This week I was planning to focus mostly on hiring. Yet as with anything, other stuff came up.Â
Urgent, unexpected 😅
This week my time was too planned. I blocked out nearly every hour for hiring work and preparing a workshop with Laura about how Made Tech does alphas.Â
I didn’t leave any time for urgent and unexpected things. One of these things inevitably came up this week. The kind of thing a manager learns about at 5pm and needs attention there and then. As a designer the focus of my work used to be predictable stuff like plastic or HTML. Now the material I work with isn’t a material, quite the opposite, it's people. Who are subtle, complicated and unique.
The lesson for me is to always leave time for urgent, unexpected stuff. I can’t plan for everything, especially now my job is to support people, not design things. Doing stuff to support people at short notice, feels like the most universal part of being a manager, in any organisation.
Market mapper 🛒
I drove to my mother-in-law’s house this week. She had an appointment and needed someone to receive her weekly food shop. I got chatting with the delivery driver. They told me they used to do the role of going round the supermarket and getting items for each home delivery. To do that job, they said staff have a mobile app that tells them where in the store every item is. Not sure if it helps with the travelling salesman problem of the fastest route between things. Regardless, I wish this app was publicly available. I waste so much time when shopping trying to find things in the store.Â
I imagine people who design supermarket layouts have similar brains to people designing website navigation and information architecture.Â
Iterate as we go 🔷 🔵 💙 💚
We’ve done eight UCD interviews this week, with more to come. Kayleigh, Laura, Matt C and Matt L have been great fellow interviewers.Â
We’ve iterated the interview format as we’ve gone. One person we interviewed gave feedback to Lee that there were a lot of ‘(great) questions’ but they felt their interview was a bit tightly packed and expected more follow-up questions.
So we adapted:
People show and talk through an example of work
We only ask questions to learn about stuff we’ve not seen and heard through the example of work shown
As a result of this change, the interviews became more conversational, slower and relaxed. Already we have a list of things we need to learn in the interview, which meant we were still assessing people skills in a consistent way.
Trying to be fair ⌛
The interviews we’ve been doing this week are the third of four stages in our current UCD hiring process. In the final interview, our goal is to learn more about people’s hands-on research or design skills. In particular how they respond to the types of challenges in the public sector.
Our first go in trying to do this is to give people some practical tasks:
Prepared before the interview
Given 5-7 days before the interview
Tell people not to spend more than 90 minutes preparing
Like asking for portfolios, making people do tests on the spot in interviews or prepare a full presentation is problematic. Frankly, it’s biased towards people who can afford the days outside of work. Free time is a structural privilege. We’ve tried to make it fairer with how we’ve designed this final hiring stage. I’m sure it’s far from perfect and I welcome feedback.