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Mentoring ‘no-hire’ design candidates

Are you doing what you can to help the next generation of designers find their way?

Drory Ben-Menachem

Published in

UX Collective

5 min readOct 7, 2019

Getting a “no-hire” decision from a potential employer is rough on any job candidate. But given their tendency to be emotionally invested in their work and their chosen profession, it can be particularly disheartening for designers.

To make matters worse, many companies have nondisclosure policies regarding candidate feedback — we’ve all heard the classic “thanks for your interest, but we’re going in a different direction with this position” generic response at some point in our own careers, right?

Obviously, the person who got hired had most, if not all, of what you were looking for, while others did not. But the question is: Why not? And why wouldn’t you share that feedback with the other candidates? Providing no feedback to a design job candidate does nothing to help them improve their interview performance or their chances of landing the next design job in the future.

So here’s a radical thought:

What if your “no-hire” decision wasn’t the last time you interacted with this person?

“But Drory,” I hear you lament, “I’m so very, very, very busy. Why should I spare time to mentor a designer that my team/company didn’t hire?”

Because we’ve all been that candidate at one point or another in our own design careers. Remember that? Yeah, sucked, didn’t it?

If it sounds like I’m talking to hiring managers, you’re right.

But what if you’re not responsible for hiring designers?

If you’ve ever interviewed, reviewed a portfolio of, or given feedback on a design candidate, then you are responsible for hiring designers — even if you’re not the one to ultimately make the hire/no-hire decision.

While this article was born of my recent experiences as a hiring manager — and I do believe that challenging my fellow design hiring managers to do this is part of our meaningful and sustainable impact on the discipline — coaching or mentoring designers is not the sacred realm of those who formally manage/lead/hire a team.

In response to John's statement:

As someone with both HR and design experience, I strongly support the initiative to mentor a "no-hire" candidate. This can be driven by a number of reasons:

1. The rationale to "no-hire" someone may have more to do…

After reading through this, I can proudly say that my firm has a good hiring system in place.

We are very particular about hiring freshers (individuals fresh out of college) so that we can train them in our ways. In 90 percent of the instances, an…