How to hire designers

From my travels, I’ve noticed a few things about design recruiting. Landing high calibre talent is hard. Like, hard. Most companies struggle with hiring designers, be it volume, quality or time to hire.

Why? It’s competitive. Hiring designers, engineers and people in the digital industry is at an all-time high, which will continue with the rise of technology, bringing design in-house and companies realising having design at the table is important.

What can you do to hire top talent, I hear you say?

Do you have a great employer brand?

With the plethora of applications every day for design roles, what is going to make someone with limited time to apply on your website, social channels or reply to your recruiter?

You may have a splendid consumer brand, but if your employer brand is dull and doesn’t reflect your culture, design team and innovation you will have trouble getting people through the door.

Your employee brand is simply: “What’s in it for the candidate?”

Every touchpoint a candidate has with your company has to optimized and tailored to them. This can include social channels, careers site (god the amount of crappy careers sites out there, is hilarious, see below)

Questions to ask when re-thinking your employer brand:

• What’s in it for the candidate?
• Are they getting a true insight into what the design team works on and how they work?
• Are there any testimonials we could get on video for other people to see what they can also achieve?

How a company invests in your employer brand shows how much you care about bringing in top talent.

People are busy.

You need to give candidates insight into what they can achieve and get back from a certain company, immediately or risk them not applying.

Be clear what you want

Client: “I want a UX/UI/UXR/Motion/Product/BA/Engineer” for 40k.

Me: “What the f*** do you want?”

This happens on a daily basis. Be clear with what you want from a candidate.

• How do they fit into your design team?
• What projects will they work on?
• Who will they be working with?
• What you can offer them.
• What your budget is.
• Make sure to do some research on the budget to make sure it’s in line with the rest of the market in your industry. A splendid salary survey in London is one from Zebra People.
• Do you want an individual contributor or manager?

Great. You don’t want a unicorn for 40k because, well, they do not exist. (oooooh, controversial).

You’ve got budget signed off, now it’s time to write a lovely job spec.

Write a job spec with the candidate in mind that you’re looking to attract.

What do great designers care about?

• Where does design sit in the organisation?
• Is there a buy-in for design and research? If no, is there scope to work with senior stakeholders to uncover the value of research. If not, just hire a contractor as a permanent person is not going to want to bang their head against the door to ship designs.
• What’s the career roadmap? How will they progress?
• Is there work/life harmony?
• Who’s my line manager? Do they give me the freedom to do great work or mentor me if I’m junior?
• What events/training/conferences do we get budget for to up-skill?
• What’s the average research budget?
• What problem are they solving in the world?
• What is their approach to design?
• How big is the design team?
• Will I have a healthy stimulation between company politics and design work? (Let’s face it, most companies you have to put with company politics)
• What’s the interview process?

How to write a job spec:

1. The role — Talk a little about the company, mission, values and what you’re looking to achieve. Don’t blabber on about what the company does in great depth, because 99% of candidates will look on your website. Also, speak about the hiring manager, why are they inspiring to work for?
2. Day-to-day — What will the designers be doing on a day-to-day basis, this will let the reader know what to expect, how hands-on or hands-off it is:

• Will they be working with founders on research, strategy to shape a product?
• Will they be a wireframe monkey?
• Will they be doing end-to-end design work?
• Will they be executing visuals?
• Will they be doing a lot of user testing?

It helps frame the role in the candidates’ mind.

3. What are the challenges? — No role is plain sailing if it was it’d be dull so by being transparent and honest with your reader throughout the job spec you will weed out people who are not up for the challenge. A ton of people move into a role only to end up doing work they weren’t expecting because interviewers aren’t honest throughout the process.

4. What are the must-haves? Explaining to someone why they must have certain experience in industries, qualifications, hands-on work eliminates questions in their mind and will stop people applying who are not relevant and include people who maybe wouldn’t have applied.

For example:

“You have experience working on complex technical systems e.g. an intranet.

• You’ve earned a BA/BSc/MA in HCI, Information Systems, Computer Science, Graphic Design or similar. If not, don’t sweat, contact me as not all degrees matter.
• You have excellent collaboration skills, as well as being able to constructively direct action within teams. You understand when to be hands-on and when you need to mentor.
• You’re eager to learn as well as to teach.
• You’re curious about how things work and have a passion for emerging technologies and all things interactive.
• You’re a great communicator, who’s able to adjust your message depending on the audience.
• You’re able and willing to travel to other offices when required.
• You’re comfortable working with remote peers on a consistent basis.”

5. Nice to haves — Including a bit around if you don’t hit all the must-haves, still offer people a chance to apply. Just because you’ve not been to university doesn’t mean someone might not be a design genius?

6. Interview process — People are busy, top quality candidates are even busier doing work. Don’t waste their time. Be clear with how you’re going to run the process.

• Do you need to do a design task?
• Have you got times, when key stakeholders can be in the process? Candidates are in-out of the market very quickly, so urgency is key.
• Do you need 3–4 steps? Can you reduce that down to 2?
• Put in the spec who they’ll be meeting.

7. Tips on how to apply — Explain some key steps to follow.

TO make sure the interview process is smooth send out a few tips:

• Have you set out why this role is a good match for your career aspirations and that you have the skills and experience required?
• We want you to be as clear about your future ambitions as we are and whilst we encourage people to learn, develop and grow, you will need to hit the ground running.
• Have you checked spelling and grammar? We have high standards and you don’t want to miss out because of something as easily correctable as a typo.

8. Call to action

Congratulations, people want to apply for your role. The team, product, company sound great. Now what?

Send them to a link to apply, with a personalised message on when they will hear back.

Key takeaways on how to attract the best talent:

• Be normal. Don’t put in BS jargon on your specs.
• Focus on employer brand to attract talent via multiple channels and have collateral for your recruiters to send to candidates.
• Have incredible candidate experience on every touchpoint both online and offline.
• Have a clear, short and succinct process.