A Designer's Guide to Interviewing

Learn what it takes to shine in design interviews.

Explore strategies to communicate well, tell a compelling story, and ace your next design interview. This guide is comprised of everything designers today need to master the interviewing process and demonstrate the skills employers are looking for from design.

No matter who you are, what industry you are in, where you are in the world, how you learn best, or where you are in your career journey, this guide has something for you.

Written by Tanner Christensen and partner Jasmine Friedl, Interviewing as a Designer combines their more than 25 years of experience interviewing (and getting job offers) from companies like Google, Lyft, Dropbox, Adobe, Facebook (Meta), Intercom, Uber, Cruise, Udacity, Atlassian, and many more. The authors have also spent a considerable amount of their careers leading and working alongside big and small design groups, startup recruiting units, and hiring managers-working with each other to help designers and recruiting teams find the best in each other through interviewing.

What's covered in Interviewing as a Designer?

- Understanding recruiting and getting the most from this guide
- Defining your career goals (and why you need to)
- Finding job opportunities
- Building a résumé
- Creating a digital portfolio
- Applying to jobs
- Preparing for early conversations with recruiters
- Navigating critique interviews
- Managing at-home exercises
- How to talk with interviewers
- Mastering interview exercises (such as problem solving exercises and whiteboarding challenges)
- Questions to ask interviewers
- How to talk about collaboration
- Practicing interviewing
- Presenting a portfolio of work
- Setting expectations (for yourself and interviewers)
- Understanding rejection
- Negotiating job offers

All of this and more presented in five succinct sections broken into job search categories:

1. Fundamentals
2. Your job search
3. Early stage interviews
4. Late stage interviews
5. Decision making