February 2025
Service Design
In Progress! Check back soon!
View Post
“Your career is a story, and interviewing is ultimately a storytelling process.”
The author, Tanner Christensen, started his own company called Shape in 2022 with the goal of helping designers through the nuances of the interview process. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you are vaguely aware that the hiring process is expensive, time-consuming, and often confusing for applicants. I was super interested in Shape and opted to sign up toward the end of 2022 when I was looking for a new role.
Shortly after, the post-Covid tech boom started to decline and companies quickly started to not only freeze hiring but also start laying people off. In other words, the design-specific job market became more confusing than it already was. Tanner then announced he was stopping work on Shape and turning the insights into this book: ‘A Designer’s Guide to Interviewing.’ I added the book to my list but it kept slipping through the cracks. I was prioritizing learning new skills and concepts over professional development - to my own detriment.
In early August of 2023, Tanner made a post about his book being on the Amazon best-seller list and offered to give away a few copies for free - messaging him expressing interest was a no brainer. Not only does he have a lot of knowledge from building Shape but he also served as the head of design @ Gem, a startup specializing in addressing the hiring process.
I ended up getting a copy, reading it in 2 days and setting some short and long-term goals for career progression.
Tanner ends the book with:
“Of all the interviewing lessons I have learned over my career, one of the most impactful has been the importance of being open and vulnerable.”
I’ll be taking a leap out of his book (literally) and sharing my two immediate goals:
1. Learn how to better assess whether a company is a good fit for me
2. Learn how to more effectively make it to the late-stage phase of interviewing
There are typically 6 stages of the recruiting process:
1. Planning and Alignment - assessing needs of teams and dedicating budget to new roles
2. Inbound and outbound sourcing - letting applicants apply to a post vs. active searching for applicants
3. Screening and early-stage interviewing - assessing skills, requirements
4. Selecting and late-stage interviewing - testing skills, cultural fit
5. Hiring - negotiating offer details
6. Onboarding - “butt in seat” and beginning a job
I usually try to briefly summarize a book I’ve read or offer an outline of some key points. In this case, I believe I would be doing readers a disservice so I’ll simply say this: give the book a read. It takes time to develop interviewing and communications skills; this book can definitely help!
Interviewing for roles is a personal process and one that can’t truly warrant clear-cut, straightforward answers that apply to everyone - this is something that Tanner conveys pretty well in this book. This book offers a good explanation of the recruitment process from start to finish, details all of the ‘tools’ designers may need, and does a great job at offering advice on how to conduct reverse interviews on companies to see if they are truly a match for you.
At times when reading this book, I thought to myself: “why does a book like this exist when there are already so many countless resources in the world for the recruitment process?” and the answer is this: the design recruitment process is so incredibly different from others I’ve seen. An exacerbating factor to this already known truth is also that: competition for roles has risen to such a degree that applications for one role can get upwards of 2,000 applicants within a few hours.
At the time of writing this, Tanner is a senior designer at Netflix (aka FAANG) and has worked at Facebook, Atlassian, Lyft, and Gem; this definitely shows when talking about best practices for later-stage interviewing. Most design mature companies follow these practices: engaging in live design critique, having on-site interviews, whiteboarding exercises, design challenges, etc but few companies that I’ve interviewed with have done these types of “typical” exercises, as he phrases it. This, I think, points to a larger conversation to be had about establishing ‘best practices’ for design interviews for those companies that are newer to design so that they can get great designers.
Design is a new and maturing industry. This isn’t news. Since things are changing so rapidly and competition is high, individuals will often post clickbait-type content online such as “How I got my job at Amazon FAANG” or “The secret to getting an interview at Spotify.” These are misleading things to post because there is no secret - this is something that Tanner’s book articulates remarkably well. The only outlier articulated throughout this entire book is that regarding referrals:
“Research has reportedly shown that designers who are referred to a job convert from an applicant to a hire at a rate of roughly 40%. Referrals also stay at a job longer and report more overall happiness than their counterparts.”
Besides getting a referral, the recruiting process is evaluating who you are, what your qualifications are, why you’re interested in the role, and how you would add value to the team/company.
Overall, I enjoyed the read and I thoroughly appreciate Tanner providing the book! He does a fantastic job at providing sample questions to drill deeper at every stage of the interview process so that you are being “mindful and curious” rather than “anxious and desperate.” I got a lot of value out of being able to identify people (sourcers vs recruiters vs hiring managers) throughout the process. Most of all, I liked how interactive this book feels: I followed along with his recommendations of:
1. setting overarching goals
2. setting job-hunt specific goals (portfolio, resume, slide deck, etc.)
3. questions to ask during interviews
4. researching companies before applying
This is a solid read and a book I will likely be continuously referring back to!
