8 red flags to watch out for in a UX job interview

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It was a dreary morning and I was hoping it wouldn’t start raining until after my 1 pm interview. The initial phone interview had gone well, but there was only so much I could learn in 30 minutes. There were plenty of red flags as early as the phone screen, but I wasn’t mature enough to spot them.

It was the interview with the hiring manager where I began spotting all of the red flags. I ignored a lot of them because I was excited about the position and the company I might be working for.

The manager was vague about the role’s requirements, and the position they were hiring me for was new—-a “bit of an experiment.” The job description was a carbon copy of any UX position listing you could find online, and my direct report would be someone who knew nothing of UX.

I knocked the interview out of the park, easily passed the design test, and received an offer the next day. I took the position and, within a month, regretted it. All of the red flags I had ignored became all too evident. I found myself looking for a new position in three months.

In the past 13 or 14 years, I’ve had a lot of different UX positions. I have read hundreds of job descriptions and wasted hours with in-person interviews for roles I knew I would never take.

Here’s what I normally home in on to get a sense of what I might be walking into.

We’re building a UX team

An organization that is building a new UX team can be a great opportunity or a major red flag.

One thing you need to figure out is how many positions they have open. I have discovered, many times, that there are only few positions available. I have taken a few of those jobs and, it turned out, they never planned or received budget approvals to hire more designers.

If you are OK with being a team of one or a few, this isn’t so bad. But if it is a large organization, you might find yourself with a mountain of work and not enough designers to ever really make an impact on the organization’s strategy.

I usually ask what prompted the organization to build a UX team. The answer will give you tremendous insight into how serious they are about design within their organization. If they are able to give you some detail around their upcoming projects where design will clearly play a prominent role, then that is a good sign. If you receive a vague or unsatisfactory answer, indicating they are playing “follow the leader,” that is not a good sign.

We need someone who can conduct research, design interfaces, and code

I am well aware that there are UX unicorns out there. But I try to ensure that I am not doing too many things and none of them very well. I’d rather be proficient at a few things than half-ass a lot of things.

That is the problem I see with this second warning sign. The organization simply wants to get more bang for their buck. I have done the research and the design, I have coded (many years ago) while fleshing out the design, but I wasn’t truly operating at full efficiency in any of those positions.

The true problem with this scenario relates to your own professional growth. If you truly want to grow as a designer, you will do so much quicker if you aren’t dividing your attention between being a good coder or researcher and sharpening your design skills. Otherwise, it will take you twice or thrice as long.

You’ll be reporting to the head of marketing, head of QA, head of development, or what have you

This is a short-term contract for three or six months

How do you manage conflict with a product manager or a development team?

We’d like to use the majority of the interview to focus on your portfolio

How experienced are you with Axure (or any other tool)?

Looks like we are all out of time