Secret sauce of Design Hiring

9 min readJun 7, 2020

My journey from designer to design recruiter

Let me start this with my journey from a designer to a design recruiter.

I worked as UX designer for about 14+ years.

And, in my previous role as Principal Designer, I was involved in hiring few design roles. And I observed that, when it comes to design hiring, there are many challenges and gaps. And it made me think, is there anything that I can do to solve this problem?

Then, I approached Sunit Singh, whom I call my design guru and mentor to hear my story and things I was planning to pursue, and he was so open to help me and called me at Starbucks, Koramangla the same day.

And today, I am so grateful to Sunit that he did not just give right directions to my thoughts that day, but my first design hiring project, and a simple advise that I still remember, that -

And I followed what he said, I talked to design heads of few design led product companies to understand their challenges, when they hire designers.

Also, I met 100+ designers to hear their stories and challenges when they apply for job change.

And after hearing all stories from designers and hiring managers, one thing got very clear in my mind that, there is a lot to be done to make a positive change in design hiring space.

And that’s how my career turned from a designer to a design recruiter.

Why are we discussing about design hiring?

Because, hiring quality designers is a tough task
It takes anywhere from 3 months to 6 months to hire a designer
There is huge shortage of quality designers in industry
Hiring managers and HR has to spend a lot time

And there is no simple solution or success formula.

But I am sharing with you a few things that I have learned as design recruiter that can help to solve this to some extend.

Be in users shoes

I feel, you should consider design hiring as a design project, in which the candidates are your users.

And you should be very empathetic to the users to understand their pain points, and to make this experience engaging and seamless.

Stages of Design Hiring

1) Excite Designers

Considering the shortage of quality designers, it’s very important for you to excite and educate the design candidates.

Remember, good designers are not just looking for another job.

When they are open for a change, they do their homework and are very particular about their next move.

And I believe, here are few things you can do to excite them with your offering.

Other than brand, they are very interested to know who are the mentors and design peers they are going to work with
Create a deck to help them understand about design team, vision, values and culture.
You should share that deck before you initiate the interview process. This will help them to understand - why they should work with your company and your team.
In this, you also can include who are the investors, what is the current market valuation, what was the last funding and what series, who are the founding team members. This will help them to understand the safety and security of the company.
You also can show them some of the projects and actual design for them to understand the maturity of design.
Also you should host some meetups and events, and invite designers to your office to give them an opportunity to interact with your team
You also can ask your design team members to be active on social media platforms to share their their knowledge and represent your company

2) Invite Designers

In this stage, you are inviting designers to the role you’re hiring for.

And here are few things you can do, so you don’t loose any right profile in this stage.

Job Description

Job description is like an entry point.

And often designers decide whether to apply to this job or not, just by reading it.

Hence you have to be very specific about the design role you are hiring for, and skills required for that role
I often see that a company is hiring for product designer, but in JD they talk about visual design and UI design skills.
Also sometimes the role is for UX designer, and they expect designers to work on marketing design and front-end development too.
And ideally there is nothing wrong if you are expecting additional skills, but you should make that expectation very clear through JD
Don’t keep any room for assumptions to avoid wasting time for everyone
The objective of JD is help candidates visualise what company is looking for and what the exact role they have to play if they join

Choose right job portals and recruiters to work

I think, the quote “Less is more” works perfect here.

Be very selective, and post your job on very limited job sites.

In my experience, Linkedin is the perfect place to hire quality designers.

Also the reason you should not post your job on more sites is, you will end up getting more profiles than you can screen.

Remember, the majority of good designers prefer Linkedin for job change, hence the profiles you may get from other places may not be upto the mark.

And you will face the same problems, when you work with more recruiters.

A right application form

You have to ensure, you have small and easy application form.

In which, you can make portfolio and Linkedin profile fields mandatory.
Because without portfolio, its very difficult to evaluate a designer
And Linkedin provides you information about their contents and activities they do in design space.

Enable and educate HR team

It’s simple, if you want to hire quality designers faster, you must educate your HR team.

You can show them few sample profiles that can work for the role you’re hiring for.
Give them a small demo on how they can do initial screening by seeing resumes and portfolios.

Shortlisting right candidates

You should not blindly go by keywords in resume. Because often, you will notice the same keywords in almost all the resumes
Sometimes, few designers don’t feel comfortable sharing their work in public sites.
In that case, drop them a mail to share their recent design work. I have seen that few feel comfortable to share the work, only when someone specifically asks for that.
Also I have seen some hiring manages judge a book just by its cover.
And they shortlist or reject profile just by seeing the resume. They feel, if a designer can’t design a right resume in first place, he or she can’t be a good designer too.
Also before you shortlist candidates and call for interview, ensure that their skills, CTC and years of experience matches with what you’re looking for

Using ATS to better manage profiles

ATS is nothing but a software used by companies to track applications.

Almost all companies use one or the other ATS.

Typically, all these softwares have enough features to manage the pipeline, communication, filtering and evaluation.

And if you have to deal with too many applications, I would suggest to learn few basics about your company ATS from your HR team.

3) Engage & evaluate designers

This is the stage where you have shortlisted few candidates with whom you’re going to talk. There may be few changes in this process from company to company, but more or less it is same.

Exploratory call

Primarily, the exploratory call is done by HR team to help candidates know about company, products, culture, team and design maturity.

This helps to keep designers engaged and excited for further rounds.

Portfolio review

This is mostly a telephonic round.

In this round, you try to judge skills of your candidate.

Few do’s and don’t:

Before you go for this round, review the portfolio work in detail, and be prepared with few questions. So you can efficiently manage time. This also helps you to make a good connection with candidates.
You also should try to capture information, communication and evaluation in a printed template or in a system. So you can better track or filter when requires.

Here is the template I designed that you can use to evaluate designers

Design test

Believe me, design test is the most difficult part, most designers hate it, and are not so open and excited to do.
And I strongly recommend you to invest more time to do through portfolio review than give a design test.

You should go for design test only if you are not confident about designers skillsets after doing portfolio round, and you want extra validation. But trust me, you should not make this a mandatory part of your hiring process

Also if you think, design test is really required, give them a task that they can complete in 3-4 hours, and not 3-4 days

Whiteboarding exercise

If possible, do whiteboarding exercise in place of design test.
In my experience, designers prefer whiteboarding exercise over take home design test.

Face to face round

Here you invite designers to come to your office to have discussions with your leadership team (product owners and business owners) and HR team.

If possible, invite the designers to your office when all the panel members are available, and try to wrap up all the rounds in one day.

Common Do’s and Don’ts

You should keep designers informed during each stage of interview
Share some feedback (few bullet points) to a designer when you reject. This helps them to understand the gaps and better prepare next time.
When you are hiring, and you are getting profiles, spend atleast 20–30 minutes a day to review the profiles and ask HR to setup next round earliest possible
Remember, most designers have busy days, and don’t like random calls
Hence if you have a job you’re excited to share with them, share them the details by mail, and share your calendar to choose a time slot that works for both. They will respond if they are interested.
Many good designers I know are not so active on social media and job sites, and if you are hiring a role, they may not be aware.
Hence, it is good if you can find such people and connect with them through mails or other channels
You should not blindly go behind pedigree and brand.
Pedigree and brand definitely adds value. But we also have to understand there is a huge shortage of good designers. And on other side, there are many good designers who are not from IIT or NID, or who didn’t work in design led companies in Indian silicon valley (Bengaluru), but they are exceptionally good. So better go and find such designers too.

Timeline to fulfil a design role

We all know time is critical when it comes to design hiring.

And you have to remember, when good designers are looking for a job change, there are many companies behind them. Also they are well connected with design community.

Hence if your process is very slow, you may have tough time hiring a right designer on time.

In my experience, after working with some design led product companies and understanding their timeline, here I am proposing a simple timeline that may work to solve this problem.