The take-home design challenge is broken. Here's how to survive it anyway.
Watch & Listen:
Four hours of unpaid work. Seven rounds of interviews. And then a generic rejection email that reads like it was written by a robot.
If you're hunting product design jobs right now, none of the above is news to you.
In this episode of The Design Table Podcast, Tyler and Nick have their opinions on the modern design hiring process; take-home challenges, endless interview rounds, and the red and green flags you should keep in mind to figure out if a company is worth your time.
They get into why take-home tests rarely test what companies think they're testing, why a whiteboarding challenge is the better alternative, and why paying candidates for their time is the bare minimum. Nick shares his own experience walking away from an unpaid "trial day." Tyler mentions the exact questions he asks recruiters to flush out red flags before he wastes his time on a dead-end process.
They also get tactical. How to actually win a take-home challenge if you have to do one. Why a Loom walkthrough can be the difference-maker over a stack of Figma files. And what interviewers are testing when they ask you to present your work.
Key takeaways
"If you really have to test someone's thinking, do a whiteboarding challenge—it doesn't take a lot of time, it's an hour, and you're testing how they work in collaboration with others, not in a bunker working on something alone."
"I'm gonna be investing a lot of man hours that I'm not being paid for. And if I don't get the job, that is a lost investment. The take home test doesn't really test the right thing—it just tests that you can work in a silo, when in reality you work in collaboration with other people."
Watch it on YouTube
Hosts
Tyler White
Tyler White is a Principal Product Designer with 15 years of experience in B2B SaaS and fintech, helping teams scope, frame, and connect design work to real business outcomes.
Nick Groeneveld
Nick Groeneveld is a freelance UX and product designers from the Netherlands. He started his design career in 2015 and has since then worked for startups, government agencies, and corporations.
