The UX job interview: more conversation, less recitation
4 simple tips on how to connect with your audience
UX job interviews commonly include a request for candidates to showcase prior work to a group of people before 1–1 interviews. After 300+ interviews, I’ve noticed four behaviors that are incredibly simple and make candidates shine. These tips are not about your portfolio — this is all about controlling the room with a conversational tone.
1. Ask the group to introduce themselves
Before you begin your presentation, ask everyone to introduce themselves. Even if you’ve already done your homework on who’s who, asking for this gives you several advantages:
- You appear comfortable and confident. You are not on a stage to be peered upon; you are in a group meeting where you are the expert on the topic (you!). If you do feel anxious, you may find that this helps you get comfortable, noticing each person rather than focusing on yourself.
- You demonstrate your ability to lead ad-hoc group conversations and create the environment. This is a critical capability of a design position and you’ve just kicked it off showing your mad skills.
- You learn how they position themselves, which helps you understand what they may be listening for in your presentation.
- Raw psychology: people like to talk about themselves (to the tune of 60% of their conversations) because it feels good. Now they are more ready to hear your story.
Hot tip 1: If they bring more than ~8 people, ask your point of contact in the room to give you a little context on the folks who are on the call (live). This can achieve similar results without burning up too much of your time. They may even point out that most are just observing, and introduce you to the few folks who you need to know.
Hot tip 2: Don’t go overboard by making assumptions about people based on their introductions. “Oh hey, you said you are an engineer so I’m sure you can relate to this crazy story.” Don’t do that. Don’t pretend you know them.
2. Introduce yourself, too
This sounds simple but is often forgotten. Even those of us who truly care about candidate experience face the reality of back-to-back meetings. Ease your audience into who you are before diving into your work.
This is NOT the time to run down your CV or explain how many titles you’ve had (they mean something different at every company anyway). This is NOT the time to share personal attributes or preferences with no relevance to your expertise (trained interviewers know to only focus on the qualifications, so stick to that part of your story).
This IS the time for your 30-second elevator story. You enjoy creating what kind of things? For what kind of people? With what kind of teams? “Ah, interesting. Ok, show me.”
3. Assume this group has no idea what your company or product is
Interviewers want to understand your work, so connect them with the story you are telling. In other words: context, context, context.
You don’t need to do a sales pitch; just explain why these pixels/flows/devices/things matter at all. In 30–60 seconds, share who the customer is and what the business is aiming to solve for them. This part doesn’t have to be boring — check out this Masterclass article on creative ways to set context in writing, and design the right approach for your story.
Then explain your awesome work and the impact it had.
4. Speak to the group, not your slides
This is a conversation, not a scripted commercial. The purpose of these meetings is for the group to understand your work and how you work. Designers are makers — whether you are making strategy, organizational plans, products, collaboration, software, hardware, or games, you’re making. This group of people likely are (or at least represent) your co-makers. Reading or memorizing a script tells them about what and how you make. Getting comfortable with the group and talking through it with them shows them.
You know your work best. That means you can show up with confidence and just have a conversation about it. Feel free to ask people to hold questions until you get a story or point explained, but take questions along the way in the meeting. When you can have a dialogue with them, you also learn about the team you’re interviewing for and what it might be like to work there. Are their questions aimed at learning more? (cool! A curious group.) Or somehow trying trap you? (Maybe not so fun to work with.) Practice your story, yes. But let the conversation flow.
Designers, if these behaviors are not something you are used to doing, start practicing now. You can practice at a design review, ask for help from an adplist.org mentor (I’m happy to help! 👋), or role play with a friend. Remember: it’s your work, your story. We are all just here to learn!
