- Does anyone like hiring interviews?
For job seekers it's stressful to prepare your materials
and submit yourself to the collective judgment of strangers.
And for UX leaders, it's also stressful
hiring a new team member who may underperform
or quit after a few months.
As unpleasant as they can be,
hiring interviews are critical for UX teams
because the consequences of success
and failure are substantial.
Research suggests that high performing employees
are hugely more productive than average employees.
Finding a talented new hire is like striking gold.
On the other hand, the US Department of Labor estimates
that a bad hire can cost 30%
of the roles first year earnings.
For UX designer role making $100,000 a year,
a bad hire leaving after six months can cost $80,000.
They're basically two kinds of interviews,
structured and unstructured.
The second one is probably what you're most familiar with.
Unstructured hiring interviews have no predefined questions
and they emphasize open-ended conversations.
The number of interviewers can vary.
The questions can vary.
There's no guidance on good or bad answers.
The interviewer's feedback is often
just thumbs up for thumbs down.
Now, structured hiring interviews are very different
and a new idea to many.
The interviewers are kept consistent across all candidates.
The interview questions are drawn from a predefined pool
and interviewers ask the questions
in the same order to all candidates.
They also give numerical ratings to candidate answers
by referring to guidance
on what a good or bad answer sounds like.
Unstructured interviewing is popular
and a familiar approach.
However, over 100 years of applied psychology research
has consistently shown that unstructured hiring interviews
introduce a lot of problems in the hiring process.
They're less likely to predict a candidate's future behavior
and job performance.
They're unreliable and they lead
to inconsistent evaluation of candidates.
They're also harmful to diversity
and introduce unconscious bias
against historically marginalized groups.
They're also bad for job seekers.
Numerous cognitive biases plague unstructured interviews
and lead interviewers to judge candidates
on irrelevant details.
The good news is that incorporating structure reduces
these problems and gives everyone a fair shot.
If you're unsure where to start, don't worry,
just follow these 10 steps
to conducting better hiring reviews for your UX team.
One, perform a job analysis of the UX role,
and generate a list of 25 to 35 task statements.
Use the job description, recall accomplishments
of high performing employees or just ask employees
in that role to brainstorm essential tasks.
Two, survey the team
and rank the task statements by importance for that role.
Three, take the top 10 to 20 tasks
and develop questions that have candidates
described how they behaved in the past
or how they would resolve a realistic work dilemma.
Four, create a scoring rubric for each question
by writing three statements describing a very good answer
and three statements describing a very poor answer.
Five, pilot test your interview questions with a team member
in a mock interview and check for clarity.
Six, document all questions and scoring rubrics
into print or digital interviewer guides.
Be sure to include a five point scale
to capture each interviewer's score
of the candidate's answer.
Seven, select three to four interviewers
and brief them on the interview guides and their use.
Eight, schedule a one hour one-on-one interview
with each candidate and interviewer.
Ensure all interviewers can interview each candidate.
Nine, once a candidate has finished interviewing,
arrange of 30 minute follow up
with all interviewers within 24 hours.
Review each question
and ask interviewers to share insights based on their notes.
Finally, ask everyone else to imagine working
with this candidate
and have them submit a final intuition score
from one to five.
10, calculate each candidate's score
by averaging interviewer ratings across all questions.
Calculate the average intuition score
across all interviewers as well.
Then add both values and make a job offer
to the candidate with the best score.
Remember these principles the next time you conduct
or participate your UX team's interviewing process.
And for UX job seekers,
learn to spot structured interviewing
as an important clue that a UX team cares
about hiring talented people
while promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.
For as much as we may dislike them,
hiring interviews will always be with us.
Let's start doing them better.