Snappy introduction about myself: I’m presently a Senior UX Designer working at Jellyfish.com – I’m based in London and I like to think I’m fairly active in communities regarding design, technology, crypto, and entrepreneurship.

Throughout my career, I interviewed at various big companies like Facebook, Shazam (Apple), Revolut, Ticketmaster (Live Nation Entertainment), IBM, Sky UK, Tata Group, Infosys, McKinsey and many more.

I have no shame in saying that during my job hunting I failed several interviews. I have also managed to land some amazing offers. In fact, in one of my previous articles, I talked about Why you should keep interviewing even if you love your current job.

Going back to the point of failing interviews: Let me just say that failing is okay. There is nothing wrong with failing. Failing helped me to understand where and how I could improve. It helped me to reach the next level. And eventually, it helped me grow as both a designer and a communicator.

I always like to refer back to a quote I heard in a podcast a long time ago:

The world ain’t no sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place. And I don’t care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. I don’t care how strong you are. Cause it is not about strength. It is not about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. Now, if you know what you are worth, then go out and get what you are worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hits and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you wanna be because of somebody else.

Similarly, in the work field, we sometimes tend to point fingers and justify our failings with excuses. Instead, I realised that the best way to overcome these situations is to acknowledge that you failed. Then, the following logical step would be to understand why you failed and how to avoid it in the future. Everyone fails. Every company fails to some extent. But great individuals and great companies are extremely good at learning from their errors.

I’ll give you an example. What Google does when a project gets shut down or fails is a Post-mortem document. Basically, every single person involved in that project has to compile a document describing, in their view, what went wrong and what caused the failure of the project. All in very high details. All these documents then get merged together into a Post-mortem file and this file will contribute to the global Google knowledge repository. This is done in order to avoid that other people inside the organisation will make the same mistakes. Failing is not a bad thing – many many people will learn from it.

But now, more specifically, let’s see how and why I failed some of these interviews and what I learnt and applied in those that were successful.

1. UX-up your application – aka Quality over Quantity

The number of applications I submitted while I was still in Uni it’s embarrassing. Same scenario when I felt frustrated in past jobs and I was looking for a quick discharge of negative emotions. We’ve all been there! Plus let’s be honest, the ‘Easy Apply’ feature of LinkedIn doesn’t help at all. All I had to do was searching for UX Designer roles based in London, upload my CV, link my portfolio and done. You could literally apply to dozens of companies per day. As long as the demand for your role was there. And believe me when I say that the talent market was and still is on the hunt for UX Designers. As of today, my LinkedIn inbox is still full of recruiters.

But even though you have the possibility to apply to so many companies, you should not. I slowly realised that the less effort I was putting into drafting my application, the less appealing the company became to me.

On the other hand, the more time I was spending in designing my application for a specific company the more intrigued I was. And yes, I used the word designing on purpose. Because applying to a job became something fun and stimulating to do. A UX process which I started enjoying a lot.

Why am I talking about the UX process while applying for a job? As a UX designer I conduct research, I try to understand users and business needs, I look at pain points in the experience and what instead is working great. All of this is in an attempt to inform my decision making and design thinking. While applying to jobs I started undertaking a very similar process: I was doing researches about the companies, understanding whether or not their values were resonating with mines, looking at what were the problems and trying to find possible solutions. These helped me a lot to heavily personalise my applications, give them a bigger voice, and show some of the companies why I was really interested in pursuing a career with them.

Don’t be scared of undertaking longer application processes. When applying to companies which you are really passionate about, the journey will be fun, stimulating and often will have better outcomes.

2. Be yourself, but the awesome version of it

What do I mean by that is try not to be someone else, or at least someone you don’t like. You should always be yourself when interviewing for a company. At the end of the day, they are interviewing you as much as you are interviewing them.

Knowing whether or not that company is the right fit for you will define whether or not you will stay longer term there. And it is extremely hard to figure that out if you go to the interview not acting as yourself but as the person you think they will like.

My advice is, be the awesome version of yourself. Meaning, try to act like the person you aspire to be. Act the same way you did that time (maybe at work or maybe on a normal day at home) when something great happened and you felt awesome. If the interview goes well, that will define what the company is expecting of you. Which means you will work towards becoming a better version of yourself. It’s going to be a win-win scenario.

3. Don’t promote immediate solutions

This is especially valuable for design exercises and creative interview questions. The interviewer doesn’t want to see if you know the right answer. Some of the time there isn’t even a right answer.

There is though a right approach. You must approach the question by wearing your thinker hat. Ask questions, investigate the context of what has been asked, and try not to jump to solutions.

Somebody once asked me: How could you design the interface of an elevator for a building that has 100 floors?

The right approach is not to jump into fancy solutions leveraging smart technologies or crazy sketching. It is instead to investigate the question further. How many elevators are there? What kind of building is it? Residential? Offices? Hospitality? A mix of all of them?

Approaching the question with further questions will help you define the problem space better and come up with more tailored solutions.

4. The user-first approach can and should be challenged

Also known as “Thinking inside the box”. Meaning, how you can be creative by embracing constraints. I wrote an entire article about it.

Similar to the above point, and especially true for in-house companies, interviewers want to see if you have an understanding of the business side as well. Are you someone who puts always the user first? Or are you someone that embraces the limitations that might get thrown your way and nonetheless is able to find an optimal solution for the final user?

5. Have relevant work in your portfolio

This might sound like a silly one. Especially because most companies (in-house) clearly state that there is no need for a portfolio project that covers the domain area. Which is to a certain extent true.

However, my suggestion is to try to find a bridge between their products and your portfolio projects. Whether it is domain-related or simply a challenge you overcame that could be applied to several projects. I often found that when there is an item that resonates with my interviewer, people become much more engaged in the conversation and interested in the outcome of the project.

6. What went wrong is often more interesting than what went right

Do not pretend that everything in the project went as planned. If that is the case, chances are that the project was not much of a challenge. People want to see how you face problems, how you deal with uncomfortable situations, and how you overcome them.

Try to use the PROBLEM – HYPOTHESIS – CONCLUSION cycle.

You start by defining a problem, you formulate your hypothesis, and you draft your conclusion through a design solution. Now maybe the solution wasn’t good enough. Or maybe you did user testing and you identified other problems. Which brought you then to start the cycle again. Define the narrative and take the interviewer through the lifecycle of the project. Do not do use exclusively on the good parts.

This can be applied to anything related to your portfolio project. Not just the design outputs. Try to identify which problems you faced during the length of that project (a challenging client, demanding stakeholders, un-defined team structure, etc), formulate a hypothesis on what might have caused them and how to fix them, and then try to define what you would have done differently.

What have you learned from the project? What were the main takeaways you could apply to any other piece of work?