Micro Case Study
Northwestern Mutual Product Design Interview Guide.
Chris Avore
“Hiring designers is the most important part of the designer manager’s job - not delivering amazing work, not creating the culture in which design is practiced, not retaining the designers already on payroll, and not scaling design throughout the company.”
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Problem
Our design team needed a consistent way to evaluate design candidates because we were interviewing and hiring almost every week and didn’t have an established evaluation process in place.
Approach
Applied design thinking to creating a re-usable interview evaluation template. Mapped out the interview journey. Created how might we statements. Brainstormed on potential questions to ask design candidates.
Outcome
After a few iterations the results were an interview guide with role specific questions job descriptions, interview questions, and attribute rating.
Lessons Learned
The interview panel engages more when they have pre-defined questions to ask and space to contribute their thoughts. After interviewing each candidate we utilized this matrix to determine if we wanted to extend an offer or not.