It took me 3 months to land my next role as a Senior Product Designer. Yet for the companies I would work for and got offers from, it took them only 2 weeks to come to a decision and give me an offer.

From my previous article about how UX recruitment processes are broken, I’ve now come back to continue venting as a senior level professional and an ex-hiring manager.

Rejections, rejections, and more rejections…

Remember a time when you got rejected because of you messed up at a whiteboarding test? Or got rejected because your take-home assignment of 3 hours didn’t show deep-level UX thinking?

Here’s some common scenarios you may face:

• Your whiteboarding session was poorly-facilitated and caused you to perform poorly.
• Your take-home assignment usually will not take 3–4 hours, because you also needed to complete a presentation for it.
• Your test assignment ended up being some vague UI improvement of a company’s product, with little room for solid UX or product inputs.

With all this issues in mind, companies are still enforcing assignments on designers, despite not really knowing how to hire them right.

The amount of interviews we still have to sit through and conduct is a joke.

I really thought the more I leveled up as a senior, the less hiring b*llsh*t I’ll have to go through when I look for new work.

While this still holds true, the benefits of interviewing as a senior is now almost marginal compared to being a junior or a mid-level designer.

Why is this phenomenon happening?

In this article we explore my opinion of things. Buckle up, it’s a long read.

The history lesson you should know

According to LinkedIn, there are more than 500,000* UX designers in the field today. Back in 2015, the number was less than 50,000* when you search the term “UX Designer”.

*This is based on my memory of the past LinkedIn search results and the actual current. Don’t quote me on this.

There was a shortage of designers back in the day, as not enough people knew about User Experience and not enough companies wanted to invest in design outside of marketing.

However, success stories from Google, Apple and other design-focused product companies proved the value of this industry. Demand was then created for the role, but the lack of knowledge sharing surrounding the space made producing and hiring talents difficult.

Universities tried to fill that gap with degrees and minors on Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction. Companies, unfortunately, couldn’t wait 4 years for a junior talent to graduate and join the field.

And so, bootcamps came by to fill that gap. We were producing juniors in a rapid rate like never before, equipping them with ONLY THE BASICS to venture out into this new, open-world career adventure where only the best and brightest survives.

Bootcamps don’t teach their graduates the level of critical thinking needed to succeed in the industry today. There’s simply no time for that.

In half a decade, we grew 10 times in number. In that process, I would also argue we outgrew our own professional demand.

The result: take-home assignments becoming a gatekeeping tool in UX hiring, adding more lead time to close design roles and creating loopholes where companies can take advantage of designers, especially juniors.

My struggles as a hiring manager

With the influx of designers, you would think hiring would be a breeze. There was no need to poach a designer from another company and there’s always resumes to review and interviews to schedule.

However, most of the resumes I got were from bootcamp graduates desperately trying to be hired. Unfortunately for the both of us, they neither have the experience or the portfolio to warrant an interview for the senior-level position I posted.

More than 90% of the resumes I got follow the above process. With a huff, I’ve decided to leave the resume filtering to HR.

Why do junior bootcamp graduates apply for senior design positions? No, your experience in a non-design, non-tech role doesn’t automatically qualify you as senior. Neither does your age.

No one tells bootcamp graduates that they are not work-ready.

I’ve reviewed the resumes and portfolios of 100+ bootcamp applicants for junior roles and the main reason for someone to get rejected is because their work is simply not good enough.

It’s almost never due to lack of formal work experience or formal design education. When you get rejected from just your resume application, it means there’s a gap between your technical skill set and the industry’s expectations.

Bootcamps make a lot of promises for employment and sell you the success stories of others. That doesn’t mean the same positive result will apply to you by default.

If you constantly get rejected at the application stage, it means your work isn’t good enough yet for actual employment.

Many candidates don’t seek enough feedback from others.

The first principle of Dale Carnegie’s famous book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” is to not criticize, condemn, or complain.

Giving a rejection is already a delicate process to handle; so adding unwarranted, negative feedback to a candidate’s rejection is not something a hiring manager will instinctively do.

If you want constructive feedback, you need to ask for it and ask it from multiple sources. It’s not sustainable to only rely on companies that rejected you for suggestions to improve.

Good candidates are able to reflect upon their rejections and shortcomings to make upgrades to their profile for when they apply next.

This is the life-cycle of hiring and closing roles; the literal process of natural selection.

“You’re not giving me a take-home assignment?”, gasped a designer I was interviewing. They’ve already completed a portfolio review, so I explained that I didn’t think an interview assignment would be useful in the process, although there would be a small task for them to complete as a final step.

They nodded, solemn. Of course, the task wasn’t going to be too easy, but it was small.

👉 The TaskMy team picked out a collaboration board, and set up a template for candidates to add post-its about themselves. Their task was to just fill up the board with some post-its and information about themselves, to visually tell us about their working style and hobbies.

Fun, right?

👉 The Catch
It was a fun task; if you didn’t consider the fact that the tool was like Miro or Figjam, but with -999 usability and no tutorials available online. With this task, we could determine the culture fit, and the candidates’ ability to adapt to the unknown.

👉 The Result
The candidates we hired from the above process were employees we did not regret hiring. The company was big on innovation, so yes, this process is very unorthodox and was customised to that said company.

From a hiring manager standpoint, there are easy and creative ways to hire without any interview assignments. The goal is not just to hire the best talent, but to also reduce lead time and hiring costs so you’ll have more budget for culture items that will eventually lead to attracting the best talent to apply.

A good hiring manager will sit down with HR to figure this out.

My experience applying as a senior professional

It’s 2022, remote work is still the rage. Remote hiring has taken over by necessity. On-site interviews and tests almost don’t exist anymore.

As a designer who only does remote work now, this is the time to be alive.

During my first batch of interviews, I noticed a little trend.

Portfolio reviews and whiteboarding assignments were the preferred hiring method of companies with mature design leadership.

It felt great to not have to touch a single take-home assignment. I get more time to interview at more companies, more time to relax, and generally just more time for my own mental well-being.

Despite that, this doesn’t make the improvements perfect.

No assignments, more interviews?

For some companies, no take-home assignments means more interviews.
A lot more. I’ve had to do 6 interviews for one company, only to get rejected at the end because another candidate can start sooner.

Whiteboarding, except companies don’t know how to whiteboard.

With some companies, I got a whiteboarding test that was too vague, or so badly facilitated that there’s no way someone can perform. One company admitted to me that they have rejected 10+ senior designers at the whiteboarding test. At that number, I wonder who’s the problem.

There’s a literal answer key online for any hiring process.

UX influencers have been shedding some light on how they tackle take-home assignments and whiteboarding tests. Especially with take-homes, the solution framework used to complete assignments can be literally copied, so I do question if these processes are actually useful to determine if one designer is better suited for the job than another.

Despite this, I acknowledge that there has been significant improvements in the UX hiring processes. I’ll take a whiteboarding session over a take-home any day.

We’re moving to the right direction slowly

Companies that ask for a portfolio review and a whiteboarding assignment from designers immediately get a green flag from me.

Here’s why:

🍏 Sign of design maturity at the company

Take-home assignments suck and have been the bud of many complaints from UX designers. A company that has evolved from this cumbersome process shows signs of maturity in their design leadership.

🍏Sign of a healthy work culture

Companies that do portfolio reviews are usually companies that successfully pick out designers who do good work and can be trusted. Trust is an important ingredient in many remote product teams; if you can’t trust someone’s portfolio, how are you going to trust them to do the work hundreds of miles away?

🍏 Sign of a good Human Resource team

Any company that is flexible and able to adapt their processes while remaining fair signals a strong People & Culture team. Bad HR is one of my instant deal breakers when interviewing, as the last thing I want preventing me from doing my best work and hiring the best team is Human Resource bureaucracy.

Even if a company assigns you a take-home, you can still advocate against it and ask for an alternative interviewing process. Above you saw evidence of a successful negotiation, below you’ll find an example of how I negotiate.

Getting your ideal interviewing process is possible, you just have to try.

A senior designer’s framework to manage today’s expectations

At this point, I have a framework when applying and interviewing.

✨ Always be positive

Got an interview scheduled? Made it to the final stage? Did well on one part of your recruitment process?

Congratulate yourself. Too often we focus on the end result rather than the process of interviewing. Every part of the process is a learning experience, so being a good sport about it will help you in the long run.

✨ Don’t be afraid to reject companies

I pull out of applications when I am given badly written assignments. I may give companies I really like a chance, but never be so desperate that you ignore red flags and become a slave to design assignments. It’s not worth it.

✨ Apply intentionally

Just like how I avoid companies that don’t hire intentionally, I make a conscious practice to apply intentionally. No mass applications, no blind applications, no stress-testing my resume.

I apply to companies that I like and roles that I am genuinely interested in. When you do things with intention, you live with yourself better and get over rejection faster.

What is the next trend with UX hiring?

With the explosion of talents and the continual growth of the industry, the expectations of UX designers, particularly senior-level professionals, aren’t going to budge.

Soon enough, how pleasant a company’s hiring process is will be a determining factor for top talents when they choose where to work next.

In this generation where entrepreneurship is strife, if we cannot find the ideal work environment out there, we’ll be sure to create one ourselves.