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Spotting the Fake Designer
The Folly of UX Interviews
I’ve got a funny story for you — funny in an ironic sort of way.
In speaking with several colleagues over the past year, the topic of moving positions has come up more than once. Perhaps it’s restlessness as a result of the pandemic. But more and more designers I know have begun to think about getting that next position.
As we talk, they lament the entire job-seeking process. They’ll have to update their resumes and their portfolios — a task that can easily last a month or longer. They speak of dreading the interview process they suppose they’ll have to go through — taking tests, presenting their work and so on. It all takes so much time they tell me.
At some point in that conversation (or another), I’ll ask a few questions about their own hiring process at their current place of employment. Most of these designers are in a position where they can at least partially design the hiring process for a new designer. Call me curious but I really do want to hear how other teams find the right candidates for their open roles.
Here’s the punchline. They all tell me the same thing or a close variation. They do a portfolio review, ask the candidate to walk through their work in the interview and some of them go so far as to test candidates. The process takes weeks or longer.
In case you don’t get the joke, I’ll expound on the irony here. I know a bunch of designers who, when looking for a new position, hate going through the very same process they use to hire candidates in their own organizations.
So, here we are — a bunch of user experience designers who can’t seem to figure out a better hiring experience than the one that’s been passed on to us through our own interview experiences. This is a little like the snake eating its own tail. It’s mimesis.
Here’s an analogy to consider. Let’s suppose you just hired into a company that you were once a customer of. They give you a design project for an application you use. You are tasked with a complete redesign and there is a part of the application or service design you have always hated and found problematic for users. Instead of changing that in your redesign effort, you simply design it the same way for the new release.
