How to Recruit Top Design Talent
Insights from InVision’s 2019 Product Design Hiring Report
As VP of Design Education at InVision, I have the opportunity to talk with design leaders and hiring managers from many companies and industries. Despite their differing backgrounds, brands and budgets, they share one common, recurring pain point: the struggle to recruit the best designers onto their teams.
This is especially true in today’s hyper-competitive market, where having a great design team has been proven to improve business outcomes. In fact, 92% of companies who rank at the highest levels of design maturity can draw a straight line between the efforts of their design team and their organization’s revenue.
To better understand how employers can attract the best designers, and how product designers can get hired and advance their career, we recently commissioned the 2019 Product Design Hiring Report, the first global survey of its kind.
We went deep — interviewing a total of 1,635 product designers, design students and those responsible for recruiting and hiring designers in seven key markets around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, Singapore and New Zealand).
Whether you’re a hiring manager seeking top design talent, or a product designer trying to break into the field or advance your career, we hope these insights will help you gain the competitive edge.
Key report takeaways
Product designers rate a strong design culture #1: 84% of product designers identified a strong internal design culture as the most important criteria when evaluating new opportunities.
Within the design and tech industry, product design is one of the fastest growing fields: 70% of people managers increased the headcount of their design team in the past year.
Product designers are in greater demand than ever before: 81% are contacted by recruiters on at least a monthly basis, while 34% are contacted by recruiters weekly.
Product designers’ salaries are on the rise: 84% of product designers enjoyed a salary increase in the last 1–2 years, and they expect their compensation to rise by nearly 20% in the next 1–2 years.
Hiring managers look for product designers with diverse skills: 100% of people managers agreed that the most attractive candidates have a skill set that includes both hard (technical) and soft skills, especially as only 24% of product designers possess a diverse skill set.
Product designers must be able to collaborate across teams: 83% of people managers rate collaboration as most desirable soft skill in product designers.
Coding experience is attractive to hiring managers, but does not impact salaries: 80% of people managers reported that they are looking for coding skills in candidates. However, only 13% of people managers are willing to pay significantly more in salary for coding experience.
How to hire top talent
If you’re responsible for building teams, hiring the right people is actually your most important job. The people you hire will form the foundation of your team, and may in turn hire others as growth continues. They’re also your greatest legacy. Some will outlast your tenure and carry on the work you started. Think carefully and invest your time accordingly.
If you’ve ever freelanced or run an agency, you know how critical it is to keep your project pipeline full. The same goes for hiring; if you wait until you have an open position to begin searching for talent, you’ve waited too long!
Importance of soft skills in designers
As the cross-functional nature of design projects increases, designers must be able to work collaboratively and build powerful partnerships with different teams across the organization. Not only that, they must be able to “speak the language of business” by effectively communicating their ideas and the impact design has on business outcomes to key stakeholders.
The primary reasons for letting an employee go rarely relate to a lack of technical prowess; rather it’s a shortcoming in soft skills. Missing technical skills can be remedied with coaching and training, but shortcomings in soft skills are much more difficult to correct.
“The 1:1 interview is your chance to assess soft skills: self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and relationship management,” said Irene Au, Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures. “These are all ingredients for emotional intelligence, which are critical for design success.”
Assessing soft skills can be difficult, especially in the constrained environment of an interview — the interviewee is likely anxious and trying to impress you. You want to set your interviewee up for success, so get to know the person before discussing technical stuff. Find out what they’re passionate about and how they see the world. It can sound like casual chatter, but it provides the clues needed to evaluate soft skills.
Here’s what to look for when interviewing candidates:
Broad perspectives
Diverse backgrounds and interests introduce different perspectives to the team. You don’t want to hire a bunch of employees who are just like you; this is why it’s best to avoid hiring for “culture fit” and instead you should hire for “culture add.” To really foster innovation, look for people who bring new dimensions to your company, and strive to build teams with a variety of voices and outlooks.
Adaptation and grit
Listen hard to your candidate’s life and work experiences. Stories of overcoming adversity, not fitting in, or moving to a new country, for instance, provide clues about how someone deals with challenges. Adaptation skills demonstrate that the candidate has the aptitude to overcome a tough problem, team change, or new project.
MacArthur Fellow and psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth calls this quality “grit.” Grit is more than just perseverance; Duckworth ties grit to a focus on long-term goals and a commitment to following through on them.
Candidates who’ve overcome adversity over a long period of time because they can see the payoff are gritty, and usually make great hires.
A collaborative mindset
As our Hiring Report uncovered, few skills are as important to a team as collaboration. In fact, hiring managers rated it the number one most important soft skill in product designers.
However, it can be hard to gauge during an interview how well a candidate will work with others. Though there are ways to pick up signals, like by asking the candidate about the dynamics of other teams they’ve worked on, and discovering how they like to collaborate. Look for red flags, like if the interviewee blames failures on other team members or clients.
It might make sense to create a small, tightly scoped project to help you evaluate candidates. Here are 2 project ideas:
New product ideation exercise
Assemble your team and the candidate in a room with a whiteboard for a 1- to 2-hour ideation session. Identify a product idea to explore as a group — one that you and your team have no prior knowledge of so you’re on equal footing with the candidate. Work through a simplified Design Sprint process to explore design solutions to the presented problem. Sketch individually, present ideas, and discuss. Work through revisions of the ideas together and observe how the candidate works with your team.
Reimagining existing product exercise
Invite the candidate to conduct a detailed evaluation of an existing product (it needn’t be yours), identifying flaws in the user experience. From those observations, have the candidate design an alternate solution and present it to the team for discussion.
When the design is presented, listen carefully to how the candidate responds to critical feedback from the team. Are they defensive or open-minded? Do they talk more than they listen? Do they seek credit? You’ll learn a lot in that short exchange.
Social aptitude and energy
Beyond structured collaborative activities, social time with a candidate provides everyone a chance to get to know each other — invite candidates to lunch as part of the interview process.
Spending time together benefits both you and the candidate. You can determine if the candidate is still excited about the job opportunity. Do they gel with your team? Can they hold a conversation, or is there an awkward silence? Discomfort in the interview process will be amplified if the candidate joins the team, so pay close attention. For the candidate, social time provides a preview of the working relationship.
Look for red flags and green lights, and be sure to listen to your gut. Gut feelings can tell us a lot if we’re willing to listen.
Humility
Humble people make great teammates, as they’re willing to listen to and learn from others. They don’t crave credit, so they’re natural collaborators, and they treat others fairly and with kindness.
A candidate’s humility, or lack thereof, comes through in a longer interview process. When they checked in, how did they treat the people at the front desk? Did they ask a lot of questions of the people they met? Did they take the time to learn about the company, you, and your team before the interview? It’s hard to ask about humility directly in interview questions, but tune into the language your candidate uses and you might get an accurate reading. Listen for an abundance of self-congratulatory statements and a lack of shared credit.
Though humility is an attractive virtue in a candidate, be sure it’s balanced with confidence; confident designers act upon their judgements but are humble enough to know they could be wrong.
If you’d like more insights on how to boost your talent acquisition strategy, or how to get ahead in product design, check out the full 2019 Product Design Hiring Report.
