Interview candidates with whiteboard sessions

Hiring a Designer is not easy. Their work is subjective, their skills span many areas, and can be hard to judge their work if the framing is not honest. Currently "Take-home tasks" are popular during the interview process, but whiteboard sessions may be underrated.

Status quo

The industry standard is that the hiring process starts by reviewing the candidates' application followed by a first chat between the candidate and and a recruiter. I already chapeau to the teams that have a designer do the first chat instead of the recruiter from HR (sorry, People Team). I do think the People team should be the last to have the call with the candidate, but more on the at in a dedicated rant (not yet published).

After the first impression, you move the candidate to the next phase. Most teams opt for the take-home task.

Take home task

The characteristic of a take-home task is that a certain "Design Challenge" is given to the candidate and over a couple of days they work on the task by themselves, creating a final product/presentation. The task is briefly checked by the company and then the candidate can present their task.

I see here following drawbacks:

Effort

It is a lot of effort to work on the task. Candidates sometimes spend more than 20 hours on a task. Yes, it shows dedication, yet there are probably more subtle signals to see a candidate's engagement.

Focus on results

When the candidate presents the case, most candidates focus on how they solved the Challenge. This is fine, we expect that they present their work to clients and peers in a solution-oriented way. But part of the goal is to understand how they got there.

Some companies have a strong cultural focus on results no matter the process to achieve those results.

High expectations

Sometimes interviewing peers are disappointed that the task is not as shiny as the candidate's portfolio. In this situation you not only did not learn anything about the candidate, but it feels like a step back. Those candidates rarely get an offer, despite them following the set time limit for the take-home task. The shiny design in their portfolio did not happen overnight, it happened over many many hard-working days and nights.

And the Benefits of take-home tasks:

Low effort

It is for sure less effort to hand over a task to the candidate, maybe answer a question or two, then sit back enjoy the presentation they give once the task is done, and say "thank you".

Standardised

Each candidate can get the same take-home task, so they all have the same chance to deliver a good solution and be solely judged on the solution.

Averaged performance

With a couple of days for the take-home task, the impact of a bad day or an unforeseeable event is much smaller and so volatility is less of a concern.

Whiteboard session

Whiteboard sessions are similar to how some engineering companies interview their candidates. Do not write any production-grade code, but explain how you would approach writing your code. Similarly, a whiteboard session for a Designer would be about dissecting a problem and structuring the approach but not visually designing the solution.

So in the context of the hiring process, I first look at the Portfolio to understand the visual strength of the candidate. Candidates that do not have a portfolio need to show a stronger Whiteboard session. After the portfolio I look at the CV, to filter out jumpers (people who switch companies every 12 months). Then I am already good to invite the candidate to an interview. I prefer the Whiteboard session as the second interview.

I run the whiteboard session the following way.

1. Explain that you do not do a take-home task early on and explain how you do the whiteboard session.
2. Use a tool that allows collaboration like Miro, FigJam etc. so that the candidate does not need to share their screen to reduce technical dependencies and the possibility that the candidates' hardware will fail.
3. Always have 2 interviewers in the whiteboard session, never go alone.
4. Base the design challenges for the whiteboard session on the mission statement of the company. They are most of the time very broad but give an interesting direction.
5. Keep the whiteboard session up to 45 minutes in a 60-minute call. It is quite draining on the candidate.

Some drawbacks of this whiteboard sessions:

Scratching the surface

Do not expect you to have a final product, a concept or all error cases discussed. For that, the session will be too short.

Nothing visual

You will see a lot of ugly scribbles, words in boxes and arrows. But you will not see any strong visuals. Again that is not enough time.

No presentation

Because of the time constrain and the fact that you sit together for the entire session, the candidate will not present anything, so you will not see how well the candidate can present their designs (this can be covered in another call where they walk you through some of their past projects)

Bad day

Everybody, from time to time, has a bad day. Because the candidate needs to perform in this session the impact of a bad day is more pronounced. It will negatively impact your outcome. Worse yet, when one of the interviewers gas a bad day. Then consider moving the session, to give the candidate a fair chance.

Benefits of whiteboard sessions:

Real problem solving

You will see quickly and clearly if and how the candidate solves a problem. Do they try to find research online? Do they ask a lot of questions? Do they jump right into wire-framing?

Interactive

Whiteboard sessions by their nature require a lot of interaction between the candidate and interviewer. So you will see how the candidate communicates, and how considerate or opinionated the candidate is. Making it easy to asses if the collaboration is (already) smooth or if a longer phase of adjustment is needed.

No "free work"

Some candidates think companies use take-home to get work done for free. With whiteboard sessions, this concern is neglect-able (except for Art Direction or copywriting).

For me changing my expectations of the whiteboard session made the experience much better. I join the whiteboard session actively ignoring the solution to the problem statement that we found as a team. This helps me be open to the ideas and approaches the candidate has. Only after the session I judge how the candidate approached the challenge, not how close it is to what we came up as a solution.

Conclusion

I see the whiteboard session a better approach for Product Design within a Product company. While the classic take-home task is more appropriate for agencies working with and presenting to clients.

For Designer in a Product company, it is more important to me that they can question the briefing right on the spot and in a less formal environment while for Product Designer in an agency storytelling and presentation skills are more important. So the take-home task is more what the day of a designer at an agency looks like and a white-board challenge is closer to how the day of a product designer as part of the product team will look like.