The death of take-home design exercises

Hiring great designers is hard, so why make it harder?

Recruiters, hiring managers and design leaders: we all know that it’s hard to hire great designers. One surefire way to scare off great designers is to give them take-home exercises! There’s growing resistance against such exercises in the design community: in this article, I’ll dive into their ethical and practical concerns before sharing some helpful alternatives.

What’s wrong with take-home exercises?

They devalue designers’ time

As a designer, you have probably been asked to design a logo, website and/or wedding invitation for free before. Take-home exercises fall into the same category of practices that devalue designers’ time.

Let me draw a parallel: imagine that you’re looking for an accountant, therapist, or babysitter. How do you ensure that you pick the right person? Would you look at their past work, read professional references and pay for a few trial sessions? Or, would you ask them to complete an unpaid assignment in their spare time?

They devalue personal time

Job searching is a long, arduous process. It’s common to look for jobs while also working full-time. In between researching companies, speaking to recruiters and completing take-home exercises, designers are left with very little personal time.

Personal time doesn’t just mean napping and watching Netflix. It also means: working on side-projects, learning new skills, mentoring others, caring for loved ones and tending to mental and physical health. Personal time is sacred, and unfortunately, take-home exercises normalize the encroachment of work into our personal lives.

They produce bespoke work that designers can’t reuse

Imagine you’re interviewing for eight roles over two weeks. Half of those roles involve take-home exercises that each take 5–8 hours to complete. In total, that would be two or three full working days dedicated to producing bespoke work…unpaid work…work that you can’t use again.

Instead of asking designers for bespoke work, consider using more standardized design assessments instead (we’ll dive into this later).

They produce free work for your company

One startup asked me to design a new ‘Partnerships’ page for their website. Another asked me to redesign their app navigation. Another asked me to rebrand their annual summer festival. In all of these instances, I would have been producing novel, valuable and marketable ideas for free.

Soliciting free design and development work via hiring exercises is a big no-no. Doing so can damage your brand reputation and sever candidate relationships.

“But,” you say, “we’re a fintech company and our exercise is to design a food delivery app. We won’t profit off the designer’s work!” Maybe not directly, but any awesome ideas that a designer might come up with could still be poached and integrated into your work.

Let’s adopt this as the industry norm: asking designers, engineers, or anyone for bespoke work = fair compensation for our time.

Why don’t take-home exercises work?

You can’t see how designers collaborate

Design is highly collaborative: we interview users, ideate with product managers, influence stakeholders and outline constraints with engineers. Take-home exercises, however, are completed in isolation rather than realistic team settings. These exercises might be suitable for showcasing process and craft, but they fail at measuring collaboration and soft skills.

You can’t control factors like time

Let’s ask two designers, Amelia and Joseph, to complete the same 5–8 hour task:

Amelia left her job a month ago. She’s financially stable and has no dependents. She spends two full days on the exercise, conducting extensive research, ideating wireframes and crafting polished prototypes. She even had enough time to test her prototypes with friends. You’re thoroughly impressed by her effort and perceived efficiency, and she has set the competitive benchmark.

Joseph is a full-time working father. His son struggles with remote learning, so he spends a few hours each day teaching. He spends his weekends with his mother, who recently suffered from a fall. He could only spare two hours for your exercise, but in that time, he produces some thoughtful assumptions, user flows and low-fidelity sketches. You can see that he’s a great designer, but your mind is now anchored to Amelia.

Time is a huge variable, and it can hugely influence the outcome of take-home exercises. It’s neither fair nor effective to measure designers by work that they produce in their spare time.

They scare off high-quality designers

Presenting take-home exercises, especially during the earlier stages of your hiring process, is a surefire way to lose great candidates. If your company currently offers take-home exercises, measure the percentage of people who voluntarily drop off at this stage. How many of these drop-offs could have been that amazing designer that you were looking for? The one who smashes success metrics, masters their craft, shapes new processes and defines industry standards?

These are the designers you don’t want to lose. They’re also the ones who understand their market worth, and they will be the first to go if your hiring process isn’t frictionless, enjoyable and human.

Alternatives for take-home exercises

It’s important to measure a designer’s craft, process and skills, but there are better ways to do this:

First, understand what you’re looking for

Get your team together and ask: what kind of designer do we want, and what key skills do we need? Your answers might fall into some (or all) of these categories:

1. Visual craft. Solid execution. Modern and functional designs.
2. Product thinking. Solving complex problems strategically.
3. Interaction design. Crafting sound experiences that drive user goals.
4. Collaboration. Communication, authenticity, and openness to feedback.
5. Leadership: Proactiveness, influence, and an innovative mindset.

Then, choose some of these industry standards

Once you’ve identified your priority areas, consider using some of these suggested industry standards. As industry standards, they allow designers to gain transferrable skills that can applied to any role:

1. Past work presentation. Ask the designer to walk you through their past work. Evaluate how they validated assumptions, made pivotal decisions and collaborated with others. Use this opportunity to understand their product thinking, process, proactiveness and execution.
2. Live app critique. Pick an app, service, or website to critique with the designer. How well do they extrapolate business and user goals? Do they understand the intentionality behind the content, information architecture and interactions? With an app critique, you can evaluate a designer’s technical literacy and ability to think on their feet.
3. Behavioral interview. Ask the designer about their background, achievements, failures and future goals. This is a great way to learn about a designer’s priorities, strengths and improvement areas. It’s also the best way to identify high-impact individuals who could transform your organization.
4. Live design challenge. Give the designer a prompt, either ahead of time or on the day, and solve the problem collaboratively. How do they approach ambiguous challenges? How do they respond to criticism and suggestions? What assumptions do they make to drive the conversation forward?

Suggested best practices

For take-home exercises to have a respected place in design hiring, we need to take a few steps to make them more effective and fair:

Tailor the exercise to the designer

Be agile and responsive to the strengths of each designer, rather than giving everyone the same task. Let’s apply this to two designers:

Amelia is a UX and research expert, but her portfolio lacks strong examples of high-fidelity work. Some of her visual designs look dated. You’re looking for a “full-stack designer” with strong visual skills, so you might challenge her to design a conceptual interface in a limited time.

Joseph’s portfolio shows sound processes and exceptional end designs. After interviewing him, you see that he is humble, proactive and highly collaborative. He would be a great fit at your company; in fact, you’re worried that he might get snapped up by top companies. If you ever encounter a designer like Joseph, why, oh why, would you ask them to complete a take-home exercise?

Compensate designers for take-home exercises

Please consider compensating designers for take-home exercises, even if the task isn’t directly related to your business. They’re still producing bespoke work while generating ideas that can enrich and enlighten your business.

Think about it this way: how much would you pay to ensure that you hired the right person? $500? $5000? Pick an amount, and there’s your budget for compensating people for take-home exercises.

Limit take-home exercises to 1–2 hours

If you don’t have the budget to compensate people, then consider limiting the scope of your exercise so that it can be completed in 1–2 hours.

Instead of “design a food delivery app,” consider:

“YouFood is a food delivery service in Shoreditch, London. They deliver on-demand home-cooked lunches to customers, but they have been overwhelmed by orders during the pandemic. Customers are frustrated with receiving the wrong orders and food arriving cold.

How would you address this? Please provide low-fidelity sketches as your final deliverable, and limit the time spent to 1–2 hours.”

In summary…

Evaluating a designer’s craft, collaboration and potential is great. Asking designers to produce bespoke, uncompensated work is not.

Designers – if you ever receive an unreasonable take-home exercise, don’t just accept it as the “done thing”. Consider this instead:

Hey [Recruiter Name],

Thanks for sending me the design exercise. It looks interesting and I’m excited to proceed to the next step. However, I’m concerned about its scope.

It would take me [x] —[x] hours to complete it to an acceptable standard, and unfortunately, I don’t have much spare time right now due to [personal projects/caring for dependents/whatever].

Would you consider limiting the scope, or compensating me for my time?

Thanks!

[Awesome Designer Name]