‘answer key’ to help guide team members as they graded submitted exercises.
We developed a standardized rubric to ensure all graders were calibrated on what to pay attention to and assessed each candidate consistently.
As take-home assignments were returned, team members would rotate grading duty. Defining expectations forced me to examine the exercise in even greater detail, and also revealed areas for further development. For example, I realized I needed to throw in a few more ‘softball’ mistakes, rather than focusing so much on higher-level thinking.
Releasing Instacar into the wild
Finally, it was time to go live! Our recruiters began sharing the exercise with candidates who passed the initial screen, and we began getting submissions. This was by far the most exciting part of the project; most fascinating was how each candidate came back with such unique solutions. Many identified issues (and accompanying suggestions) that I’d completely overlooked or hadn’t intended, which was both humbling and thrilling. But fortunately, it did accomplish the goal of helping us gauge candidates’ strengths in product thinking, writing, and attention to detail. Beyond using the exercise to hire IC candidates, it’s also played a role in evaluating managers for the team, as we ask them to critique anonymized submissions.
While it may be a little anticlimactic, I unfortunately can’t share excerpts from the new exercise since it’s still actively used in our hiring process, and candidates have finite time to finish the assignment.
If you’re in the process of designing (or redesigning) your company’s content strategy/content design exercise, I hope this article has helped. Feel free to comment with your own experiences and learnings, or reach out with any questions!
And if you’re interested in joining the Content Design team at Instacart (and getting a peek at the Instacar exercise firsthand), we’re hiring! Check out current roles on the team.
