UX workshops are intensive collaborative sessions used to solve problems and enable progress on a particular challenge throughout the design timeline. While these workshops are typically used during projects to align on user experience and design, the same facilitation and UX techniques can be applied to a hiring process.

If your hiring process is unorganized or the criteria for good candidates seem arbitrary, putting a defined structure in place will streamline your hiring process.

UX workshop techniques in hiring. Align: Set clear goals for the role and what it will bring to the organization. Diverge: Collect feedback from interviewers individually. Converge: Discuss discrepancies as a group to narrow down candidates. Prioritize: Compare candidates based on skills and value to the company.
Different phases of the hiring process can benefit from UX-workshop techniques.
Different phases of the hiring process can benefit from UX-workshop techniques.
Different phases of the hiring process can benefit from UX-workshop techniques.

Become Aligned as an Organization or Team

Often, when a hiring process is disjointed, it’s because the organization or team does not have a clear vision of what it’s looking for in a new candidate or role. This problem can be mitigated by emphasizing alignment on team needs before searching and interviewing candidates.

In order to get the most out of your hiring process, be sure to set clear goals. These goals help teams establish common ground at every step of the hiring process, from initial candidate screening to final interviews. Think of this process as a discovery workshop, one of the 5 types of UX workshops.

We can apply the same three building blocks from UX-workshop agendas to align on our hiring process:

  • Goal: The desired outcome or end result of hiring this new candidate or role
    • What need will this candidate or role fill in the organization?
    • What will we be able to do once this candidate joins our team?
    • What will happen if we don’t fill this gap?
  • Questions: The information that the team needs to gather in order to reach the stated goal
    • How will this role or candidate work with others on the team?
    • Where does the team currently struggle and how will this person leverage those gaps?
    • What kind of skills will we have once this person joins the team?
    • Where will we still have gaps if we hire this person?
  • Processes: The activities the team or organization will do in order to gather the required information
    • How will we evaluate skills of candidates?
    • When will we know that we’ve found a good match?
    • How will we narrow down multiple candidates that meet our criteria?

Diverge and Converge When Evaluating Candidates

Usually, there are many different people involved in a hiring process: a recruiter who screens resumes, a manager who conducts a phone interview, a team member who asks questions during an onsite interview, and so on. These people all have different perspectives on what it would be like to work with a candidate and, therefore, should all be included in the final hiring evaluation in some way.

We can borrow the diverge-and-converge technique used in UX workshops to gather perspectives from all members of the hiring process and narrow them down to a final path forward.

One way to do this is by setting up a form to collect feedback on candidates from those involved in the hiring process. This form should allow screeners and interviewers to leave their feedback on a candidate. This aspect of the process is done diverged so that interviewers give input without being biased by someone else (potentially someone who is more influential than themselves).

Figma candidate assessment forms for interviewers to leave detailed feedback after interviews
Figma: An internal recruiting and hiring feedback tool called Lever is used to record feedback from those involved in interviews. The image on the left shows an open text field, originally used for feedback collection. The feedback form was updated to include specific ratings on the candidate’s skills and culture fit in order to prompt valuable feedback from interviewers.

Once feedback has been collected, the team can converge to discuss discrepancies. The individual rankings are a guide to facilitate discussion and not the end of the decision-making process. These discussions can help narrow down a large pool of candidates, or further validate that your front runner is the right candidate.

Here are some sample discussion points:

  • How much training would this candidate need to be at the highest rating?
  • Does the candidate’s knowledge of x make up for lack of y?
  • For skills that have a wide range of rankings: What did you hear or perceive in the interview that made you rate them that way?

Narrow Down Candidates Using Prioritization Matrices

We use prioritization matrices to make decisions in the UX process based on objective, relevant criteria instead of subjective opinions. We can also use them in our hiring process to narrow down multiple good candidates that we’ve interviewed. Think of this step as a prioritization workshop, another of the 5 types of UX workshops.

Set up one or more matrices with criteria that make sense for your organization. A good approach is to create one matrix with more general criteria and a second that narrows in on more specific criteria. Some examples include:

  • General criteria
    • Skill level of the candidate
    • Culture add to the organization (new ideas or perspectives that a candidate can bring to the team or company)
  • Specific criteria
    • Design skills (or research, content, and so on)
    • Communication of ideas
    • Ability to assign on client projects
    • Cost to the organization (salary, training, and so on)
Two prioritization matrices: one comparing culture add versus candidate skill level and the other comparing research skills versus design skills
The matrices above show how to plot candidates on a general matrix evaluating culture add and candidate skill level, as well as on a specific matrix involving criteria like research skills and design skills. Filter out candidates that end up in the red zones and narrow your focus to the candidate(s) closest to the green zone.
Two prioritization matrices: one comparing culture add versus candidate skill level and the other comparing research skills versus design skills
The matrices above show how to plot candidates on a general matrix evaluating culture add and candidate skill level, as well as on a specific matrix involving criteria like research skills and design skills. Filter out candidates that end up in the red zones and narrow your focus to the candidate(s) closest to the green zone.

Using these matrices will help the hiring team narrow down candidates until it finds the right person.

Conclusion

UX workshops are essential in creating good user experiences and collaborating with our teams. We can use these same techniques internally at our organizations to build effective hiring processes.

Consider trying the techniques discussed and then conducting a retrospective meeting to discuss how you can improve the process in the future. Like with any UX activity or technique, iterate on the process until it works for your team.