Stand out from the crowd: Cracking the design interview
A 5-step framework to pass design interviews and land a job in product design.
Until now, I’ve written agnostic of current events. I want to acknowledge that it’s been an unusual and difficult past few months for every function in tech. If you’ve been affected by layoffs, hang in there and take care of yourself first.
For those of you finding yourself on the job market, the pickings might be feeling pretty lean. With more qualified applicants looking, there’s pressure to stand out from the crowd. While I’m on the topic of core design skills, I’ll share my most popular mentorship framework: how to pass design interviews and land a job.
Step 1: Shift your mindset from “collecting” to “matching”
The purpose of interviewing isn’t to “collect” offers from every company.
The performance-focused rhetoric in tech makes it too easy to think about getting offers as a game of collectibles. A job is not a rare rock and your career is not a rare rock collection. Some people do land offers after every interview. Many people don’t, and that’s fine.
The purpose of interviewing is to find an employer that meets your career goals and life needs.
Interviewing is a grueling process that culminates in making a big decision about your career. This second mindset will help you to conserve stamina so that you can 1) last through interviews and 2) start afresh in your next role. Here are some techniques to start shifting your mindset:
At the end of your interview process, thank your recruiter for something that you gained → Thank you for having me onsite, I had a great time touring your office.
Stop your interview process early if the role doesn’t fit what you’re looking for → Thanks for considering me for this role. I’ve decided to take a different direction in my job search.
If a process doesn’t work out, remind yourself it’s about matching, not collecting → I really like what Company X is building, but it’s not a match right now
Step 2: Figure out what you’re looking for
Now that your mindset is set on finding a job that meets your career goals and life needs, do you know what that job looks like? Knowing what you’re looking for is the best way to come off as a confident candidate, something employers love to see. Plus, you have to build your side of the road to make job hunting a two-way street.
For your next employer, consider these things:
What do you want to accomplish?
How will you spend your day-to-day?
What kind of environment are you a part of?
Step 3: Package yourself as a product
Let’s apply our design thinking expertise to interviewing. If we can see a potential employer as a potential user, that makes us the product that solves a potential employer’s needs. At minimum, employers expect designers to exhibit some base level of the table-stakes, core design skills which I’ve laid out as visual design, design decision making, and storytelling.
Minimum affords you some recognition, but hardly helps you stand out. Luckily, employers tell you exactly what will fulfill their needs via a job description. To stand out, you want to demonstrate how you uniquely fulfill a potential employer’s needs. Here’s an exercise to discover your unique skill offerings:
Name your top 5 strengths
Name the 3 most important skills your ideal employer is looking for
Select 3 strengths that are complementary to the 3 skills your ideal employer is looking for
Step 4: Market your candidate brand
You are in control of how you display yourself. It’s possible to present yourself in the “ideal” way to land an offer, but that makes job hunting a one-way street to appease an employer. You also risk losing an offer by inadvertently exposing inconsistency, which is jarring and easy to spot.
The output of steps 2 and 3, your employer criteria and employer-complementary skill set, is your candidate brand. Use every opportunity, from your resume and portfolio to 1:1 conversations, to deliver a consistent message of what kind of candidate you are. This way, you’re clearly communicating the best version of yourself to hiring teams. Consider these manifestations:
A recruiter instinctively knows you’re a designer from how you utilize hierarchy and layout on your resumé
A hiring manager can evaluate your ability to make design decisions based on the methods you feature in your portfolio case studies
Your cross functional partners can get a sense for what you will and won’t advocate for based on your behavioral interviews
Step 5: Practice and iterate
Even if the idea isn’t to land every offer, it’s worth self-reflecting on each interview to understand how you can present a better version of yourself. Interviewing is a muscle. It takes practice to unstick yourself in a whiteboard challenge, or succinctly describe a time you recovered from failure.
Organizations aren’t obligated to give you interview feedback, but ask for it anyways. You can compare your self-reflection and the organization’s feedback to build intuition around how people perceive you. Then, you can adjust the factors that are within your control. For example, if creative problem solving is part of your candidate brand and you get feedback that your case studies lack complexity, you can control what you present and how you present it, but you can’t change your repertoire of experience. Here are some other common“diagnoses”:
Your application callback rate is low → For the roles you’re applying for, your portfolio doesn’t demonstrate the core skills at the level the employer is looking for
You’re not passing the recruiter call → There’s a gap between your experience and how you present yourself
You’re not passing a portfolio screen → You aren’t engaging the hiring team with a relevant story that displays relevant skill sets
You’re not passing a design challenge → You’re on-the-spot execution level isn’t matching up with the skill level you’ve display up until now
It’s tempting to dive into the interview process to feel security from any job offer. Taking even one hour to bang out your candidate brand in steps 2 and 3 will help increase your callback rate from roles you actually want to take. Don’t use preparation as a reason to never reach step 5, the actual interviews. The faster you start interviewing and refining your candidate brand, the closer you’ll get to matching with an opportunity that’s compatible with you.
Even now while the market is rough, there are so many jobs and opportunities. Standing out from the crowd is about leaning into your goals, skills, and interests. If you find yourself sinking into the crowd, reflect and lean into yourself more. Keep going—you got this.