Your resume mentions scaling the order service. What broke first when traffic doubled, and what did you change?
The Postgres connection pool saturated first. We added PgBouncer, then split reads onto a replica and moved sessions to Redis…
Every score opens onto the transcript and video it came from.
What makes product designers hard to screen
Portfolios are edited
You see the version that worked, presented after the fact. The three that failed and taught them something are not in the PDF.
Team credit is invisible
Beautiful case studies routinely come from teams of six. Nothing in the artefact says who decided what.
Craft and judgement look identical on a slide
Someone who executes a given direction perfectly and someone who chose the direction produce the same-looking page.
How Career1 does it
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01
Post the role
Type a job title and Career1 drafts the description, or dictate it, or upload the JD you already have. You choose what the application form asks for — phone, city, and any screening questions of your own.
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02
Everyone gets interviewed
Every applicant, not a filtered subset, gets a link to a spoken interview they can take at 2am on a phone. It asks about their actual experience, follows up when an answer is thin, and runs about eight minutes.
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03
Read a ranked shortlist
You get a match score, the verified strengths, the risks, a hire recommendation, and the full transcript and video behind every claim. The evidence ships with the score, so you can check the reasoning instead of trusting it.
What the interview probes for in product designers
- The constraint behind the decision
- Why this layout and not the obvious one — and what they gave up.
- Their own contribution
- What they personally decided versus what the team handed them.
- Evidence they used
- Whether the design changed because of something they learned from users, or because of taste.
- Handling disagreement
- How they describe a time engineering or a stakeholder pushed back, and what happened to the design.
Questions people ask
How do you screen designers beyond the portfolio?
By asking them to talk through the decisions in their own work — the constraint, the alternatives, what they'd change. Career1 runs that conversation with every applicant and attaches the video, so your design lead reviews reasoning rather than thumbnails.
Can candidates submit a portfolio link?
Yes. Add a required link question to the job's application form and it's captured alongside the résumé and the interview report.
Is this suitable for senior design roles?
It's a first round. For staff and principal roles it's most useful for deciding who your team spends an hour with — the depth of the decision-making comes through quickly.
Also hiring for
Start with two candidates, free
Post a role, send the link, and read the first scored report tonight. No card, and nothing for your candidates to pay or install.
Vet your first product designers free