UX Hiring (process) should be a win-win! -Part 1
UX talent is difficult to find. User Experience discipline has evolved multi-fold over the last few years and there is no single clear definition of skills required or expected to be really successful in your job.
What should a candidate do? more so, what should the hiring manager do? Shouldn't this process be the most easy and intuitive given that you are posting (or applying) for a job that expects designing for ease of use?
Today, pretty much every company will require a UX Designer and UX Researcher to be successful, but what is expected out of those roles can be substantially different depending on the services offered by the company and deliverables expected through the job.
I worked for Enterprise Holdings Inc. a parent company for Enterprise, National and Alamo car rental brands and managed the UX department there for 10+ years.
Here is what I did so that I could find the right talent making sure it is a win-win for the candidate as well. If I hired them - they knew exactly what they needed to do the job and if didn't end up hiring them - they knew why?
Part 1 is more for hiring mangers.
1. I wrote job descriptions from scratch. Yes, I avoided the temptation to get the best UX designer or researcher description from the web and just tweak it to make it applicable to us. There are many job descriptions that you will find on the web that are good but as you read them carefully and fully, you will start laughing about how much is crammed in those (especially since the UX field and skills are ever evolving).
They expect a UX super-hero to have all of those at once. Not possible! Having a generic, all encompassing job descriptions just defeats the whole purpose of hiring and starts the whole process on a wrong foot.
Don't we UX professionals say, for better usability test results - the "recruiting" has to be right? That's exactly is the mantra here, for everything else to follow suit, get your job descriptions spot on. They will go a long way in your hiring process.
Extra Benefit: It not only created a baseline for what is expected out of the role for new employees, it helped me set expectations for current employees too.
2. Know and educate your in-house recruiter. Yes, go out for a lunch with him/her. Get that job description that you wrote with you and talk about it in detail. Don't expect them to know everything in your field. You are the expert (and hiring manager). "Explain the job" to your recruiter first. Ask them if they have any questions? Is anything confusing?
Extra Benefit: Having a cordial relationship with your recruiter will go a long way. S/he will know your style, schedule constraints but since you educated them they will feel empowered to make best decision and filtering for you.
In the next part, I will talk about actual process itself that yielded great results for me at EHI.
Author Bio: My name is Mandar Pathak and I run the website www.optimizeprodux.com and its associated blog. Optimize-ProdUX is my consulting adventure advising clients about better User Experience (UX) and Digital Strategy. The office is located in St. Louis, MO.
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