Picture this.

After applying for dozens upon dozens of design positions, you finally get a call one afternoon from a UX hiring manager. You’re excited and tell them whatever you think they need or want to hear so you can get that in-person interview.

You’re successful. An interview date is set.

You go through a grueling interview process. They test you, interview you, maybe even sometimes interrogate you. They ask about research, processes and methodologies. They look at your work, your sketches, your portfolio and pick it all apart.

Six interviews later and when you’re done with it all, you throw your best dress shirt in the trash, knowing you’ll never get the pit stains out. That time your older sibling slammed your head in the car door? That was less painful. Defending your thesis in grad school wasn’t as stressful (requiring far less Xanax).

But after a few weeks (or months), you finally get that offer.

You accept and set a date for your first day. By the end of your first week, you begin to realize all those textbook questions they asked and textbook answers you gave are nothing like the reality of the position.

There is no research to integrate. There are no design processes or methodologies in place. The design system is what they call a Work in Progress (WIP), consisting of a couple of dozen components clearly borrowed from a templated Figma library, no documentation and a half-ass style guide that makes no sense.

Didn’t they ask you extensively about your experience with all of this?

Many of you probably don’t need to picture this scenario. It’s a situation you can likely identify with. We — and I include myself here — often hire for the positions we’d like to have. Not the ones we are actually trying to fill.

To be clear, we often hold our candidates to unrealistic standards — professional standards that are either not followed (or even required) in the position. Or we hold them to standards we don’t follow as hiring managers.

A good example of this is user experience research.

I’m almost always asked about research experience in an interview. They might want to know if I have conducted research. But most of the time, they want to know if the designs I walk through are backed by research.

I rarely walk through or present a design that has no basis in research. But I do have a hard drive full of designs that went live with little or no research.

There’s a reason for that.

I almost always arrive at a new position with no existing research and, sometimes, an organization that doesn’t have much inclination to conduct any meaningful research. I usually discover it’s damn near impossible to get to a real person who uses the company’s product. If the sales staff or product team doesn’t block me, I’m too busy — inundated with high-priority design features on the roadmap.

Ironically, these organizations almost always inquired about my research experience during the interview phase. All of them listed research in the job description. Many of them didn’t even have a researcher on staff, leaving that duty to me (assuming they even allowed me to talk to a client).

So, why did I spend so much time discussing my research experience in the 5 interviews I attended?

Here’s another one: Everyone asks about your process.

Now, I have written a number of times about UX processes. I won’t repeat all of that here except to say, your process will be shaped and often formed by the organization you work for. Even your UX strategy will be shaped, in part, by organizational culture and needs.

So, am I saying we shouldn’t ask a candidate to demonstrate they have at least some understanding of process and methodology in design? Not necessarily. But it’s a “fluff question” — a lobbed ball right over the plate.

First of all and if we’re honest in answering this question, our processes and methodologies (having been shaped by the previous organizations we’ve worked for) are messy at best and almost non-existent at worst. But the real point to flesh out here is that it usually isn’t any better in the new position and most of us won’t have the chance to practice what we know.

So, why spend so much time on it in the interview?

I get it. I’ve been a hiring manager and we often theorize we’ll have the power to shape change in an organization (this is mostly a myth). We want to hire people who have at least a basic understanding of the foundations of design and have put that knowledge into practice. But when we write unrealistic job descriptions and put candidates through “the gauntlet” in interviews, it’s as if we’re selling something we don’t have.

One would think that given all of the questions about research, your process, how you get from a problem to a solution and all of the artifacts they always want to see, you’d be walking into an organization that operates like IDEO or Frog. But that isn’t the case.

In my experience, I spend at least the first year trying to put processes in place — research pathways and analysis, building a research library, hand-off procedures, executing an iterative design cycle, building out a basic design system.

Sometimes we even hold our candidates to standards we don’t follow or meet.

Case in point. I used to work for a Fortune 50 company where some of us managers got together and developed strict criteria for judging portfolios. We were inundated with resumes and decided we needed to weed out the less desirable candidates. So we used portfolios — a big mistake.

One of the criteria related to how dated the portfolio looked (a somewhat subjective measure, I admit). The funny part of it was that most of us (we were all hiring managers) didn’t have up-to-date portfolios ourselves. Some of us didn’t have portfolios at all.

Having a portfolio is almost always in the job description and they often stipulate online portfolio. Granted, many designers still have to contend with NDAs and choose the antiquated PDF instead. But this is 2022 and it’s relatively easy to secure sensitive content via password protection.

Test me on this. The next time you land an interview, see if you can find the hiring manager’s portfolio online. In all the interviews I’ve done, I haven’t found too many.

It’s pretty simple when you think about it. An interview is conducted to ensure you will be able to perform the duties of the position. If the position doesn’t require (or allow) user research, you shouldn’t be graded on how you integrate research into your designs. You shouldn’t be judged on criteria that will not be required of the position.

When you compare the interview process to the positions we end up holding, it often feels more like clickbait. What you see isn’t necessarily what you get. It’s like I ordered a bacon-wrapped filet mignon but the waiter shows up and tells me all they had was a Philly Cheese & Steak Hot Pocket.

My apologies to Nestle. I have nothing against the Philly Cheese & Steak Hot Pocket. But it isn’t a bacon-wrapped filet mignon.

This isn’t just my frustration either. About once each quarter I’ll have some designer reach out to me lamenting the position they’re in. Many of them have told me they have seriously considered leaving the profession. Their primary complaint? The position isn’t what they thought it would be and they aren’t allowed to practice UX design. Many of my colleagues have communicated similar feelings when the topic arises.

The explosion of user experience design over the past decade has undoubtedly contributed greatly to this problem. Organizations have been slow to realize the ROI of UX design but quick to hire teams. Thus, you end up with a lot of companies bearing low or no design maturity implementing what they don’t understand — UX design teams.

“We’ve got UX,” they say — whatever that means.

The burden then falls on the hiring manager who desperately needs to hire designers — designers who can help manage the workload. What are we to do in such a scenario? Well, we hire for the position we think we’ll have or the one we’d like to have — not the one that exists.

Perhaps one day, organizations will get it. They’ll all have fully practicing UX designers that are less concerned with timelines and new releases than they are with understanding the people who use the product. All of these organizations will provide the pinnacle of a user experience. In the future.

But I doubt it. I’m getting too old to be that idealistic.

What’s more likely to happen is things will continue as they are. The profession will eventually contract as people leave out of frustration when they can’t practice what they know. They’ll tire of working knock-off jobs with no purpose, designing meaningless products that made the release deadline but have no hope of making an impact.

The greater percentage of us who survive this fate will be stuck eating our Philly Cheese & Steak Hot Pocket, wondering what happened to our bacon-wrapped filet mignon.