Interviewing UX: Designing a Design Team’s Hiring Process
Aaron VanSchyndel
At Yammer, we put a lot of time and care into our hiring process. Everything from our design team’s website to our interview questions has been thought out, tested, and iterated on. When you’re trying to hire designers (or anyone for that matter) in a competitive market like San Francisco, it helps to have your shit together.
A typical hiring process looks something like this:
Your post a generic job description, get some candidates, and then have to figure out if they match up.
At Yammer, we decided to work backwards:
We started by asking ourselves “Who is the right person?” and tailored our entire hiring process off of that. This allows us to focus much more on skills, and not just titles.
To start, we got our design team in the room, and did a brainstorming exercise to find out what qualities would make a successful designer. Things like: had they shipped their designs, could they articulate and defend their design decisions, did they value analytics? All things that we really care about and would want in a potential hire.
After that, we used what we came up with like a script to generate specific interviews and design exercises to look for those things. Because, let’s face it, generic interview questions suck. I’m talking the “What do you think is your greatest weakness?” kind. Most of these are only determining if the candidate is good at interviewing or not. We used the skills our team outlined to craft deliberate questions. We also give individual team members specific skills to focus on and ask questions about. This prevents unnecessary overlap throughout the day of interviews.
Our final step was to write the job description. On most job boards, if you’ve seen one designer job post, you’ve seen them all. I strongly suspect that most UX job descriptions are derived from an original set of five requirements that have just been copy-and-pasted since the beginning of time. We try to be more deliberate than that. We asked ourselves, “If I was this type of designer, what would I be looking for?”
It’s important to think through your hiring process from start to finish. You want each step to make you more certain that a candidate is the right person for the job. It’s as much a user experience problem as anything else.
Aaron VanSchyndel is a UX Designer at Yammer. His GoPro has been to the peaks of Tahoe, the depths of the Sacramento River, and the ice of the San Francisco Bay Area Curling Club.
