I submitted a marketing web design challenge, but heard nothing for 1 week, after which I was instructed to wait until Hertility appointed a Lead Product Manager, who would review the work.
After another 3 weeks, I was invited to a 30-minute interview. At the start of the interview, I was asked to present my design challenge. Unfortunately, I was interrupted almost immediately with a stream of behavioural questions.
Given my prior interviewing experience, I found this odd. Typically, a presentation is a segment of an interview, during which the interviewees may interject with related questions. A behavioural interview would then take place in a second segment. Everything at once felt chaotic. Attempting to present a piece of design, while answering behavioural questions, is far too much context-switching. Especially given the 30-minute time slot. In my experience, such a format is unheard of.
Many of the interview questions were irrelevant to product design. EG: The interviewer asked me questions about brand design, for which I was not applying.
One frustrating part was when the interviewer asked me to talk about my mobile designs. They asked me very specifically to explain the distinctions I had made between the mobile and desktop designs of a particular page, with a focus on what I had done differently on mobile. I explained that besides ensuring accessible font sizes, adequate touch target sizes for buttons, and progressive disclosure through carousels, nothing else was changed on this page. This didn’t appear to go down very well. I feel it was interpreted as a lack of knowledge of mobile design, as evidenced by the feedback I received. Given that the assignment was a piece of marketing web design, web design principles and responsive design principles were adhered to. This included allowing the user to read the same content on mobile and desktop, which I explained at the time. It seemed as if the interviewer wanted me to say that I had made product design principle-based decisions for the page, such as minimised functionality/re-arranged content, as you might execute in product design, but the challenge was a marketing web design, not a product. The typical goals of a mobile product and a mobile marketing web page are usually different, and I could only describe the design decisions I had made based on the challenge set. If you ask a candidate to show examples of something specific on a page and it isn’t there, it shouldn’t reflect on the candidate.
The current product designer was not included in the interview, which I felt was a pity. Future interviews for this position would benefit from the presence of a design expert and a more structured format, as candidates cannot put their best foot forward in this setting. Despite the disjointed experience I had in interviewing for Hertility, I admire the company and its values.
