Cheat Sheet is a practical guide to the hiring processes of some of the most competitive jobs. This week, General Electric wants to reinvent itself for the digital age, and you can help—but do a little soul-searching first.
See all the cheat sheets here.
First Round:
30-minute phone screen with human resources to discuss the projects you’ve worked on. You aren’t disqualified if you’ve never worked in user experience before, but this is the moment to clearly explain how your skills would transfer to this position.
Second Round:
Follow-up phone call with a senior member of the UX team, who will ask questions about your résumé in chronological order. The interviewer will be looking for patterns of success and growth in your career.
Third Round:
A one-day visit to the company’s user experience headquarters in San Ramon, Calif., for group workshops and five individual meetings with staff. Candidates with less experience will be tasked with a one-hour design challenge.
The Score:
The hiring team meets at the end of the day and ranks the candidate in a series of qualitative categories from 1 to 5. A candidate’s background carries more weight than his or her case study challenge, because some people get nervous. “I’m looking at whether this person has demonstrated consistency.”
Do take a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test. The best user experience professionals tend to be intuitive types, according to the test. “You have to be able to observe the needs, emotional states, and goals of the people you’re designing for.”
Do practice your delivery. “Working as a UX designer means creating a narrative around software development—if someone can tell a good story about someone they’ve observed, you can see the compassion.”
Don’t act like you know everything. “Naiveté can be more valuable than expertise. Sometimes experts can’t see a novel solution because they’re too close to the subject.”
Don’t take credit for things you didn’t do. “If you show us your portfolio, we can figure out pretty quickly if your collaborator at a prior firm did more of the work.”
Don’t go it alone. If given the choice to collaborate on your case study challenge or to work independently, “it’s always a bonus if the candidate decides to do the case study with somebody. It shows a willingness to be open with others.”
