How to get hired as a Designer at Booking.com
How to prepare for a design interview at Booking.com or… anywhere.
Hi! I’m Roberta, one of the Design Managers of Booking.com, working in the team that helps travellers find alternative accommodations.
I successfully interviewed in 2017 as a UX designer — and I still remember it as if it were yesterday. I was excited about the prospect of working for a large company and moving abroad. But there was also a feeling of the unknown and imposter syndrome, prior to the interviews.
In this article I will outline our interview process for UX Design roles and explain what we’re looking for. To help you prepare I’ll also share some tips on how to build your portfolio.
Our interview process
Step 1: Resume and portfolio review
You applied through jobs.booking.com and you sent us your resume and portfolio, great! From here, the recruiter, the hiring manager and two other designers will review your submitted documents, to make sure you fit the role you applied for.
Step 2: Recruiter phone screen
After the initial assessment, a recruiter will call you to have an introductory chat, ask you about your experience, your motivations and talk to you about the role and the company. If there is a match we’ll schedule the next round.
Step 3: Hiring Manager phone interview
During this step, you’ll talk to the hiring manager (your future manager if it all goes well) and a senior manager or a principal designer. They’ll introduce you to the specific position you are interviewing for.
It will be a casual conversation of around 45 minutes, followed by 15 minutes for your questions. Here, we won’t deep dive into your craft specifically but will ask you generic questions to understand your experience, your passions and what is important to you when it comes to work.
Be yourself. At Booking.com, we welcome everyone.
From my experience, I found it helps to structure your answers and be concise. Communication is one of the skills we are evaluating in these interviews.
After the conversation, the interviewers will carefully evaluate your fit for the role. If you are successful, you will be invited to one of our offices to have the last round of interviews face-to-face. At least, that’s how we did it pre-pandemic. Currently, we’re doing our best to keep our employees and candidates safe and healthy, so we’re working from home and meeting candidates virtually.
Step 4: (Virtual) face to face interview
Congrats! You’re in the last round of interviews. You’ll have two one-hour interviews:
- Craft interview:
Here you’ll do a deep portfolio review with two Booking.com designers. You’ll be focusing on one case study specifically, presenting the process and outcomes, and answering in-depth questions.
After a short intro, you’ll have 45 minutes for the case study and 10–15 minutes for your own questions for the interviewers.
- Stakeholder management interview:
In the final session you will meet the hiring manager (again) and, if possible, the senior manager. This will be an unstructured conversation, similar to the first interview.
A 45 minute discussion will cover your approach to solving problems, stakeholder management, and strategy, based on your past experience. Then you’ll have around 15 minutes for your own questions about the role, the company or anything else you want to know at this final stage.
What happens next?
Once all the interviews are done — to prevent any bias — every interviewer will write their own conclusions independently. Then we get together, share our conclusions and discuss. Once we reach consensus, a decision is made and the recruiter will reach out and communicate this to you. Whether you’re successful or not, the recruiter will take the time to share detailed feedback with you.
What if the outcome is not what you expected? Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you’re not a good designer but just that you weren’t a fit for that specific role or that you were not ready, yet. You can always try again in the future!
“The growth mindset says all of these things can be developed.” — Mindset by Carol Dweck
What do we look for in your portfolio?
Your portfolio is the first thing we see in the process and the key to moving on to the next round. Even though it might sound time-consuming, building a strong portfolio is a long-term investment and a useful tool for yourself. There are some reasons why:
- It prepares you for the interview by articulating your work in a visual and concise way
- It helps you reflect and make a self-assessment of your experience and current skills
- It makes sure you invest time in the process only if you are a potential fit for the role
Here are some tips on how to build a portfolio, according to what we look for:
Breadth and depth
Your portfolio should balance presenting the breadth of your experience and skills with deep-dive case studies showcasing your ability to solve tough challenges. You should demonstrate a range of abilities and project executions such as interaction design, visual design, etc. (breadth) as well as giving a more in-depth analysis of a selected project or topic (depth).
Try to tell a comprehensive story by answering these questions:
- Why: Why did you work on it? What was the problem and the opportunity?
- What: What did you do? What was your contribution?
- How: How did you propose solving it? What was your process?
- Impact: What was and how did you measure the impact? What did you learn?
We don’t only want your polished mockups and prototypes. We want to see how you got there, how you adapted the design thinking process to your needs, how you decided the information architecture, your role in the project and who you collaborated with. Show us all of that, too.
Show your design decisions behind the screens.
Craft and commercial awareness
In our candidates, we look for strong craft skills and user focus as well as good commercial awareness and business understanding. From your portfolio we should get an idea of the following:
- What is the final design quality of your work?
- How did you balance users and business needs?
- How did you use colors, typography, and interactions?
- What data did you base your decisions upon?
Easy to scan
This is valid for both your resume and portfolio: keep it short, make sure it’s easy to scan and well organized. Whether you use a website, a slide deck or a pdf, it’s not important. Just keep in mind that a hiring manager scans countless portfolios every week.
This is my personal suggestion: give hints and summarize the points described above without going too much in detail. If you are strategic about it, the hiring manager will want to hear more from you and schedule an interview.
How can you use your portfolio to pique my curiosity?
We’re hiring!
I hope these tips will come in handy to you. Are you interested in joining our thriving UX community? Check our current openings here.
