🕺🏿 👩‍🎤 🧘 How we select designers and conduct technical interviews 🤮 ☣️ 🧓🏼

There are three product design divisions in CityMobil: a rider, a driver, and back offices, and for each of them you need to select people who will solve their specific problems.

Who generally responds and whom we are looking for

The selection of candidates, even for some initial interviews, is a rather laborious process. It takes a lot of time for the heads of departments and employees of the recruitment service.

There are many responses, but very few are relevant. As a result, all candidates can be divided into several groups:

.Illustrators, artists, promotional / communication designers. There are two possible scenarios: either people don’t understand what they’re talking about, they just click on a vacancy and wait for them to be called for an interview - such candidates are immediately refused. Either these are people who understand that they are not quite suitable, but want to make a certain career shift towards product design. Everything is individual here: there are cool guys with whom you should at least talk to the future, and there are those who ask for a test, because they want to pump themselves in this way, and it is important for them to get feedback. In both cases, this is an excellent groundwork for the future: you can get to know a person, tell him about the company, give feedback and help to more structurally approach the process of transition to a new specialty.And also put him in reserve and chat in a year.

Junior / Interns. Completely novice specialists who graduated from the courses “become a UX designer in 3 weeks and get a job from% money_money%”. It happens differently with these guys, but basically it's not our profile. Such candidates most often have good groundwork in graphic design, but they absolutely don’t understand the specifics of working inside product teams with a lot of interaction and communication. If there is a good candidate, you should get to know him and put him in reserve too.

In the future, when we are ready to open programs for interns, we will be happy to take these guys and help them develop.

Middle.And here it’s already becoming more interesting, a variety of specialists fall into this category: from UI designers to designers who have already worked in grocery companies.

It is often difficult for a portfolio, cover letter, and even companies in a resume to understand what tasks a person performed. At this level, you need to understand in detail what the person did there, how the processes were organized, what the structure of the teams was, how the roles of the participants were distributed in them, and what was the role of the designer himself. Here you have to dig and try to find what you need. Most often at this and the previous level there is a certain reassessment of one's own skills and value.

SeniorSuch specialists rarely respond to vacancies. It is clear why - they have no problems with work. In 99% of cases, work finds them by itself. Although there are responses, it’s rather a story about a sarafan: when people know about us through acquaintances, they have a certain credit of trust, and they already go through a vacancy to us for starting communication. Hiring such designers is extremely simple: people know what they want, and you either immediately realize that you have little in common (in general or specifically now), or all stages of hiring go through quickly and painlessly.

Senior +.One of the most obscure categories. Specialists of this level sometimes simply lose their motivation, somewhere they try to try themselves as managers, they want to be more product managers, work three days a week or something else. Everything is very complicated with the psychology of people and their personal motives, while such candidates can easily go through technical interviews, but at some point in communication you understand that a person is not ready for permanent work and can simply burn out in a few months.
In each of these groups there are a large number of nuances, questions, dark spots. We regularly update our process of communicating with candidates as soon as we see any systematic patterns or problems.

How we build a dialogue with a candidate

Since we are a young IT brand, it is important for us to build communication with the candidate correctly:

Make communication comfortable. This is really important. For our part, we try to be as transparent as possible and answer all questions in detail, so that a person has a complete picture of the structure of work with us.

Provide feedback.Part of the candidates disappears at the stage of viewing the resume and portfolio, part after the first interview, someone after the test tasks. The further the candidate and I went through the funnel, the more we will try to give him a detailed feedback: we analyze the solution in detail, talk about strengths and weaknesses, consider the ideas proposed, say what could be corrected and recommend materials for study. Feedback is a great way to manage the negative of rejection, but it is also a way to lay the foundation for the future: some candidates are not suitable due to lack of experience, so it’s important to tell them where to go and leave a good impression about us, so that again in a year meet and talk about possible work.

Make the process as efficient and fast as possible. There are not so many good candidates, you should try not to extend the funnel of communication, but be able to maintain the level of candidates.

What our hiring process looks like

The examination of the candidate takes place in 5 stages:

Evaluation of the candidate’s resume and portfolio;
Screening;
Interview with the future leader;
Interviews with the product team (product manager / line manager);
Test and its analysis with the head + HRBP.

Evaluation of resumes and portfolios

This part of the funnel eliminates the largest proportion of people.

No one is looking at a portfolio for more than a few minutes. Most often, it is clear to the hiring manager from a cursory glance at a couple of works, it makes sense to ask more detailed questions about the work in an interview to see the reaction and evaluate the understanding of business tasks. The main thing in the portfolio is to see several key points:

Graphic design . Basic test for hard skills: is everything normal with layout, space management, working with color, text and other aspects.

Maturity of decisions.From the portfolio you can understand how mature a person makes decisions in terms of interface logic and product performance. Of course, there are many examples of solutions where an assessment can be given only after A / B testing and tests in the laboratory - you can talk about this with the candidate for an interview. This will help to understand how a person responds to such questions, and how deeply his understanding of the product and business.

Relevance of the candidate’s experience. I divide this paragraph into two:

Work experience in our area (internal systems) or related areas: various B2B services, tools, infrastructure units. The guys from neighboring units are more oriented to b2c / c2c, so they have their own pool of important parameters.
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A separate story with a candidate’s resume. It seems that this is just a set of input data, but in fact, from the summary you can trace how a person’s career has developed, and from this make assumptions about how ambitious he is, how quickly he wants to develop, what goals he sets for himself. You should not make hasty conclusions on the resume, but if you have questions, they should be asked.

Once, when I asked the candidate for an interview why he chose the companies in which he worked, he replied: "I want to move to places that can increase my value in the future." It would be an absolutely normal and rather ambitious answer if he had a set of well-known brands in his resume, but that was not so at all. His next transition simply confirmed that a person is looking for only money, and not some kind of growth prospect.

Screening

IT professionals do not like HR calls, including designers. But from the point of view of working with the funnel of candidates, there are several important things. During the screening, we always want to tell the person a little about what products we do, how we develop, grow, what we have to work on. This is more convenient to do by phone. Also, talking with a candidate helps evaluate his communication skills.

Sometimes in a telephone conversation we find out what tasks the candidate performed, discuss obscure points from the resume and find out salary expectations.

Interview with the future leader

Here, I think, I will not tell you anything new. We conduct a standard technical interview for one hour to understand how suitable the candidate is for the company and this unit. Usually we build a dialogue as follows:

The head talks about the goals of the company, about products whose design is being developed, conducts a short overview tour of the department’s structure.

In the next step, we ask the candidate to talk about the last few places of work, how the processes and product teams were organized, what were the problem cases, how he solved them, how he solved communication issues. The quality of answers to these questions allows us to understand the maturity of the candidate as a designer: how independent he is, whether he correctly understands how the work should be arranged, what he will expect from the head, department and company. We periodically go through the portfolio or ask to organize his presentation, this helps to understand at what level the person’s communication skills are and whether he understands the specifics of the business well.

If at the previous stage there was not enough data, we ask the candidate to solve several cases. They are associated with a common understanding of the decision-making process and with communications. Cases usually take about 20 minutes, we give a general outline of the task, the conditions can be changed on the go. The main thing is not to go too far, it is important to feel the mood of the candidate.

Questions section from the candidate. An interview is always about two sides, so at the final stage of the interview we answer as many questions as possible from the candidate. I especially love guys who have all their questions written in advance :)

After the interview, more than half of the candidates who were selected earlier are screened out. About 65-70%. 2-3 days after this stage, we decide whether we want to offer the candidate to complete the test task and introduce him to the product team.

Test

The most painful stage. Here the result of everything that we heard, saw, and asked about is manifested. But you need to understand that a test is not a way to get brilliant thoughts from a candidate that we will steal and put into production. This is just another way to get to know each other, to find out what the candidate is actually in the job.

You can tell a lot, let dust in your eyes, but still the test often puts everything in its place.

There are several rules regarding test cases:

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This is an interview on the so-called cultural fit. The designer will have his own head for specialization, but he works in the product team. All teams have their own peculiarities of building processes and their own culture. It is important that the designer is well suited to both his future leader and the product team.

Usually, the product manager and the direction manager come for an interview from the team. The first one is trying to understand how comfortable it is for him to work with a designer, because designer and product manager is such a “product deuce” where people work as partners.

A candidate who did not fit one team can easily fit another, so you need to understand that refusing an interview with a team does not mean the final "no."

Final - analysis of the test with the candidate

Analysis of the test task is already with the finalists. This stage is similar to one of the parts of the “interview with the leader”, but is more concise in time. We go through the task, ask how the person approached its solution and discuss these solutions.

This stage is interesting in that it has an HRBP unit, whose task is to check the motivational component of the candidate. It may seem strange to you, but I have seen many times in large IT companies that they hire people solely because of their hard-skills and then suffer from unjustified expectations, poor motivation, toxicity, and other unfavorable psychological factors.

Offer

If everything has grown together, a person receives an offer :) On average, two working days after the final are enough for us to make an offer to a candidate and discuss it with him.

After we present an offer to a person, the next part begins - onboarding. It begins precisely at the moment when we make an offer, and not when we already bring a person to work. But more about that in the next article.

How we select designers and conduct technical interviews