Interviewing Tips to Help You Land Your Dream Design Job

We’ve all experienced the anxiety that comes with waiting not-so-patiently for the phone to ring, or email to arrive, to find out if you got an offer for your dream Design job. So many factors determine whether or not you get an offer to join the team. Your skill set, work background, seniority, and work style all play a part in the evaluation process.

How you present yourself during the interview process itself, however, is one part of the process that far too many take for granted and approach without appropriate preparation. Many talented Designers end up sabotaging their chances at getting an offer as a result of how they present themselves and their work during interviews. By doing some work to prepare yourself for interviewing with a company, and following a few easy tips, you can dramatically improve your chances at landing that dream job.

The Initial Phone Screen

Hiring managers or recruiters will almost always conduct an initial phone screen with a candidate after reviewing their resume and portfolio. Making it this far is an important step. You have your foot in the door and have impressed someone enough for them to take the time to talk to you. Use this chance to show them your interest in the position and to express why you would be a good fit for the role.

• Do your homework: Learn about the company before you get on the phone. It’s amazing how few people do this, and expect the interviewer to spend precious time during the phone screen explaining what the company does. Understand their industry, products, differentiators, and history. Review the job description several times to make sure that the expectations for the role match your desired position.
• Be specific and succinct: Be able to explain to the interviewer where you’ve been and what you’re looking for next in a succinct, clear, and coherent way. Many people spend far too long talking through every detail of their experience, diluting their message and leaving the interviewer without any clear take-aways. Be as specific as possible to make sure your main message is received.
• Express your interest: Tell the interviewer why you’re excited about joining their company. Express how you can amplify the existing team while also learning from them. If you come across as being lukewarm about the position, the interviewer won’t be as excited about you and will be less likely to push you through to the next step.
• Do not bash your current job or team: Almost every phone screen will include the question “Why do you want to leave your current job?” Be truthful, but also be respectful. If you bash your current manager, team, or company, instead of focusing on what environment you’re looking to move into, it’s going to make the interviewer feel uncomfortable and question your ability to work well with others.
• Ask good questions: Use the phone screen to help inform whether or not you’re interested in the company and the position. Ask specific questions that are important to you. For example, instead of asking “do you like it there?”, ask “What about the culture of the company keeps you coming back every day?”

The Portfolio Review

Putting together a portfolio of past work is a critical part of the process. It will often make or break your chances at even talking to the company you’re interested in (Ian Fenn, our friends at Salesforce UX, and many others, have written and talked about this in-depth). Once you’ve captured the company’s interest, however, you will be asked to present your portfolio to the team. How you do so is very important.

• Start with one project to go through in-depth: Show the interviewer a project that best represents your past experience and that also shows what you want to be doing going forward. Going in-depth on a project helps the interviewer understand the details that are needed to evaluate your experience. Casually breezing through too many projects leaves the interviewer without any substance to evaluate.
• Focus on your contributions: A lot of candidates spend significant time talking about the background of projects that they’ve worked on before getting into their role on the project. Giving some context is great, but your contributions matter the most. State clearly what you specifically contributed to the project, versus what other team members contributed. If you worked on a team with other designers (which is a good thing!), it’s even more important to clearly state your role so the interviewer can get a sense of where your skills might fit within the team.
• Tell a story: Emphasize the problems you solved, what tactics you used to solve those problems, and how you know the efforts were successful. The decisions you had to make are just as, if not moreso, important than the end result. Talk about what didn’t work, what you would do differently, and what you’re most proud of.
• Give details about your process: Many portfolio presentations go something like this: “I brainstormed ideas, did some user research, collaborated with the team, iterated on ideas, and this was the final design.” While it’s good to show the interviewer your process, you also have to give details about what you did for each of those steps. Talk about the decisions and tradeoffs you had to make. Talk about how you approached each step, and why you felt it was important to do. Show the value each step in the process brought to the end result.
• Find something in the design to highlight: One of the best ways to show how you work as a designer is to highlight how you solved a very specific design challenge. Take a specific interaction you worked on, and show it, don’t just talk about it. Walk through how you solved a particularly tricky navigation problem. Talk about how you evolved your existing style in order to better visualize the information hierarchy on a page. Showing details like this will help the interviewer understand your attention to detail and how you execute on difficult design problems.

Design Exercises

It’s becoming more and more common for companies to ask Designers to complete a design exercise as part of the interview process. Design exercises help companies evaluate specific skills that might not be clearly present from the candidate’s portfolio or to see first-hand how candidates interact with the team. While there’s never a right or wrong answer to these exercises, how you share your work is important.

• Show your thought process: Before presenting your solution to the exercise, talk about how you approached the problem. Identify any gaps in the problem statement and how you iterated on your ideas to reach the solution. Don’t just jump to the final deliverable.
• Engage with the interviewers: Ask questions about the problem statement, and ideally collaborate with the team on refining the solution during the interview. Part of the evaluation process with design exercises is seeing how you work with the team on problems. If you don’t ask for any help or for any feedback, it may imply that you wouldn’t think to work with the team on solving problems.
• Explain the pros and cons of your solution: No solution is ever perfect, particularly for design exercises. Being able to critique your own work is an important skill that is good to show the interviewers.
• Talk about how you would approach the problem in “real life”: Design exercises are artificial and limited. Call out what you would do differently if presented the problem on the team, and how those other steps would help improve the result.

General Tips

Finally, there are a few best practices that you should follow throughout every interaction you have with a company.

• Be engaging and professional: When speaking to the interviewers, be professional in how you present yourself. Show that you’re confident in your abilities through your words and actions. Be aware that how you interact with the interviewers, even through your body language, can either support or detract from your message.
• Be yourself: While you should have a professional demeanor as mentioned above, be sure to show your personality and style to your interviewers. Joining a company isn’t just about your skills, but also about how you fit in with the team. “Culture fit” is an often overused and vague term, but in reality it comes down to this question that every interviewer asks themselves: “Do I see myself being able to work well with this person?”
• Be honest: Don’t overstate your experience, be truthful about where you are in your career and where your strengths and weaknesses lie. It’s better to be up-front than to surprise the team later on.

Interviewing for a Design position doesn’t have to be intimidating. It can actually be fun, as long as you’re prepared to share with the company what makes you special and what makes you a good addition to the team. Go into the process confident and remember that interviews aren’t a one-way street. You need to make sure that you find a company that meets your expectations and values, and where you’ll be happy to go to work every day.

If you’re currently looking for a Design position, no matter what your specific area of expertise (Visual/UI Design, UX, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Usability, etc.), we’d love to talk to you. Submit your resume and portfolio to RelateIQ Designer Catriona Cornett (catriona@relateiq.com) and we’ll be in touch!