Member-only story
You Should be Honored to Design for Us
On a long enough timeline as a UX designer, it is inevitable you will move up the rank structure, perhaps manage a few people or more and eventually assume the role of a hiring manager. You will eventually be the person on the other side of the interview table, wielding the power to hire or reject potential candidates. You might even design your own hiring process and construct the hoops candidates must jump through in order to work on your team. All of that happened to me.
I am old enough now to have been in management, off and on, for many years. Most positions I have held over the years inevitably saw me move into one of those hiring and firing positions. At some point, I began to change. Perhaps it was the power and like some sort of golem from a J.R.R. Tolkien novel I started to morph. At some point, I think I had forgotten what it was like to be the candidate.
This transition was subtle but occurred during a period where I was integral in building a rather large UX team of thirty plus individuals. I had become one of the primary hiring managers and fielded a dozen resumes or more on a weekly basis. I started to see people less as humans and more as resumes and portfolio sites. My primary objective became developing a system of weeding candidates out as quickly as I could.
We were going through a hiring frenzy and I would inwardly groan as each new submission landed in my inbox. Each submission equated to at least an hour of my time between reviewing the candidate and scheduling the phone screen. Though I used a checklist and systematic means of evaluating each candidate, I would often find myself accepting or rejecting a candidate for the most arbitrary of reasons. There is little doubt I rejected perfectly qualified candidates during this period. But HR wasn’t my full-time job and I still had projects to oversee and push along.
When conducting the in-person interviews, I was rarely well-prepared given the number of applicants I was screening and scheduling. By the time they were scheduled and onsite, I would most likely have forgotten much of what I had reviewed when screening them and thus would know very little about them. Conversely, I would expect them to know about my organization. I would expect them to ask questions about my organization and the team.
