Preparing for an interview at Schoolinks requires more than just a polished portfolio. You must be ready to articulate the why behind every design decision and demonstrate a high level of comfort with live collaboration and critique.

User Centricity in EdTech – You must demonstrate a deep empathy for K-12 stakeholders. Understand how students interact with software compared to how busy school counselors do. Your portfolio and answers should reflect your ability to design accessible, engaging interfaces for younger audiences while maintaining professional, high-utility dashboards for adults.

Figma & Live Execution – Schoolinks heavily evaluates your hands-on design skills. You will face live design exercises, so you should be incredibly fast and organized in Figma. Practice building layouts, applying auto-layout, utilizing components, and explaining your design system thinking out loud under a time limit.

Receptiveness to Feedback – Product leadership at Schoolinks values designers who can take direct, constructive criticism and iterate on the fly. During your portfolio review and live challenges, view feedback not as an interrogation, but as a collaborative brainstorming session. Show that you can defend your work logically without becoming defensive.

Product & Business Alignment – You need to show that you design with business goals in mind. Be prepared to discuss how your designs impact key metrics like user retention, task completion rates, and implementation efficiency.

The interview process at Schoolinks is rigorous and multi-staged, designed to evaluate both your theoretical design thinking and your practical, on-the-spot execution. While the pipeline is thorough, it ensures that candidates who receive offers are highly aligned with the fast-paced, collaborative culture of the product team.

The journey typically begins with an initial screening phase, which may feature an asynchronous video assessment. This format requires you to record short video answers to a series of prompted questions. Following a successful screening, you will move into deep-dive conversations with product leadership, where you will discuss your design philosophy, past experiences, and portfolio.

The mid-to-late stages of the process focus heavily on practical application. You will be asked to complete design challenges—either as a structured take-home assignment or as a live, interactive session. These stages are designed to simulate real-world working conditions at Schoolinks, testing how you collaborate with key stakeholders like the Director of Product and the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) before moving to final references.

The timeline above outlines the typical progression a candidate goes through from application to final offer. You should use this visual map to pace your preparation, ensuring you allocate enough time to practice live wireframing and presentation skills before reaching the intensive technical rounds. Note that depending on the specific team alignment (e.g., core product vs. growth), some stages may emphasize rapid prototyping over deep systems architecture.

To succeed at Schoolinks, you must understand the exact competencies the hiring team evaluates during each major stage of the loop.

Portfolio & Case Study Review

Your portfolio is the foundation of your candidacy. The interviewers, particularly the Director of Product, want to see structured, end-to-end product thinking rather than just a collection of beautiful UI mockups.

Be ready to go over:

• Problem Definition – Clearly explaining the user pain point or business opportunity you were tasked with solving.
• Iterative Process – Showing your messy middle—user research, low-fidelity sketches, user flows, and the design directions you decided not to pursue.
• Measurable Outcomes – Highlighting the quantitative and qualitative impact of your designs (e.g., reduced drop-off rates, improved user satisfaction scores).

Example scenarios:

• "Walk us through a case study where you had to redesign a complex dashboard. What were the initial user complaints, and how did your final UI resolve them?"
• "Show us a project where user testing completely invalidated your initial design assumptions. How did you iterate based on that data?"

Live Design & Whiteboard Challenge

This round assesses your real-time problem-solving capabilities, your design intuition, and how you perform under pressure. You will be given a prompt and asked to design a solution live in Figma or on a digital whiteboard.

Be ready to go over:

• Scope Clarification – Asking targeted questions to narrow down the prompt, define the target user, and establish success criteria before drawing anything.
• Information Architecture – Structuring the user flow logically before diving into visual layouts.
• Figma Execution – Creating clean, structured UI components rapidly, demonstrating strong visual hierarchy, typography, and layout skills.

Example scenarios:

• "Design a mobile feature that helps high school students track and complete their community service hours."
• "Create an intuitive interface for a school administrator to bulk-assign counselors to thousands of student profiles."

Design Review & Feedback Loop

At Schoolinks, design is an iterative, highly collaborative process. During this evaluation, product leaders will review your designs (either from your take-home task or your portfolio) and deliver real-time, critical feedback to see how you respond.

Be ready to go over:

• Active Listening – Showing that you fully understand the feedback before responding or defending your design.
• Constructive Iteration – Verbally or visually exploring how you would modify your design to address the stakeholder's concerns.
• Communication of Trade-offs – Articulating the pros and cons of different design choices clearly and professionally.

Example scenarios:

• "If we told you this high-fidelity layout is too visually overwhelming for a student, how would you go about simplifying the cognitive load?"
• "How would you defend your choice of using a multi-step modal versus an inline form for this specific user action?"

As a UX/UI Designer at Schoolinks, your daily activities will span the entire product design lifecycle. You will be embedded within a cross-functional team, working closely with Product Managers, Engineers, and other Designers to bring features from concept to production.

Your primary responsibility will be to translate complex user requirements and product specs into elegant, highly usable interfaces. This involves conducting user research, mapping out detailed user journeys, creating wireframes, and building interactive prototypes. You will spend a significant portion of your time in Figma, crafting high-fidelity mockups that adhere to and help expand the Schoolinks design system.

Beyond individual design execution, you will act as a champion for the user. You will participate in regular design reviews, present your concepts to engineering and product leadership, and collaborate closely with developers to ensure that the final, implemented product matches your design specifications. You will also monitor post-launch user feedback and analytics to identify opportunities for continuous UX optimization.

To be competitive for this role at Schoolinks, you must demonstrate a strong balance of technical design mastery and collaborative soft skills.

• Must-have skills – Advanced proficiency in Figma, including deep knowledge of auto-layout, components, variants, and prototyping features.
• Must-have skills – A strong portfolio demonstrating shipped digital products, showcasing end-to-end UX processes, clear visual hierarchy, and clean UI design.
• Must-have skills – Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with a proven ability to present design decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Nice-to-have skills – Prior experience designing complex B2B2C platforms, SaaS dashboards, or educational software (EdTech).
• Nice-to-have skills – Basic understanding of HTML/CSS and front-end development constraints to facilitate smoother developer handoffs.
• Nice-to-have skills – Experience conducting structured user testing and translating qualitative user feedback into actionable design iterations.