Assessments to hire instructional designers

One of my big pet peeves - asking job candidates to do off-the-clock work to create a a project. Any candidate who says they are fine with doing one of these is hiding the truth, and at the end of the day the project is a minor if nonexistent factor in making the hiring decision.

So I recommend you don't do an assessment (and what's it mean to be "tested live" - storyboard in 30 minutes or less?). If you want to see what the candidate can do, the ID's portfolio should be more than enough to determine if their skills are a match to your needs. 

Hi Aicha,

I have seen this done a few ways. May times there are portfolio requests or just a conversation on the designer's experience and approach to e-learning projects that they have completed. What are the details of the position that you posting? This information will help with the type of candidate that you want to attract. Depending on the industry, your candidates might prefer to work on projects in their particular specialty (i.e. technology, academia, healthcare, science,  fashion, sales, etc...). 

I hope this helps :-)

Hi Nadelle,

Thank you! I'm afraid I can't share too many details about this position, but what you're saying about the specialty is interesting: we work in a certain industry but are not requesting them to have experience in that field. What we're expecting is someone who can use our materials and turn them into engaging trainings, with the help of reviewers that are experienced in the field. Note that the contents are not highly technical. What we want is to check the extent of their technical skills when it comes to creating interactive content. The idea wasn't to ask them to share their portfolio but to provide some materials and give them a week or so to create an e-learning based on that. Is that common?

Hello Aicha and welcome to E-Learning Heroes! 🙂 I’m interested to hear what experiences the community members have to share on the topic. I just wanted to chime in with a few ideas. When it comes to portfolios and projects, it really depends.

With portfolios, you usually can get a good sense of someone’s skills by seeing their work. But sometimes even after seeing their e-learning examples, you might want to dig in a little more into the details of their work. You can ask them about the challenges they faced, the solutions they found, and any goals they achieved. Also, what part of the project they were involved in. Did they restructure the content, create the graphics, and build the course?

When it comes to assigning a project for the interview, I’d only do this if you’ve narrowed it down to your top candidates. You don’t want to put every candidate through that process since it wouldn’t be a good use of their time or your time. If you do decide to assign them a project, make sure it’s simple and similar to what they’d do on the job. This gives the candidate a good sense of what the job will be like if hired.

Here are a few interview resources on the topic:

• Top 4 Tips for Interviewing an Instructional Designer
• How to Find a Freelance ID or E-Learning Developer

I hope that helps!