Why UX design competitions in the hiring process are actually not a bad idea

And how design challenges need to change to realize their advantages.

This article is going to trigger some people.

I know what you're thinking. The people who will be triggered are those who think design competitions are exploitative. Maybe. But the last time I proposed this idea on LinkedIn, some middle management chud from BlackRock dropped in uninvited—as though he were walking in on his wife with her boyfriend—to attack me for "not being able to follow rules" (whatever that means). If the worst people on earth are getting butt-hurt enough to troll my posts, then I know I'm on to something, and I'm going to double down.

So here we go.

I believe that design competitions as a component of the UX job screening process aren't inherently a bad thing. In fact, I think they are potentially the least toxic form of candidate selection. And I have reasons.

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What are those reasons?

There are three big reasons that design competitions blow away other methods of candidate selection:

• It evens the playing field

• It keeps the number of applicants down

• It keeps your skills intact

Not convinced? Keep reading.

It evens the playing field

You've probably heard how some hiring managers won't even talk to you unless you have a few specific companies on your resume. Is there a legitimate reason for that? Of course not. The most commonly cited reason for this is that those companies are hard to get into, meaning that, if you got into that company, you must be special. But, as it turns out, tolerance for abusive selection gauntlets is not a proxy metric for professional skill level. Who would have guessed?

The same applies to the other instruments of credibility. An Ivy League diploma looks a lot more impressive than one from a state university, despite the fact that the quality of education isn’t really that different. Portfolios are another problem. Candidates with a lot of NDA’d material or projects that didn’t launch due to circumstances out of their control are at a serious disadvantage.

A design competition which puts everyone on an even playing field, in which the hiring manager only sees the design submission, stripped of any resume, portfolio, or personally identifying information would negate both advantages. That information would only be seen after the candidate has been selected for interviewing based purely on their submission. At that point, that extraneous information will mean far less to the interviewer who will have based their first impression of the candidate on their skills alone.

It keeps the number of applicants down

The same arduous selection process that gives FAANG jobs such a cachet has a dirty secret. It’s all theatre. While the companies will claim they institute these processes to ensure that only the most “brilliant” minds work there, there’s no evidence to back that up. The reality is that making it miserable to get hired reduces the applicant pool. Yes, that’s a good thing.

If the current job market has taught us anything, it’s that having a huge pool of applicants does not make it easier for a company to hire. If anything, companies are taking longer than ever to fill jobs despite the glut of candidates. There are many reasons for this, but the bottom line is that it’s actually not a blessing to be overwhelmed with job applications, and I can confirm this from experience.

Companies that have that many applications coming in inevitably resort to the following “solutions”

• Rely on personal referrals

• Use an ATS

• Institute a hard (but secret) cut-off time, after which any application is discarded

Each of these approaches decreases the meritocracy of the hiring process. It favors those who are more connected, better at gaming the system, or just lucky. But when you have so many people applying, a clean, deliberate, rational selection process just isn’t practical.

As it is, companies already use strategies to pre-emptively screen out people who are not sufficiently interested in the position. The aforementioned FAANGs use their Confucian examination processes while the also-rans use obnoxious application forms that make you re-enter your entire job history.

And that makes the case for design competitions. They are another means of cutting down on candidates. The time required to complete them means that fewer people will bother. This benefits both the company and the applicant. Anyone who understands UX knows the importance of strategically-applied friction. But anyone who understands UX also knows that there is good friction (which isn’t perceived as friction) and bad friction (which enrages the user). Grueling interview loops and boring internet forms enrage users. Ethical design competitions do not.

It keeps your skills intact

Perhaps the most toxic part of the job search process is not that you are doing hours of work without being compensated, but that the work is completely worthless. Filling out job applications is not a useful skill for anything other than job hunting. So, while people with jobs are spending 8 hours a day building their professional skills and making themselves more valuable, you are becoming increasingly irrelevant despite spending just as many hours a day and not being paid.

With design competitions, the work you are doing to apply for the job actually builds your professional skills. The best designers out there enjoy designing enough that they'd do it for free. So—concerns about exploitation by unscrupulous companies notwithstanding—a good design challenge shouldn't feel like an unfair imposition. It should certainly be more enjoyable than filling out the same daft Workday form twenty times in a row. And, if we work the math out, the total time you must spend on job applications - whether that means completing a design challenge or filling out forms - in order to get a single interview probably comes out in a tie.

In other words, if you have to spend several hours per day doing unpaid work, wouldn't you rather spend that time doing UX rather than filling out forms? Thought so.

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How to fix design competitions

It's understandable why so many people bristle at the idea of design competitions as a means of candidate screening. Dishonest companies use them to con free work out of people, without even hiring anyone at the end. It's a well-known scam. But this doesn't mean that design competitions are fundamentally broken. One would think that the design community would realize that this, like any other problem, can be solved through design.

There are four things that need to happen in order to rehabilitate design competitions.

1. Use a third party

The most important thing that has to change with design competitions is the fact that they are currently administered by people absolutely unqualified to do so. Applicants have no reason to believe that their submission won't simply be treated as free work, or that any applicant will get an interview at all. The competition might be used simply to select for those most willing to do free work, and the company will then use the usual lame heuristics to select winners, e.g. FAANG and Ivy League creds.

A third party can eliminate these risks. For one thing, the third party competition host can work with the employer to design a challenge that involves skills relevant to the job but cannot be applied directly to the company's work. They can also ensure that the hiring company will only see any identifying information (name, resume, portfolio) about the applicant after their submission have been selected.

2. Charge per interviewee

An unscrupulous company could use the third-party host to trick people into submitting designs, only to just "select" everyone, then run their resumes through an ATS. To avoid this practice, the host would charge the employer for each submission they selected, and they wouldn’t get to see the candidate’s information until they’d paid.

This would mean the company would have a vested interest in actually interviewing the candidate. If they paid but didn’t hire anyone, they would have wasted their money. It also means that companies would be incentivized to not select too many applications so, if you did get selected to interview, your odds of getting the job would be much higher.

3. Standardize submissions

It wouldn't make much sense to eliminate the advantage of FAANG jobs if the design challenge introduced new unfair advantages. One risk of an improperly administered UX design challenge is that it would favor visual designers. Research shows that attractive UIs can actually fool you into thinking they are better designed than they really are. This even applies to UX experts. The third-party host could negate this advantage by requiring that all submissions be limited to low or mid-fidelity wireframes. The number of colors could be limited to a few signifiers such as red, green, yellow, and blue, as well as grey to indicate media. Any submission which broke these rules would be rejected before the employer ever saw it.

4. Create fun, sci-fi design challenges

In order to decrease resentment from those who did not get selected, the job challenges should be fun. This means not forcing the applicants to design another dopey food delivery app or online banking dashboard. There are all sorts of possibilities. Here are a few:

• The government has begun guaranteeing citizens the right to legal representation in civil lawsuits, but it cannot afford to procure human public defenders for every case. Instead, it is using an AI powered agent to do most of the work. Create an interface that enables the client to work with the AI agent, providing it with information and asking it questions. It must keep the human attorney overseeing the case informed of all developments. Any AI-generated legal advice must be 100% free of hallucinations.

• A medical equipment company wants to launch a home-based personal medical laboratory. It will enable people to perform their own blood tests, urinalysis, and other minimally invasive examinations from the comfort of their own home, without a doctor, and without their private information entering some database. After the failure of Theranos, this device must be more complex and larger, and require more human intervention in order to function. Create a physical and digital user interface for this device.

• A new racing league features ultra-fast cars that operate in a dynamic envelope beyond what a person's senses can keep up with. Design a driver interface that uses AI and data visualization to augment the driver's senses and cognition while keeping everything fully human-operated.

The possibilities are limitless. If job searching involved designing cool sci-fi technologies, people might actually, God forbid, enjoy the job search process.

Convinced yet?

I'm well aware that people hate design competitions in the applicant screening process, but I think that these feelings are based on the way competitions are currently handled. There is nothing inherently exploitative in a purely skills-based hiring process. It's just that, for some reason, nobody is doing it properly. If you are involved in human resources and are interested in establishing such a process at your company, get in touch. If this current glut of candidates is actually making it harder for you to find a good match, then a third-party UX design competition might be what you're looking for.

It certainly cannot be worse than what we have right now.

Fiddle dee dee. That will require a tetanus shot.

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