Hiring designers from job descriptions, to screening, interviewing, and onboarding. Book Review: Liftoff! (Part 3)
In this article, I will reflect on chapters 4 to 7 of the book “Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You”. If you’re looking for a shorter and condensed review you can check out my TL;DR review. Are you interested in getting the book? Buy it via Rosenfeld Media’s website.
Chapter 4: Performance Profiles and Interview Guides
The fourth chapter starts off with an intriguing hook. The authors tease a supposedly superior alternative to a classic management staple: job descriptions. Instead of conjuring up the “same old, same old” list of bullet points that put applicants to sleep, readers are teased by a new and better way: performance profiles. These are supposed to communicate tangible performance targets in addition to a role’s key duties.
The first visual example given in the book is seeminlgy one of the simpler ones, where a certain performance profile contains information about reaching a certain sales quota. I was immediately intrigued and breezed through the chapter to find out more. To my surprise, the chapter continues in strong fashion, as the authors lay out a sample workshop format on how to collaboratively create a performance profile with the team. Unfortunately, this is where my excitement quickly turns into confusion and then disappointment.
The workshop format is seemingly ordinary, filled with collaborative brainstormings and dot voting. My criticism isn’t about the sample agenda, but about the output example that follows. The authors put an illustration in the book, which shows one of the resulting “role objectives” and a few key duties.
This is where my excitement turned into disappointment. Isn’t this just another traditional job description? I don’t think there was anything terribly wrong with them in the first place, but much of the guidance in this chapter is true. You don’t want to put too many bullet points in your job ad as it’s been proven to encourage significantly more males to apply. You definitely want to check your copy with a tool such as textio to check for discriminatory language.
Maybe this isn’t supposed to be the performance profile in its entirety, but just one part of it. This is definitely not clear in the book and really left a sour taste in my mouth. Nevertheless, I felt inspired by this chapter and wonder how I would write a performance profile for a design or research role. How about these?
- For a design leader: You will establish a design review process that reduces feedback loops with stakeholders in half by the end of the year.
- For a senior user researcher: You will rethink our user research practice to achieve bi-weekly research sessions as opposed to monthly by the end of your third month.
- For a designer: You will complete an interface inventory in collaboration with the frontend developers for all 3 of our B2C products by the end of your second month.
The chapter ends with a bit of information on how to create an interview guide. For the organized folks out there, this isn’t really ground-breaking news. Prepare your questions based on your job description or performance profile and make sure to follow interviewing best practices.
Chapter 5: Screening Designers
The fifth chapter dives into screening designers, mainly via phone screens. Compared to Mark Horstman’s book “The Effective Hiring Manager”, Liftoff gives decent guidance, which isn’t as detailed. There are quite a few examples of “behavioral interviewing” sprinkled throughout this and other chapters, so kudos for that.
The authors make a good case for “blind screening” which is backed up by research on blind auditions for orchestras in one famous study. As the book prides itself on being practical, I’d expect a bit more information on how organizations in various sizes can do this effectively. I can’t imagine smaller-sized startups spending a significant amount of time and labor to editing resumes for their colleagues so they can hire even slower, but without bias.
Chapter 6: Interviewing Potential Team Members
This is the part of the book where you might feel like you’re currently reading your favorite designer Slack group (mine is “Designer Hangout” ;-)). What do the authors think about on-site assessments? Take-home exercises? What are the dos and donts for interviewing designers?
Whenever I’m reading about opinions or anecdotes, I get quite vary about human biases and echo chambers. Unfortunately, this chapter isn’t filled with much evidence or research studies. Sure, I’m not a fan of doing unpaid work either to get a chance to interview at a company, but that doesn’t tell me what’s effective. As a manager I’d like to strike a balance between hiring the best candidate and giving everybody the same chance to make it through. What I don’t care about is simply making everything easy for the sake of making things easy. Let’s assume that we implement the suggestion to pay designers for their assessments with a decent hourly rate. How much can we expect to pay here per position we’re trying to fill? What if we can’t get the budget for this? I’ve frequently found that the authors don’t go into too much detail when you meet resistance on implementing the various practices.
To be honest, this lack of evidence (besides anecdotes) has been plaguing most of the chapters on hiring in this book so far. There are definitely valuable things to learn about compared to more general books on hiring. Hiring designers is a bit special after all, since a lot of other roles don’t rely on portfolios for instance.
In regard to panel interviews there wasn’t a whole lot of guidance to be found. To me, this was in stark contrast to Horstman’s “The Effective Hiring Manager”. A great book follows the formula of explaining why something is not effective with rationale and data. It then follows by offering an alternative, including the steps on how to implement it. This is something that I’ve missed frequently when reading various chapters and parts of “Liftoff”.
Chapter 7: Offers, Negotiations and Onboarding
The seventh chapter isn’t that long, but it came with quite a few inspiring methods and techniques. I particularly enjoyed the parts about creating flexible compensation packages, levergaging journey mapping to design and improve the onboarding experience and the suggested buddy system.
We all have different needs and might value different components when it comes to a job offer. I thought the authors gave a few good examples on differentiating in the offer phase of the hiring process. It should be said though that a lot of companies can’t be that flexible at all. In my experience and from what I could read in online communities, most organizations are not that open about their salary ranges. This means it’s very likely that you aren’t working in one of these companies either and might not be able to design multiple different offers.
If you’re familiar with journey mapping, you might find the parts about improving onboarding with this method easy to follow and inspiring. Since journey mapping can start off quite basic (see Jared Spool’s article on the topic) the barrier of entry shouldn’t be as high as you might think. The most important thing about the map though is to create it collaboratively. Make something together, show it to people and gather their feedback if the created map is accurate or should be changed to get closer to reality. This has the crucial “side effect” of driving alignment across roles and departments. Don’t count on HR to fully support you here though, they might even feel like you’re walking on “their turf”.
The buddy system isn’t something that’s particularly ground-breaking, but it definitely was described in a concise and effective manner by the authors. The example from New York University seems to be fleshed out very well and very impressive in the level of detail it’s explained. Most companies which have any kind of onboarding process will most likely feature assigning a mentor already. I do feel though that these are often very shallow and the book gives some solid, actionable guidance which should help anybody to support their next hire without having to sacrifice all of their own time.
Team members who act as a buddy or mentor obviously also benefit from this role in many ways. First, they will naturally have to act as a leader in this relationship, which also allows you to observe their behaviors in this regard. Then, according to many, teaching is an essential step on the path to mastering any skill. Lastly, chances are that you have a busier schedule than your team members, which means the new hire will get the attention they deserve.
This article is part of a series, where I review the book “Liftoff! Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You” in detail:
- TL;DR review
- Chapters 1–3: Design leadership definitions, diversity & inclusion, and designing the hiring process
- Chapters 4–7: Hiring designers from job descriptions, to screening, interviewing, and onboarding
- Chapters 8–10: Team Charters, One-on-Ones, and Design Critiques
- Chapters 11–13: Presenting work, saying no, and growing your designers
- Chapters 14–16: Scaling design, influencing your organization, and escaping velocity
- BONUS: Collection of books, articles, and other resources for leading design teams.
