In 2020 I stopped sending design assignments as part of the interview loop. I have not missed them once, and the arguments I hear for keeping them have not improved in the six years since.
This was at Grammarly, in the middle of a hiring run that took the design team from five people to fifteen in a year and eventually brought in around seventy across product, design and research. Volume is what forced the question. When you run four candidates a month you can absorb a bad stage in the loop. When you run four a week you find out exactly what each stage in your loop is measuring, because you see the same failure repeatedly.
What the assignment measures
The stated purpose is to see how someone thinks about a problem. The actual purpose, in most companies, is to produce an artefact that a hiring committee can look at, because looking at an artefact feels more objective than forming a judgment about a person.
What it measures in practice is discretionary time.
The strong candidate without dependents, currently unemployed or in a job with slack in it, gives you fourteen hours polished to a very high finish. The equally strong candidate with two small children and a demanding role gives you four hours, and it looks worse, and your committee reads the difference as ability. I have watched that comparison happen in a room and I have made it myself. Nobody in that room is trying to filter for household circumstance. They filter for it anyway, because the artefact does not come with a timesheet attached.
There is a second problem. The prompts are almost always a lightly disguised version of a real problem the team is currently stuck on, which means you are asking people to do unpaid work on your roadmap as the price of consideration. Most companies would deny this and most prompts fail the test.
What we did instead
Two changes, and they are cheaper than the thing they replaced.
A collaborative whiteboard session in the onsite. A real problem, sixty minutes, two people from the team in the room working it with the candidate rather than watching them. You learn things an artefact cannot show you: what they ask before they draw, whether they change their mind when given new information, how they handle someone senior disagreeing with them, whether they can put a bad idea on the board fast in order to get to a better one.
A portfolio review with the whole design team present. Three or four relevant projects, presented by the candidate, with everyone attending while the team was still small enough for that to be possible. The point was not broad consensus but exposure: the candidate meeting the team as it actually is, and the team owning the hire rather than receiving it.
Both stages take the company's time rather than the candidate's, which I think is the correct direction for that cost to run.
The version I actually prefer
Everything above is what you do when you are hiring at volume and need a process a dozen people can run consistently. When I am hiring one person and I have any say over how, I would rather do something else entirely: work with them for a few weeks and pay them their rate.
Not a trial task. Not a scoped exercise marked against a rubric. A real piece of the actual work, with the actual team, at their normal hourly or daily rate, for two or three weeks.
You learn more in the first week of that than a full loop produces. How they ask for what they need. What they do on the day the brief changes. Whether the engineers start routing questions to them without being told to. None of that is available from a portfolio, and all of it is the job.
The objections are real and I have made most of them myself. It is slow. It does not scale past a handful of hires a year. It needs a budget line and a contract that most companies have not set up. And it is hard for anyone still employed somewhere else, which means running it as your only route would select for people between jobs without anyone deciding to, which is its own bias and a worse one than the take-home has.
So it is not a general answer. But where it is available I do think it beats everything else, and it is the only format I know where the candidate is evaluating you with the same quality of information you are getting about them. Paying them properly is what makes that mutual rather than extractive.
What a portfolio stopped telling you
The other reason to move weight off the artefact is that artefacts have been getting less informative for a decade.
The best portfolios are frequently not fully online any more. Work sits behind an NDA, or behind a password, or nowhere at all (individuals and companies do steal it, which is the unglamorous reason nobody says out loud). Senior people in particular often have a thin public presence and an out-of-date Dribbble, and if your process treats that as a signal you will systematically screen out the most experienced candidates in your funnel.
So the skill shifts. You are reading a career rather than a gallery: what they were hired to do, what shape the team was, who else was in the room, what happened after they left. Some of that comes from the résumé, most of it comes from the conversation, and the rest comes from reference calls, which I have argued are the most informative half hour in the whole process.
Both replacement stages spend the company's time rather than the candidate's, which is the correct direction for that cost to run.
The archetype problem
There is a related failure I want to name, because I built it into a sourcing guide myself and then had to write the correction into the same document.
When you teach a team to source, you reach for an archetype. Here is a profile that would be perfect for this role, here is why. I did this with a former colleague's profile: a strong mix of large companies and startups, long tenure in each, a couple of co-founded side projects, work sitting at the intersection of product, marketing and brand. Every one of those is a defensible signal and I stand behind the list.
The person I chose was also a white man who had enjoyed a long run of environments that treated him well. And several of the signals I was praising are downstream of that. Long tenure reads as depth and commitment, and it is partly a measure of whether the places you worked were bearable. A designer who left three roles in four years because each one involved a steady supply of micro-aggressions produces a résumé that our shorthand calls job-hopping, and the shorthand is describing the employers, not her.
So the correction goes in the same document as the archetype, not in a separate diversity paragraph at the end: the factors that make a profile look great are frequently privileges in themselves, and a sourcing guide that does not say so is teaching people to pattern-match on comfort.
The cost of what I am recommending
I would rather state this than have it pointed out.
A live whiteboard session favors the fluent. It rewards people who think out loud, who are comfortable being watched, who perform well under a mild adversarial load. Some outstanding designers are none of those things, and a take-home is the format in which they are at their best, because it lets them be slow and careful in private.
The mitigations are real but partial, and I'm not certain they close the gap. Send the problem in advance so nobody is doing cold recall. Keep the room to two people, never a panel. Say at the start that silence is allowed and then actually allow it, which requires the interviewers to tolerate discomfort they usually resolve by talking. Score the reasoning rather than the artefact on the board, and write the score before comparing notes with the other interviewer.
Even with all of that, you are trading one bias for another. My argument is only that the bias you get from a live session is smaller, more visible, and more correctable than the bias you get from a stage that ranks people by how much unpaid time they had that fortnight.
If you keep the assignment
Some teams will, and there are conditions under which I would too. Pay for it at a real rate. Cap it at three hours and mean it, which means designing a prompt that is finishable in three. Make it a problem you have already solved, so it cannot be mistaken for free labor. Give at least a week of calendar to do the three hours in. And tell candidates what you are assessing before they start, because a rubric they cannot see is a test of whether they can guess your preferences.
Most companies do none of these and describe the assignment as the fairest part of their process (I have heard it called exactly that in a dozen debriefs).
I've built design and product organizations from first hire to around sixty people, at Honor, Lyft, Grammarly and Pitch. The counter-argument I take most seriously comes from people hiring juniors and career-changers, where there is often no body of prior work to read and no reference who has seen the person operate. A short, paid, well-scoped assignment may well be the fairest option there, and I would not argue against it.
© 2026 Renato Valdés-Olmos