Design take-home assignments

The failure nobody measures

The candidate who spends fifteen hours on your assignment is usually the one with the fewest competing offers. The candidate with three live processes declines politely, and you never learn how good they were.

This filter leaves no trace in your funnel. You see a shortlist and assume it represents the market, when it partly represents who had a free weekend.

Uncomparable results push you towards effort

Two candidates spend different amounts of time, choose different scopes and present in different formats. When you sit down to decide, the only comparable dimension left is how much work each one produced.

That's how teams end up rewarding polish. They don't value it especially; it's the one thing the format made comparable.

A finished deliverable can't show adaptability

The brief a candidate receives is the brief they keep. Nothing is ruled out halfway, no deadline moves, no stakeholder pushes back.

So the most predictive behaviour for senior work, what someone does when the plan breaks, is structurally invisible in this format, however good the prompt is.

If you're keeping your take-home, fix these four things

Most of the damage comes from the format rather than the questions, and the format is cheap to change.

• Cap it at two hours and say you'll only read two hours of work. Then stop reading.
• Give every candidate the identical scope, with identical data. You're running it to compare them.
• Write the rubric before you send it, and share it with the candidate. If you can't write the rubric, the exercise isn't ready.
• Pay for it if it takes more than two hours, or if it touches anything resembling your actual roadmap.

Should take-homes be paid?

If the exercise is fictional, short, and produces nothing usable, the issue is time more than payment. Cap it instead.

If it takes a full day, or if it's recognisably your product, then yes, pay for it. Bear in mind that a paid full-day exercise still filters out the candidates with options. Payment fixes the ethics and leaves the sampling problem.

What a take-home is good at

Everything above is a criticism, and a page that only criticises doesn't help someone who has to run a process next week. This format does three things better than anything else, and they're worth protecting.

It shows craft at full resolution. An interview shows you how someone talks about spacing and hierarchy; a take-home shows you whether they can do it. For a role where output quality is the job, nothing substitutes for seeing the artefact.

It shows how someone communicates work to people who weren't there. Most design work fails at that step rather than at the design step, and a take-home is a direct sample of it.

And it's the only format that shows what someone does with unbounded time. That's a useful signal: some people expand to fill it and produce noise, others use it to go deeper on one thing. Just keep in mind that you're measuring that, and don't confuse it with ability.

The prompt matters more than the format

Most take-homes fail before the candidate opens the document, because the prompt asks for a deliverable instead of a decision.

“Design a booking flow for a fictional gym” produces six booking flows that all look competent and tell you nothing, because there was nothing to get wrong. Every candidate makes the same choices, and you end up comparing typography.

“Here's a booking flow we built. Here's the data showing where people drop out. You have two hours: tell us what you'd change and what you wouldn't touch.” That produces six different answers, and the differences are the information.

One candidate rebuilds everything. One finds where people drop off. One says the data isn't enough to conclude anything and explains what they'd measure first.

The rule: if every good candidate would produce roughly the same thing, the prompt isn't asking anything. Put a trade-off in it, something that has to be given up, and the answers separate immediately.

How to score it so two people agree

Most teams have a rubric. The trouble is that it has categories like “craft” and “thinking”, which two reviewers will score three points apart and both be right.

Score against observable events instead. Swap “did they show good judgment” for “did they state at least one thing they chose not to do, and why”. Swap “good communication” for “could a stranger understand the recommendation from the first paragraph alone”. Those have answers.

Then check your agreement before you trust the scores. Have two people score the same three submissions independently. If the totals are more than a point apart on a five-point scale, the rubric is measuring the reviewer rather than the candidate, and adding more candidates won't fix it.

When to skip the take-home entirely

In three cases the format is the wrong tool and something else is strictly better.

• You're choosing between six people. A take-home at that stage costs the candidates twelve hours between them and costs you six reviews, and most of them were never going to make it. Narrow first with something cheap, then use the take-home on two.
• The role is senior. Senior candidates decline unpaid exercises at a much higher rate, mostly because they have options and a job. You'll get a shortlist made of the people with the least leverage.
• You can't write the rubric. If you sit down to define what a good answer looks like and can't, the exercise will be scored on impression, which is what you were trying to avoid by running it.

What to use instead, and what it costs you

The alternatives, and what each one gives up.

A live exercise: an hour, together, with the constraint changing halfway. It removes the time-availability problem entirely and shows you how someone handles a plan breaking, which a take-home structurally can't. It costs you an hour of your own time per candidate, and it disadvantages people who think slowly and well.

A structured conversation about work they already did, with the same questions for everyone. It's the cheapest thing on this list, and much better than an unstructured chat. It gives up the ability to see anything they didn't choose to show you.

A situational assessment: written scenarios with no correct option, assessed the same way for everyone. Fifteen minutes of candidate time and fully comparable, which is what take-homes lack. It gives up seeing the craft, so for a role where output quality is the job you still need eyes on real work at some point.

Frequently asked

How long should a design exercise be?

Under two hours if unpaid, and enforced rather than suggested. Beyond that you're sampling availability rather than ability, and your response rate from candidates with competing offers drops sharply.

Is it acceptable to use a candidate's exercise internally?

No. If the exercise touches your own product it stops being an assessment and becomes unpaid work, and experienced candidates will recognise that immediately and decline. Use a fictional scenario.

What is a reasonable response rate for a design take-home?

If more than a third of the people you invite decline or go silent, the exercise is too long or the process is too far along without a conversation. Track it. It's the cheapest diagnostic you have, and most teams never look at it because declines don't show up in a hiring funnel as a problem.

Should we tell candidates what the rubric is?

Yes. The fear is that they'll optimise for it, and they will. That's fine, because the rubric describes the things you care about. Sharing it removes the advantage held by candidates who happen to guess right about what you want, and guessing isn't a quality you're hiring for.

Can we reuse the same take-home for every candidate?

You should. Comparability is why you run it, and a rotating set of prompts destroys it. The prompt may circulate, but that's a smaller problem than being unable to compare two candidates. If a prompt leaks, the answers still differ, because there was never a correct one.