 Are you frustrated and defeated after every job interview? Wondering why you're not getting past the first round? Putting in a lot of effort with no results to show. Don't worry I have the answers you're looking for. I'm Chris and I've been hiring UX designers since 2015. Over the years I've probably interviewed hundreds if not thousands of designers. In this video I'll show how to ace your next UX interview with these six actionable steps. And as a bonus I'll give you tips in dealing with rejection. Stick around till the end. Let's get into it. First let's tackle the problem with most UX interviews. If you're struggling with getting past the first round of interviews I would approach it like a UX problem. So it'd be like well what do the interviewers want? First like what are they looking for? What are the measures of success that gets you through to the second round? It's not completely your fault okay just know that as well. Because UX interview is really weird right? Like I don't know how many engineering friends you have but their interviews is really simple. The way they outline it is really simple. Either it's a culture fit interview then it's a technical test and the good thing about technical interviews from the engineering side or engineering interviews is they'll tell you what they want right? Hey we want you to produce an algorithm to solve this. We're going to analyze you based on this but for design it's completely different because they don't necessarily think that design is a technical capability or whatever the thing is but it's not really controlled and written by designers like the interview process. But for engineers it really is. That's why there's a bunch of recruiters, HRs and they judge you based on what they know about design or what they think they know about design. So maybe that's also one reason why you're not progressing right? So it's not completely your fault and that's just a problem with the industry in general. Second thing I could say about this is I'll tell you about my experience of phone interviews. So we set up phone interviews in the organizations that I've run because one I'm in Vietnam or in Asia or I'm in Mexico so we always test the candidate on English skills right? In the US I'm not sure how much they do that but that's the first thing and then we provide questions to the recruiter to ask. It really depends on how familiar the recruiter is to it but it's really a real general thing. So they'll ask you about your design projects can you speak about it and you know really general stuff they're not really super qualified to sort of give you the green light so they just really want to hear you say the right stuff which is typically your design process, what you learn what would you do differently can you tell me where you made these decisions and why? So it should be the easiest stage. Here are some actual tips that you could follow. Practice with real or mock interviews. Yeah one of the things if you're nervous for the interview then obviously practice makes perfect but having you know sticking the answers that you might receive next to your wall or whatever you're taking the interview that helps but remember you can never prepare and you never know exactly what they ask right so I think embracing that chaos is also good and the best interviews that I ever do are ones that I don't really care about so I have this really weird habit of like every three to six months just do job interviews after job interviews even if I don't want the job because it puts you kind of in that practice so I would say you should do that too right so what you should be doing is like doing a lot of interviews just get as many interviews as you want even if you don't want it so it filters out good questions and it basically puts you in the space of I know how to deal with the questions because in my head I have answered like this three or four times already right so you can do this with companies in Nigeria or Africa or you know companies that you kind of aren't super interested but it's good practice for you right and then you know the US company would be the goal right like if you can get a job move over to US that that would be the best sort of thing or even to work remote but you could also do the mock interviews on ADP lists right there's plenty of you know local people on ADP lists that could help you you know similar times those and stuff that could do mock interviews you know the more you do the better you are and the more surprising questions they throw at you also the better you will be to think on your feet right talk about what you want to talk about I wrote down the common problems I see on design teams and then I map that to what I've done before to try and solve those problems or at least ideas and I've said here's what I see that is a common thing that I see all the time and here's how I would go about solving it maybe it's too deep for the first interview but really what you want to do is impress them right so even sometimes when they ask you some sort of questions and you don't really know you can talk about what you want to talk about it's absolutely fine remember these are recruiters all they want is like you know is this person like excited are they capable of like kind of speaking about design are they passionate all that you know are they smart so that they're not really judging you on specific design knowledge what they're judging you probably is like does this person sound like someone I want to work with can they speak in an elegant way or whatever so it's okay not to answer their questions I think a lot of people do that and you can just talk about what you want to talk about right things that excite you yeah reflect on the past I've been applying to like head of design jobs and I basically have a document of what value I bring to the company so I think you should do that too so think about your career think about where you are okay and clearly write down what you want to do where you want to be let's just say you want to be an expert in product design you don't want to be a specialist you want to be a generalist or you're really fascinated with user research or you know something you want to learn more about and delve into where you are in your career now but also your achievements in the past at your company or what you've done that says I think I did really good at here and I believe I can transition that value to your company right I think that's a good practice as well also feedback at the end of the interview so one thing is that I like to do and not sure everybody likes to do this but I like to do it anyway I actually ask at the at the end of the interview I'm like so do you guys have any feedback from me you know how did that go in your perspective and so that will basically kill the doubt that you had in your head right if they didn't like it hopefully they give you some good feedback if they did like it uh then great let's move on but just for your own sanity ask that question I think I appreciate it when people ask that because I'm like oh look at the balls on this guy let's go right that's always good send a follow-up you should probably send a follow-up you should always send follow-ups why do we do this we send follow-ups to say thank you for your time first second is we say not only thank you for your time but we appreciate that you sat down spoke to us to show your enthusiastic right to show you actually want this job so it could be two lines in an email it doesn't have to be this cover letter of like this is my destiny clearly isn't right but you can just say simply thank you for your time I really enjoyed it if there's any other questions you want me to ask feel free to ping me and just be open and if you did f**k up let's just say they asked you where do you want to be in five years in manual and then you say ah I don't actually know then you can address that in the follow-up you can say oh that question kind of caught me by surprise but here's my short concise answer right you can address that and then what that does to interviewers is say oh this person is actually not as bad as I thought or I have warm feelings because they reached out directly after right do it within one or two hours as it's fresh in your head and just kind of be like look because when you wait for someone you're already nervous right so how do you address that by acting first by saying okay I'm just going to do what I can to close this deal but then after that you can't do anything right so address those feelings straight away if you didn't think it went well even if it did go well you should still address what you thought about it and just kind of move on you remember you're taking five minutes to write that email but the chances of you going through the probability will be higher after that as promised here are the bonus what if you didn't understand the question you are being asked in the interview so if you didn't understand the question basically what you just asked me right I said what do you mean and it's just it's a it's a mechanism for clarifying right so it doesn't you don't have to you don't have to be perfect they're not looking for the perfect person they're just looking for the person that's perfect for the role right they're looking for real humans so if you end up writing these cookie cutter answers likely you won't get hired really they want to know who you are and what you're passionate about right they want to see the potential right and that's what all good hiring processes kind of filter out so don't be too worried about that really it's just nervousness right it really is just about can you talk about what you work on in a concise manner and you know are you enthusiastic have you done some research on the company do you do you know what they're talking about or working on and yeah the first stage should be the easiest but if you knock off some of the items that I mentioned I believe your chances of success is a little bit higher and finally what do you do when you get rejected sometimes when they reject you and you get these rejection letters it weighs you down and I think that's super normal right like because you had such high hopes or you know everybody wants to sort of be like accepted or validated through some sort of recognition but this is the hiring process right you got to do it a million times so you grow thick skin and that you can kind of approach every situation like that you know whether it's selling your product online interviewing on a job or even dating right you're going to grow thick skin man otherwise you're not going to get the girl all right you're not going to sell the product and you won't get the job this is what it is right when you go up to a guy at a bar if she says no do you move on to the next one or do you still try either way people do different things but I'm saying to use that trying again is probably better and then if it still doesn't work then move on right this is the whole courting sort of thing with hiring processes there's probably only a couple of companies in the world that you should really work for as a designer right and the ones that you apply to I'm guessing are probably not those companies so it doesn't matter at the end of the day right so you know the best ones are like your Google your Apple your Airbnb your sort of like these creative agencies out there but literally there's probably 10 in the world but how many jobs are there there's there's hundreds of thousands of jobs so don't be super upset if it doesn't work out it just doesn't work out and and that might be for the better for something else right I always get upset as well when I don't get it because I want to get it because getting it feels good but not necessarily is it the best career decision as well let's just say both companies offer you a position which one are you going to choose you're going to have to reject one of them right so it's the same sort of concept so yeah if you need UX mentorship let's jump on a call link in the description or you can hit the big red button bye