Hasta La Ideas

Project Loon’s consumer-side antenna. Photos by Talia Herman.

This is the seventh post in our Getting Hired series. Yesterday, we talked to recruiters at frog design.

Earlier this month, Core77 ran an exclusive look at the design team behind Google X, the semi-secret lab responsible for Glass, self-driving cars, stratospheric Internet balloons and other projects they won’t tell anyone about. As we described in that story, X is actively looking for new design talent—so as part of our ongoing Getting Hired series, we wanted to provide some job-seeking advice for readers who think they have what it takes to work in Google’s “moonshot factory.” For that, we turned to Ricardo Prada, who leads X’s central user-experience team, which essentially incubates new projects. Prada and his researchers crystallize concepts, design early prototypes and test products with real users as soon as possible. As a hiring manager, Prada also negotiates resources, sets hiring priorities and interviews everyone who comes onto the team.

Can you walk us through your process for hiring a new designer?

We’re looking for designers, user researchers and hybrids of the two. The strength of our team is in the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives that come to the table to tackle big problems. When we’re considering a candidate, there are a few key components: resume, portfolio and interviews. First, the resume. We want to see a well-written and carefully designed resume that shows you’re an expert in your specific area, but that you can apply your knowledge and thinking across diverse areas. Your resume should tell a “T-shaped” story that goes deep in one core area, but branches out into other areas where you’ve been able to apply your thinking and expertise. For example, one of our researchers, Dhvani, holds a PhD in developmental psychology, went into public policy around children, did usability testing at a tech company and went on to work with hardware in Google X. Her deep, deep understanding of how people think and learn makes her extremely adaptable.

Then, the portfolio. If we think after reviewing your resume that you might be a good fit, we’ll have you come in to present your portfolio. This will give you the opportunity to tell us your story more fully. Here we want to see a breadth of ideas, but also the lens through which you see the world. The next step is in-person interviews. This part is really important because we want to get to know you. We want to know how you think about design, and how you tackle problems. We’re also looking for the optimism, expertise and niceness we call “being Googley.”

During the interviews, we’ll give you design exercises where we ask you to spend a short amount of time trying to tackle big problems that are similar in scale to the stuff we do in Google X. For example, we’ve asked candidates to show us how they might design a jetpack to replace cars. Good candidates are able to break the James Bond stereotype. They might think about the ergonomics of accommodating elderly grandmothers, how to communicate flight paths, how to position and price the product in the market, or how reaction times might impact safety—and then create viable plans to get to the product launch efficiently. We also will spend a lot of time trying to understand how you think about design and the design process. What does the future of your field look like? Why should it be that way?

Ricardo Prada leads the user-experience team at Google X, which incubates new projects.

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