The recruiter called me three days after I sent my CV to a job offer I was interested in, and I had a phone interview for 7 minutes. The recruiter told me just before the interview ended: “I will send you a take-home assignment, and you have three days to complete it, and if the design manager likes it, we will call you for another job interview.”

I was shocked to be asked to do a 3-day assignment before an interview with the hiring manager. I had some questions when I got the assignment, but HR told me I needed to do it myself without asking anyone from the design team.

Since I felt this company didn’t respect me, I sent her a message saying I was not interested in the job anymore.

Occasionally, I hear about take-home assignments designers have to do during the hiring process.

This post aims to explain why I believe this technique is useless and why design managers should stop using it.

If you are unfamiliar with this term, a take-home assignment is a design task the company asks the potential employee to do in their free time and send to the design team. Companies use this method to evaluate the skills of designers during the hiring process.

To be clear, I’m talking in this article about take-home assignments, not whiteboard interview.

Respect the candidate’s free time

When companies give candidates take-home assignment, they tell them how much time they need to spend on them and when they have to turn them in. There is a deadline of between 3 days and a week.

Here is the problem, the company asks for 8 hours and gives the candidate 3–7 days. Many candidates put a lot of effort into it and spend twice as much time as they should. Therefore the company gets work that the candidate did in over 8 hours, and the candidate feels bad that they spent so much time on it.

Some companies handle it by paying the candidate. It is not so common, but I have heard about it. In my opinion, this isn’t the best approach since candidates may accept the assignment to make money, and I believe it is better to avoid this situation.

There are people with more time and people with less time

A person with a family and kids has less time to work outside their day job than someone with fewer responsibilities. In that case, you can lose a great designer just because they can’t dedicate enough time to the assignment.

In addition, someone with more time can use all their free time to do the task, and that’s why it will not be a fair comparison between these two candidates.

The candidate needs to present their work

Reviewing the task with the candidate after they send it is essential. The candidate needs to explain their thoughts and how they solved the issue.

That will help you understand their perspective and ask questions about the solution.

There were a lot of places that asked candidates to send a ppt and explain their solution with a text. Creating a presentation to explain the solution will take at least 4 hours, on top of the 8 hours they ask for the task.

It is also related to the first point I wrote in this article. We need to respect the free time of the candidate.

Product design is collaborative teamwork

As part of a product team, we work with developers, product manager, and QA testers. Whenever you give the candidate an assignment to do at home, they work alone without feedback from the team. It doesn’t work like that in the real world because we must balance business, technology, and design.

What’s the point of letting a designer find a solution themselves if the real work is working on a solution with the team?

There are a lot of managers who don’t have time to design the take home assignment

This is a real pain point. Many team leaders have so much work, and hiring is another thing they have to deal with. Usually, they don’t have time to create a good task.

Because of that, Some design managers send candidates a task they found online. They don’t stop to think about what they want to achieve, what they want to test, or how they will evaluate them.

If you don’t have the time to invest in creating a good assignment please do not use a random task you found on the internet. You can’t expect the candidate to spend so much time on the task if you didn’t put time and effort into creating it.

The candidate can’t talk to anyone or in the company

When the company sends the task to the candidate, they often don’t let them ask questions.

A candidate may feel lonely working on a task when no one cares about them.

Consequently, candidates may wonder what will happen to them when they join the design team. Will nobody care about them as part of the design team as well?

Designers should control the domain

In many cases, the designer needs to control the domain to design a solution. Imagine a designer working on a cyber security product. They need to understand the domain to design a solution.

Companies with a complex product sometimes send a task about a common domain like eCommerce so that the candidates do not have to study the domain, but the task should reflect the complexity of the product. For example, a t-shirt eCommerce site has a different level of difficulty than a cyber security product.

When you give someone a task that doesn’t reflect the real difficulty of the product, how do you know if they can handle the complex product?

Sending them a task about the company product can make them feel uncomfortable

I have heard several times that companies ask candidates to perform a task related to their product. In many design communities, designers said they felt like they worked for free. When a company gives a candidate a task about their real product, it can seem like they’re searching for ideas and solutions for free.

I have heard from designers that companies asked them to make a take-home assignment about their product, and after some time the designers saw their solutions on the company product.

Of course, is not common but be aware that designers talk about it in the design communities and the designers are sensitive to it.

Designers should talk with users

Designers need to talk to users to be able to design a solution. Understanding and having empathy for users is more than necessary.

Empathy is key since it allows us to think about the other person, and it cannot happen in take-home assignments. Furthermore, I saw many tasks where the company didn’t provide any information about the users.

How do they expect the candidate to be able to resolve the assignment without this basic information? In addition, what will a candidate think about the company’s design level if it doesn’t provide them with information about the users?

Candidate asking for help

Nowadays, more and more product designers seek mentoring from other designers. Therefore, junior designers can often work with mentors on the task. In the end, the task results do not reflect the designer’s skill level. Also, you will not know if the designer did it themselves or if someone helped them.

Soft skills are more important than hard skills

Take-home assignments tend to focus more on technical skills than soft skills, so you can’t judge a candidate’s personality from them.

I believe that hiring people with great soft skills and mid-level hard skills is better than those with excellent hard skills and low soft skills.

Obviously, the candidate needs to know the job, but with a good technical interview with a clear script, it’s easy to get input about it. However, understanding the level of soft skills takes more time and effort.

People can learn hard skills easier if they put effort into studying them. However, a person without a good relationship will not fit into the company’s culture and can affect other people’s performance.

In my opinion, a clear interview process with 3 interviews that each focus on a different aspect can help you understand both the soft and hard skills of designers.

Summary

My point in the article was that I don’t see a real benefit in using the take-home assignment to evaluate candidate skills. This is for four main reasons.

1. Collaborating with other team members is needed to come up with good solutions.
2. Teamwork requires good soft skills, and we should evaluate candidates’ soft skills.
3. Designers need a deep understanding of the domain and users to create great solutions.
4. Designers often ask other designers to help them out.

Taking on responsibilities as a team leader or design manager doesn’t start when people join. We need to invest time and effort into shaping and designing the hiring process. It is your responsibility to lead it, don’t wait for HR to do it. In that way, you will be able to hire the right people while also respecting them.

Let’s hope more design managers understand the problem and stop using this technique in the hiring process. We don’t just design products. We design processes too.

Thank you for reading the article. I hope this article helped you understand the disadvantages of take home assignments during the hiring process.

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