This guide gives {{Company name}} a structured loop for design roles — product designers, UX/UI designers, and brand designers. Design hiring fails most often in two ways: falling for polished visuals without probing the thinking behind them, or running an exercise so artificial it measures nothing. This loop centers the portfolio review and a scoped, respectful working exercise, and scores both against explicit anchors.

Stage plan

Competency map

• Product thinking — connects design decisions to user problems and business outcomes, not just aesthetics.
• Craft — typography, hierarchy, spacing, and interaction details that hold up under close inspection.
• Process — moves deliberately from problem to research to exploration to decision, and can explain each step.
• Research and validation — knows what they tested, what they assumed, and what they would test next.
• Collaboration and communication — presents work clearly, takes critique without defensiveness, and works well with PMs and engineers.

Question banks by stage

Recruiter screen

• What kind of design work do you want to spend most of your time on?
• Which project in your portfolio best represents how you work today?
• What tools make up your daily workflow?
• What team structures have you worked in — embedded, agency, central design team?
• What are your compensation expectations and availability?

Portfolio deep dive

Ask the candidate to bring two projects: one they are proud of and one that shipped with compromises. Spend thirty minutes on each.

• What was the actual problem, and how do you know it was the right one to solve?
• Show me an early exploration you discarded. Why did it lose?
• What constraints — technical, legal, timeline — shaped the final design most?
• What did you test with users, and what surprised you?
• What shipped versus what you designed, and how did you handle the gap?
• What happened after launch? What would you change now?

Practical design exercise

Use a real but non-confidential problem from your domain, scoped to the session. Provide context in advance; evaluate the working process, not pixel output under pressure.

• How do they clarify the problem and audience before touching the canvas?
• Do they explore more than one direction, or commit immediately?
• Can they articulate trade-offs between the directions out loud?
• When you add a constraint mid-session, how do they adapt?
• Ask them to walk through their result as if presenting to stakeholders: is the narrative clear?

Craft and critique session

• Present a deliberately flawed screen from your product: what do they notice first?
• Ask them to prioritize their critique: which three issues matter most and why?
• How would they improve the hierarchy without adding elements?
• Where does the design break on small screens or with long content?
• Which accessibility problems can they identify — contrast, focus order, touch targets?

Cross-functional and values interview

• Tell me about a disagreement with a product manager over scope or direction. How was it resolved?
• How do you hand off work to engineers, and what do you do when the build diverges from the design?
• Describe critique cultures you have worked in. What made the best one work?
• Tell me about receiving critique that stung. What did you do with it?
• What does inclusive design mean in your day-to-day practice?

Scoring anchors

Score each competency 1 to 4 with written evidence immediately after each stage. Craft and product thinking carry the most weight; a 4 in craft cannot compensate for a 1 in collaboration.

• 1 — Below bar: cannot explain decisions behind the work, presents solo-hero narratives, critique triggers defensiveness.
• 2 — Near bar: competent execution but process is borrowed vocabulary; thin evidence of validation or outcomes.
• 3 — At bar: clear reasoning from problem to solution, honest about compromises, craft withstands close inspection.
• 4 — Above bar: reframes the problem convincingly, shows discarded directions with sharp rationale, and elevates the people around them through critique.