This way, you’re sure they know what to do, and there won’t be any surprises. Prepare the task in advance and show it to the team You should show the task to the participants from the design team before the interview. Prepare the design team members for the task For example, if they understand the difference between a radio button to select component. During an interview with a junior designer, you can provide more information about the users because you want to understand if they know interaction design. During a whiteboard session with a senior designer, you will not give them much information about the users since this is the first question you expect them to ask. Your whiteboard exercise should reflect what you want to test The difficulty of the whiteboard session should reflect your goals. Remember that the task should not be related to the company’s product, so the candidate will not think they are helping solve a real problem for free. That’ll help you figure out what task you want to give the candidate. Write the task To write a test that fits your needs and what you want to test, you need to look at and study many whiteboard exercises. Preparing the interview Shape the whiteboard exercise In that section, I will outline what you need to do before, during, and after the whiteboard interview. These little details tell a lot about the candidate. Those who haven’t studied it will ask how to use it. If they say no, but the interview shows they know the tool well, they might have studied it. When the interview starts, you can ask the candidate: Send the candidate a link to the board 2–3 days in advance. I give you a simple example: In many cases, the interview is done remotely in Miro, Figjam, or another whiteboard tool. You can evaluate the initiative You can see how seriously the candidate takes preparation.
Does the team believe the candidate is a good fit?.Does the candidate have the ability to integrate quickly into the team?.How do they talk to the other team members? Does the candidate respect them?.Do they have good communication skills?Īnother soft skill you can evaluate is the candidate’s ability to fit into the team’s culture.How does the candidate react to the stress they feel during the task?.What do they do when they don’t understand the task?.When you do the task in real-time with the candidate, you can notice how they handle the situation. You can evaluate the candidate’s soft skills For me, this is the most critical thing. In contrast to take-home assignments, where candidates have to put in a lot of time, but the hiring manager doesn’t. What are the benefits of a whiteboard interview?Įveryone invests the same amount of time Putting the same amount of time as the candidate invest is important because it gives the candidate a sense of fairness. Product designers need to push their ideas to impact the product, and people without ownership won’t be able to do that. For example, you can see if the candidate takes ownership and leads the task. It allows you to test a candidate’s soft skills, which is more difficult to do in a regular interview. In addition, a whiteboard challenge is not only a technical interview. If you prepare a whiteboard interview well, you can see the candidate’s real skills since the candidate doesn’t know what the task will be.
If the candidate is prepared for a standard interview, they can overcome tricky questions since many questions are available online. What makes whiteboard interviews different? Using a collaboration task, we test the candidate’s design process, way of thinking, personality, and how they interact with the team. What is the goal of a Whiteboard interview? The idea is to give the candidate a product design task and see how they handle it. What Is a Whiteboard Interview?Ī whiteboard interview is a task that the candidate participates in with a few team members. That’s because it’s a big topic and I’d rather discuss it in another article. One point to mention, I don’t show examples of tasks in this article. Still, any designer at any level (junior, mid, senior) can benefit from reading it. I write this article for design managers and design leads who want to use this approach during the hiring process. It is called a whiteboard interview or whiteboard challenge, and many companies use it today to evaluate candidates’ skills. In this article, I will tell you what approach you can use to get a clearer idea about the candidate. Last week, I explained why taking home assignments in the hiring process is not a good idea.