About two months ago, we decided to hire a Jr. UI Designer for our team and, as the UX/UI Design team leader for Stefanini's Applications sector in the North and Northeast, I actively participated in the selection process of the candidates, which was conducted in partnership with Edney Cruz, from HR. As Stefanini's Service Design strategist, my challenge is also to change internal processes and my goal is to make them adaptive to the contexts of time, space, and circumstances in which they are inserted. We wanted an inclusive, fair, empathetic selection that offered change, and we put our hands to align the existing process with a different way of selecting people. It is, as Edney said:
We need to remember that on the other side are human beings with expectations and families.
We designed the process, advertised the position, received the resumes, and Edney passed on to me the candidates that met the requirements of the position and aligned with the company's profile. One of our decisions was to include women, blacks, and people from the LGBTQ+ community, as well as people of different ages and professional backgrounds, in the 10 candidates who qualified for the second stage. I thoroughly reviewed each person's portfolio, resume, and LinkedIn and forwarded the UI Design exercise.
We then invited a Full UI Designer to analyze the exercises sent without him having access to any information from the candidates, besides the exercise itself. He selected 5, I selected 5, but we disagreed on one of the candidates. Instead of excluding him from moving on to the next stage, we included him, and he participated in the interview that was conducted with 5 candidates in all. The interview was about who they are, who they want to be, and the life they are building in the world because it is life that we share in our day-to-day work.
At the end of the process, we chose the person who best fit the position, but we did not forget the others. We didn't leave anyone without an answer, nor did we send an impersonal email communicating that it wasn't this time. Instead, we offered each of the 10 candidates 1 hour of feedback on their portfolios, resumes, and LinkedIn, in addition to the analysis of the proposed exercise. The 5 candidates who passed to the third stage were also offered career mentoring and feedback on their interview.
We need to understand that we can do better, do more for people.
We have a responsibility to the people who invest their time to participate in any of our selection processes. It is an honor to know that they want to work with us. We are very grateful for that! In return, we also invest our time to help them be better and get the job they want. This was a first step, of the many that we hope to take.
Here is the testimony of two candidates who participated in this process:
Welton L. Santos: It opened my eyes for me to find my mistakes myself
Ronaldo Buarque: Have you ever participated in a humanized interview?
Ayrton Renan was our selected candidate and is already immersed in his first project at Stefanini! Here is his testimony: They gave us all the support in the selection.
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DETAILED SELECTION PROCESS
As we were already working remotely, we created a space in a tool called Milanote for us to work collaboratively and dynamically throughout the selection.
0) Job description
We began the description of the position that was advertised talking about the function, the level of work and the type of person we wanted to hire, already mentioning collaboration, creativity and willingness to learn, which are some of our values as Stefanini.
"We are looking for a dedicated, questioning and innovative Junior UI Designer with a great willingness to learn, who is willing to work collaboratively and with a lot of creativity, to complete our team!"
We talked about the company so that people would get to know it, we were clear in describing the responsibilities that the selected person would have, we were clear on the skills needed for the position, we talked about the benefits offered by the company, the stages of the selection process, and we asked them to send us their portfolios, resumes, and LinkedIn links by a certain deadline. In this phase, Edney Cruz, who works as a headhunter of talents, advertised the position and searched for people who fit the requested profile.
1) Analysis of the Applicants
This is a standard phase where the candidates who did not meet the deadline or sent incompletely what was requested were eliminated. It is at this point that Edney conducts a brief interview and verifies the alignment of the candidates with the company's profile. We made a list of criteria to analyze the Resume, LinkedIn and Portfolio and Edney selected 10 candidates for the next step, including black, LGBTQ+ and women, as well as people of different ages and professional experiences.
I received the 10 candidates and thoroughly analyzed each one's portfolio, resume, and LinkedIn, making several notes about their strengths, weaknesses, profiles, and where they could improve.
2) Exercise
The candidates received an email congratulating them for moving on to the next step, with a description of the exercise they would be doing and some reference sites for them to do their research. We sent them information about what we consider good design practices and information about what would be evaluated in the exercise, as well as requirements and recommendations. We made a list of criteria for the evaluation of the exercise and invited a Full UI Designer to analyze the submitted exercises without having access to any information from the candidates.
He selected 5, I selected 5, but we disagreed on one of the candidates. Instead of excluding him from the next step, we decided to include him, and he participated in the interview, which was conducted with 5 candidates in total. The remaining candidates received an email informing them that they had not passed on to the next stage and an invitation to a video call to give feedback on their participation in the process. All received 1 hour of feedback on their portfolios, resumes, LinkedIn, and the analysis of the proposed exercise.
3) Interview
The candidates received an email congratulating them for passing to the interview stage and details about the interview: who would interview them, where the interview would take place (we tried Whereby, but ended up using wtsp anyway) and what kind of questions would be asked to prepare them, plus a reminder that said:
Always keep in mind that the best answer is the one that is aligned with who you are, not with what you think I want to hear.
The interview was light, relaxed, and without technical questions. The resume, the portfolio, and the exercise already gave us the technical information we needed. What we wanted was to understand who these people were, what they were going through at that moment, what they had overcome and learned, what their dreams were, how they reacted to unusual questions, how creative they were, how they saw society, how they failed in life, and what their reasons were for wanting to work with us.
We then selected the person who best fit what we were looking for that position. The other candidates received an email informing them that they were not selected and an invitation to a video call for feedback on their portfolios, resumes, LinkedIn, exercise and interview, and a career mentorship session.
Was it a lot of work? A lot! But it was extremely rewarding to be able to contribute to the growth of the people who came to us. Count on us, we will always be giving our best!
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