In light of Delivery Hero’s Talent acquisition team being selected as one of the finalists in the LinkedIn Best Talent Acquisition Teams Awards in Germany, we thought about providing more support to candidates by sharing some insights about our hiring process, and how to join the Design team at Delivery Hero.
This article addresses some of the most relevant questions about our recruitment process: finding candidates, and what designers can do to get hired. So strap on your career belt and join us on this virtual journey!
LinkedIn is here to stay
LinkedIn is where our recruiters go hunting on a Monday afternoon. Being a consumer-focused company, we are interested in the unique experiences potential candidates bring from other consumer-focused companies, so that is where we look first. Candidates whose status is set to ‘Open to work’ are the easiest to notice, so we usually tend to reach out to them.
But LinkedIn is not the only place where we find our candidates. We have been exploring Medium, where we occasionally notice interesting projects shared by designers that catch our attention. A Medium article can give us some insight into how a candidate thinks. This can then prompt us to look into their public portfolio on Behance or Dribbble to get an understanding of his or her work.
A clear online portfolio speaks for itself
A clear portfolio is the #1 way to evaluate a candidate’s work. When a candidate has a clearly explained portfolio online, this gives us the best medium to evaluate his or her abilities. But we still understand that sometimes work can be constrained by a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) to publishing. In such cases, we look at their CV and a description of their roles on LinkedIn, mentions of their team structures, ways of working which can help us understand more about the candidate, and then we might reach out to arrange a video call. Often, one complete project is sufficient for us to evaluate a candidate’s past work.
Finding the right fit
Outside of a clean portfolio, we seek out exclusively 3 culture fit indicators – Motivation, Collaboration and Initiatives. Motivation is often evaluated through the energy while talking about their work and the excitement in the role under consideration. Collaboration is assessed by how well a candidate can manage multiple stakeholders and their comfort in working with multiple stakeholders. Initiatives are also considered to be important and entail how proactively a candidate takes on challenges by not waiting for them to be handed over to him or her.
Going through our interview process
Having established our general guiding principles of hiring, let us look at our 3-stage interview process itself. When a candidate starts their hiring process with us, their portfolio is usually reviewed by one of our recruiters and Senior/Lead Designers. After we assess their skills and abilities according to their portfolio, we usually set up a call with them for an online portfolio review.
#1 – Online portfolio review
The online portfolio review is usually with the hiring manager or one of the Senior Designers depending on the level of the role the candidate is applying for. During the online portfolio round, the candidate is asked to talk about one of his or her case studies, the process he or she followed, the challenges faced and the outcome they arrived at. The candidate’s good communication and storytelling will be a big plus at this stage.
#2 – Whiteboard Challenge
The whiteboard challenge is a 1.5 hour call, usually moderated by two Senior Designers or Leads. This round is a way of evaluating how a candidate will be at the job, and a chance to learn about what it would look like to work at Delivery Hero. During the whiteboard challenge, we primarily assess collaboration, ability to break down user and business problems, ability to create customer journeys, time management and relevance of the solutions. We also give special appreciation to creative and innovative solutions. At this stage, the candidates are expected to present their solutions to stakeholders, so good storytelling comes in handy.
For certain specific design roles, such as those directly related to design systems teams, we often ask candidates to complete a take-home design task instead of a whiteboard challenge, so that we can better assess and match the design skills to the role most suited to them.
#3 – Final Interview(s)
The final interviews generally face to face calls with one of the design managers, design leads & product managers. The objective of this round is to find a culture and impact fit with the teams that the candidate will be working with, based on their interests and previous roles. As we do not want to lose good candidates if they do not fit into a specific team, there may be more than one round in some cases until we find another team the candidate may fit into.
Why candidates sometimes do not make it through
Yes, it is time to talk about the tough topic – rejections. We have seen some patterns among candidates who do not make the cut in our interview process. As a portfolio is our first interaction with the candidate, a poor portfolio tends to get the first rejection. If on a website, a good portfolio needs to have clear navigation and address the reader’s experience. The work also needs to be consistent with the work experience specified in the candidate’s CV. Generally, we’re assessing process, research, visual design and interaction design.
During the whiteboard round, time management is an important aspect candidates often miss out on. This is because they sometimes tend to spend too much time on one topic and are unable to go through all the stages of the process. If a candidate cannot go through all the stages in the given timeframe, it is about compromise – what stages do they value and how do they approach the given problem.
Other red flags are when candidates lie on their portfolio, are not clear communicators, or do not collaborate with other stakeholders during the whiteboard challenge.
At the end of the day, if a candidate has all the relevant skills and experience, we try to find a role specifically for them. If they do not fit for the specific role they interviewed for, we may try to find them another role they may fit based on their work. In such cases, there is no one solution for all, usually it is a case by case basis.
Thank you Aswin and team for sharing these Product Design application tips and tricks with us!
As always, we are still hiring, so check out some of our latest openings, or join our Talent Community to stay up to date with what’s going on at Delivery Hero and receive customized job alerts!
