This week we learned about interview skills.
Daniel had asked employers want they hired on in interviews and an employee at Rapid7 a big employer in Belfast responded. They said that they usually hire on values and the 3 values the company goes by are;
- Never Done- always willing to finish a project and show commitment and learn from the process
- Challenge Convention- challenging the norm and going above and beyond
- Impact Together- be a team player in the company
- Bring You- bring your ideas and enthusiasm for design
- Be an Advocate- be an advocate for the user and tailor your work to them
We were urged to think about what our values would be, these should be qualities that make you a better designer and wanted by employers.
The Interview
After this we discusses the interview process and the points we should tie our answers in with.
It’s important to bring up prior experience with a question they ask you. It let’s the interviewer know that you can handle situations like this in their company. If you can describe your experience with the company or your core values in mind, this could help.
Understanding the role you are applying for makes sure that if the interviewer asks you anyway questions about this you know how to answer them. Not knowing this makes you seem like you don’t know what your doing and looks unprofessional.
Bringing enthusiasm into the interview is a great way of showing that you will try your best in the job role as it is something you really care about.
The willingness to learn is a really important quality for placement students to have as, right now, we don’t know everything and not having an ego allows us to be more open for feedback and improving.
Interviewers will want to know you have aspirations. They want to know you are motivated to do well in this job and have aspirations of being better. I know I want to be able to succeed in a UX role and get experience with other parts of design therefore, letting the company knowing you always want to grow and improve.
One of the most important things to remember about applying for UX roles is that it is always about the user. Having a user-centered approach to how you talk about the design process is very important. I’ve started learning this in my other module and mentioning even small things you’ve done for user research such as, small interviews or surveys, will look like you really understand the job.
Tying your answers back to any of these points below will always keep you on track and emphasise your employable qualities.
When talking about a particular story or experience in an interview, use speaking points to help you remember. We were given this sort of template to fit our own experiences in to help us with this.
- Start with the backstory — give short context to the story and explain why it is important.
- Go through your actions — give the highlights of the story and keep it concise. Explain what happened and the obstacles you overcame.
- End with positive outcomes — explain how what you did improved the business/project.
My example
I decided to write an example for this using an experience of when I worked in the nursing home as a cleaner. This would be an answer for if I’ve ever worked in a team.
- The cleaning team I worked with were very understaffed, which lead to a lot of problems cleaning all the resident’s rooms in time.
- I hadn’t worked there there that long so the process was still new to me, however I really wanted to improve my efficiency to be able to clean more rooms in a shorter time. I watched what my co-workers did and how they handled tasks to complete them quicker. I took notes of this and implemented them into my own process.
- This halved my cleaning time and along with everyone else in the team contributing, we were able to clean all 52 rooms in the 4 hour timeframe. This resulted in the business doing better and the residents being much more comfortable.
Workshop
This week’s workshop involved us splitting into pairs and asking each other interview questions. One of us would be the interviewer and the other the interviewee. We were given 8 example questions and each response had to be marked by the “interviewer” out of 5. After all 8 questions were answered and marked, we swapped over.
I was very nervous for this as I hadn’t had any interview experience in this kind of job role and I was worried about what I was going to say. However, I decided to go first as the interviewee to just get is started and see what happened.
This was my highest marked question, “What was your favourite project and why?. My answer was “My ‘Rural Escapes’ travel app was my favourite as the final design looked really polished and I was really happy with how my colour and layout choices looked. I took on a lot of feedback that I was given throughout the project and I really think it improved the design and my skills overall. After the app prototype was completed I had my family and friends navigate through it to see if it was simple for them. Some of them found the ‘my account’ button hard to understand so I reworked it to be more clear”.
Overall I scored quite high with a 35/40 marks. I just tried to remember the key points I mentioned above to tie things back to but I couldn’t remember them all at the time. The only point that really came back to me was ‘user-centered design’ as I knew that is a key part of the job so I tried to mention that where I could.
This week I continued working on my CV and Cover Letter but I decided to add a bio as I had forgotten to do so before. This week’s lecture also made me understand that, the more the employers know of you and your values the better.
