The decent way to recruit product designers
TL; DR: After hearing multiple testimonies from friends on their less-than-optimal recruitments experiences, I decided to write a quick guide.
If you need to recruit a designer but you have no design background yourself — look for help from an experienced designer. Be nice to the human beings who you decided were not a good fit. Read on for more tips and ideas.
As the COVID-19 wave descends and the high-tech market is still red hot, there is a huge demand for designers out there. Much has been said on how to interview and get that job, but not as much advice can be found on how to recruit designers. While this should be a rather simple, structured job, many of my closest friends have gone through discouraging, inefficient and plain disrespectful processes which underestimate candidates’ time, feelings and dedication.
Whether you are a startup founder looking for your first designer, an HR partner collaborating on a design recruiting process, or a seasoned UX leader trying to recruit a new member of your team — these are some of my thoughts and tips to make this process efficient, successful, transparent, and respectful. In other words, the decent way.
Define ahead and get advice
You may be a brilliant startup founder, developer, or product manager. But if this is your first time around, do your due diligence: talk to experienced designers, find out how recruitment processes are done, what’s a legit salary, and what are the qualities you should be looking for according to your needs. Not all designers are made alike, and each has a different strength — UX, UI, research, motion, microcopy, prototyping… Of course, many of us are generalists that can cover each of these areas in some way, but it’s helpful to define what should be your designer’s main focus or skill.
You may also hire a professional (usually freelance) head hunter that specializes in recruiting designers, who can help you write a job post and filter through CVs and portfolios; as well as an experienced designer to interview your candidates as part of the process. This is especially important if this person is to be the first design function in your company. Please, don’t assume you are effective on recruiting designers just because you read a few UX articles or you are good at pairing colors. Respect our craft, and get a specialist to help you — in the same way you would do for recruiting a developer, a QA tester, or any other job you don’t have experience with.
Together with your ally, get advice and decide on how this process will look like, which stages and interviews will it have. The job description for your job post doesn’t need to be long or fancy, and you can get inspiration from other job posts out there on LinkedIn. But inspiration doesn’t mean copy-paste irrelevant skills that are not really required, though. Don’t be tempted to make it sophisticated — explain what your company does, what’s the main job for this designer, what are the requirements and nice-to-haves. Include location and WFH conditions, salary, and any other data piece that may make or break it for the candidates. Post the job on LinkedIn, distribute through friends… and let the network do its magic.
Initiating contact
Sooner than expected, you’ll start getting CVs. It’s the time to review and call back candidates, schedule interviews and get the ball rolling. Check if this candidate has been in touch with your company or someone from your team before — you wouldn’t believe how many times people have gone through processes in the same company, or have common acquaintances that can testify about working with this person.
Send an SMS message ahead of your first screening call. Make sure it is a good time to call, or when would it be. Remember we are all stuck at home with Covid, or with kids climbing up our heads, or just busy navigating life. Politeness is a good way to start.
Once at the screening call, have your questions written down, find out what’s the candidates’ status and reason for the job search. Give them more information about the company, the role, the team, the hiring manager. Write down relevant information, communicate what the process looks like (you already planned it, remember?), give the candidate the opportunity to ask questions, and please — don’t assume everything they heard is cool, or that they are desperate for this job. Be decent enough to ask: Is this offer interesting to you? Would you like us to move on with this hiring process?
Assuming they said yes, give them more details about the immediate next steps. If possible, schedule the next step on the spot.
Home assignments
You’ve probably heard about home assignments. You know you have to send out an assignment, so let me give you a refreshing insight:
You can do one of these. But you definitely don’t have to. In fact, some of the best and biggest companies are no longer sending out home assignments. There are many ways to evaluate designers, here are a few ideas:
- An online or onsite white-boarding exercises — Usually 45 minutes to an hour in which you present a challenge to your candidate, and see how things work out. The candidate is expected to ask questions, think out loud and reflect their way of thinking and solving problems. Also, you can expect to get a very high level wireframe or flow.
- A UX or UI critique on a different product, mobile or app — You can choose this product or let your candidate choose it. Of course this is not an informed critique, as both of you don’t work on this product, but through this you can see the way of thinking and the attention to details, the assumptions done and the level of understanding of business goals.
- Presenting previous work — Ask your candidate to create a presentation showcasing two of their previous projects. Storytelling and the way a designer presents their work is sometimes more important than the work itself, so what better way to evaluate this?
- Brainstorming together over an idea to see the dynamics between you and this person.
In any of these cases, I strongly recommend going through these paths — and of course, be assisted by your experienced designer ally.
Yet, if you decide you must do a home assignment (for your peace of mind?), follow these guidelines:
- Don’t give an assignment longer than 4 hours — People have a life. And also, they may be moving forward with different companies. Nobody wants to spend all of their weekends doing home assignments, on top of the day-to-day work.
- Avoid giving a task based on, or related to your company’s work. You have knowledge that your candidate doesn’t have, hence, you are biased. At one of my previous workplaces — a bank — , we used to give an onsite 45-minutes task to plan (wireframe) a solution for sitting arrangements at your wedding. It worked just fine and perfectly predicted UX qualities and thinking process.
- Be brief and super clear about the required outcomes and deliverables, and don’t assume the person knows what to do or what you expect to receive.
- Give the opportunity to present the work, rather than asking to send back a Figma file or presentation.
- Again, be sure you have the skills and the time to evaluate the result. Looking at a mockup and thinking “Yeah, this looks nice” is not a smart move. If you don’t have a UX background, consult with an experienced designer.
Not a good fit?
So you finally found a designer, and you need to let the others know the job is no longer relevant. Or maybe you didn’t find — but you know this person is not skilled enough, or simply not a good fit to your needs. In any case, for God’s sake, don’t be a d****e.
Give notice as soon as possible, as personally as possible. Call them, thank them for their time and dedication, and just remove the band-aid. Explain that you’ve decided to sign with another designer, or that you will continue looking for a better fit for your team. If, for any reason on Earth, you can’t call — write an email. Yourself, with your own email address, and not the [enter your preferred HR lead management system] generic mailbox.
If the reason is professional, give them clear, specific and actionable feedback. Let them know what are the weak areas that could be improved. If possible, also praise the good qualities you found. Feedback is incredibly useful for designers, and in my personal opinion — if you can’t spend 5 minutes writing down feedback for a designer that spent 4 hours on your task, you s***.
If the reason is personal (you just think it won’t be nice to work with this person, they are overly defensive or there’s just some missing click), keep it short and be honest. You can never know if there is a real problem here, or maybe the stress of the process is affecting this person in any way.
If time is passing but you still haven’t decided yet, stay in touch with the candidate and update often on what’s going on and why your answer is delayed. (Side note: if a candidate is not a loud YES, then it’s a NO. But maybe that’s just me) Don’t send a short WhatsApp message, or worse, ask your HR to send a generic email. That’s not cool.
*These last points are probably relevant to any recruitment process.
The one
Such a relief, you’ve found them! Call them and let them know you’d like them to join the team. Review all details that you may have discussed during the process (starting date, salary, title, equipment) to make sure all is agreed before sending over a contract. Once again, give the opportunity to ask questions and remove any uncertainties. Your goal should be to send a contract in which this person is not surprised — in a good way.
All that’s left for the candidate is to sign, and finish up other details to start your working relationship on the right foot.
See? It’s not complicated. Leading decent design recruitment processes is not only important for the name and reputation of your company, but for candidates to feel open and respected. Do you have any more tips for recruiters? Leave them on the comments!
A few more reading resources, ideas and great questions on recruiting designers here, here and here. Good luck! You got this.
Hello! I’m Nati Asher. I’ve spent the last 10 years in product design & technology, designing and leading teams at startups, design agencies, and large tech companies. I am a UX lecturer and public speaker as well. At times, I facilitate design thinking workshops and mentor young designers. Opinions here are my own, and not my employer’s. Thank you for reading!
