Thanks Jason for the picture!

So I mentor and give out loads of advice to designers to attain more success in their job hunts. A pattern I’ve noticed for the entirety of 2023 was that the pitfall for most designers, from junior to senior, is passing the white-boarding test.

Happy new year, by the way.

First things first: Failing a whiteboarding test isn’t the end of the world. It’s doesn’t always mean that you’re not good enough.

The only time I failed a whiteboard was when a hiring team didn’t know how whiteboarding was supposed to be done. True story, no salt.

But that being said, I find a lot of designers just sort of following a checklist of tasks to complete instead of meeting the hiring manager’s checklist of techniques we’re looking out for.

I thought enough UX influencers had created a lot of guides on what to look out for and how to be successful at whiteboarding, but after going through these resources myself, I thought, “Yeah, this ain’t it.” and decided to write an article with some information they missed out.

This article will reveal how I approach white-boarding with a >90% passing rate (I literally only failed once), and my attempt at explaining the context of what hiring managers are looking out for when white-boarding.

Understanding why whiteboarding is a thing

Whiteboarding is one of the most stressful events in a hiring process, hands down. It has a lot of uncertainty, it’s a lot of ‘winging’, and even if you have experience facilitating prior, it doesn’t always mean you get the ideal results that will move you to the next round because you’re dependent on the participation of the hiring team.

Due to the amount of variables, it’s really random, and you praying that your hiring team isn’t in a bad mood when they’re doing the session with you is the…