Today, the VMware Careers blog has a great post about how to prepare for a technical on-campus interview with VMware.  It’s a great post about technical interviews, and reminded me that I should post about how interviews for our user experience team differ from those interviews.

What types of questions do we ask?

We want to learn about your user experience skills.  We’ll ask about projects that you’ve done, and ask about the design and research process that you went through during that project.  If you’re doing a design interview, you can expect to do some sketching as we ask you to solve a design problem.  If you’re doing a research interview, you can expect to devise a quick research plan to answer a question.

Practice your UX skills

You can expect to flex your design and research skills during our interview.  As you’re working through your design or your research approach, make sure to explain your thought process, and ask questions if you need clarification.  Be comfortable in front of a white board as you sketch your designs.

Your resume is not a standalone document

Your resume doesn’t stand by itself.  Tell us about what isn’t captured on your resume.  If you’ve got portfolio pieces that are related to items on your resume, be prepared to show them and explain them.

Don’t be afraid to tell us about what worked and what didn’t work.  For example, if you had a research project where no changes were made based on your results, talk about what happened, why it happened, and how you might approach it differently to get a better outcome.  If your design didn’t work, tell us what didn’t work about it and what you learned from it.

Ask questions

We want to know that you’re going to fit into our team, and we want you to be happy here.  Ask us questions.  Is work/life balance important to you?  Do you want to attend conferences and publish papers?  In what areas do you want to grow in your career?  Is working for a green company important to you?  In other words, think about what you want in your first job out of college, and ask questions to make sure that you’re going to get that with us.

An interview is not, and should not be, a one-way street.  It’s not just about the employer determining if you would be a good employee.  It is just as important for you to decide if this is the right company and right team for you.  If you’re not happy, your job performance will suffer, and ultimately your career will suffer.  Take advantage of the time that you have with us to gather information that will help you decide whether this is the right fit for you.

Speaking of questions: if you’ve got ’em, ask away in the comments, or email me.

I mentioned earlier that summer intern season is coming, and that my team has intern openings.  The job openings are listed on our website:

• user experience research intern — This position reports to me, and is on a project where I really want to see some awesome research.  Read the job description carefully, because there’s some discussion in there of what the project is about, and a great candidate will be able to tell me how they’d go about executing on this project.
• user experience designer intern — We’ve got several openings, so there are several different summer projects where we’d like an awesome intern to come in.  Here, a great candidate will have a good portfolio and will be able to tell us how they think that they would apply their design skills to the types of problems that we see at VMware.

Interested?  Email me with your cover letter, resume, and portfolio (required for design candidates, not required but still useful for research candidates).

We’ve got other jobs available as well, not just summer interns.  We’re especially interested in hearing from senior interaction designers, such as for this opening.