A Beginner’s Guide to Hiring Designers

Some tips to help you avoid a total meltdown.

Published in

Pixel Tours

7 min readJun 10, 2016

Life at Pixel Tours has been good these last few months. We’ve had enough work to keep everybody completely pinned, and after hiring a couple of developers, are now beefing up our design team. All of which meant I got to experience life on the other side of the interview table. Here are a few things I learned that might come in handy if you’re looking to add a designer or two to your roster.

For the First-Timers…

If, like me, you’re new to this, do your homework. Uncertainty is a large part of new experiences, so make sure you feel fully prepared to go into it. There’s a lot of great advice, use it. To that end, I’ve included some references at the bottom of this piece.

Understand Your Needs

Spend some time thinking about your priorities—what needs to get done in the next month? How about the next year? What gaps do you currently have in your team? Who’s worked to the bone, stretching across multiple roles, or in need of assistance?

Also understand which of your needs would be better served by an in-house designer than freelance talent. Creating a batch of icons or a series of animations is a finite enough job for a short-term contract with a specialist. Constantly tweaking a product’s experience based on customer feedback is probably best handled in-house.

…and Theirs

Great designers want to work at great companies, or companies they believe can become great. They want a chance to build something they can be proud of in years to come, and a seat at whatever metaphorical table allows them to do that.

Invest in Your Pipeline

Building a pipeline of designers takes a long time and when you combine that with finding someone who is truly great for your team, it can take even longer. Build that pipeline now and always keep it going.
—Lindsay Mindler, excerpt from Designing the Team

Cultivating a good candidate pool—like any other form of lead generation—requires care and feeding. Start early, and never stop. Certain places I know of are seemingly always hiring designers (although what that says about turnover, I’m not sure).

Finding the Right Channels

If you’ve got local design events, conferences, talks or meetups, pop in and say hello. Better yet, host some yourself. As Michael Port likes to say, “Always have something to invite people to”. It’s such good advice, I’ll forgive him for ending on a preposition.

If you’re looking online, here are a few suggestions, but don’t forget to go deeper into a designer’s portfolio:

If you’re a startup looking to hire a tech-minded person, AngelList is a good place to start.
Dribbble will give you a good feel for someone’s voice, without a great deal of insight into the thought process. Expect to see strong illustration, motion or product design skills.
Behance offers more diversity and deeper case studies, spanning most of the creative fields, and is a pretty good place to find agency or client services talent.
For a wide, local candidate pool, LinkedIn is always a good bet. You’ll need to spend a bit more time filtering through applicants here.

Start by proactively searching through a few portfolios before ponying up the cash (or time) to create a job board post.

Craft Your Ask

“The most common complaint I hear from people switching jobs is ‘I’ve been promised things that are just not happening’.”
—Antoine

The more accurate your job description, the easier it will be to get the right people to contact you (and the wrong people to look elsewhere). Don’t rush this bit, any effort you put in here will pay off later.

Try to paint a picture of what the designer’s day-to-day activities will look like, not just her objectives. Talk about the structure of the team. Give her a sense of the office vibe.

Let your tone reflect the personality and culture at the company.

Prepare to Receive

Before publishing the job posts, we hadn’t set up our careers@ email address properly. The first few responses bounced—we may have lost good candidates because of that.

Don’t be like us. Test your forms, email addresses, whatever you’re using to collect.

On a psychological level, prepare for an assault on your inbox. Carve time out of every day to look over applications. Don’t gloss over someone because you’re tired and you’ve already looked at five other applicants—take a break and come back to their application when you’re ready.

Remember to respond to the applicants you won’t be interviewing with the same courtesy as the ones you bring forward.

Screening, Interviewing and Evaluating

I think you have to kiss a lot of proverbial frogs before you find your prince. Screen any candidate you’re interested in with a phone interview first — so as to not waste your time. —Allegra

No matter how well crafted your call for applications is, you’re likely to get some applicants that don’t fit. In our case, looking for full-time, local people meant we had to screen out some incredible applicants due to location.

Interviewing

Use the phone interview to get a feel for who someone is, go over their resume, and ask about their aspirations. Check for any promising signs or red flags, and decide who you’d like to meet in person.

We like to bring people in for two conversations—we’ll have a more intimate design conversation, and a broader, company-focused conversation, where candidates can meet the team.

During the first conversation, we’ll introduce the company and share some of our work, then ask the designer to talk us through a couple of projects in their portfolio. Depending on how much we can draw from previous work, we may ask if the designer would be willing to complete a quick test. If that’s the case, we’ll have them present their work at the start of the second interview.

At this point, if everything’s looking good, we’ll get into logistics and properly introduce our candidate to the team.

We schedule a couple of hours for these conversations. This gives both parties plenty of room to ask questions and get to know each other a bit better. It also gives candidates the chance to play around with some of our toys.

Design Tests

It’s important to try and glean as much from a designer’s portfolio as you can before launching into a test.

Here are a few tips for getting the best out of a design test:

Pay for the candidate’s time. A designer will likely be working on other projects, looking for other jobs, or both.
Where possible, avoid basing the test around one of your projects. Not only will it feel less like spec work, it reduces the knowledge gap and provides a blank slate free of bias.
Let them work in their preferred environment (aka the Take Home Test). I like to say an onsite test is a reflection of what a designer will be like for the first week, when they can’t remember anybody’s name or where the bathroom is.
Provide just enough information and context, and prompt the designer to reach out to you if they have further questions. Asking questions is a big part of the design process.

Evaluating Candidates

At this point, you should be in one of three positions:

A) You have no outstanding candidates
B) You have one outstanding candidate
C) You have more than one outstanding candidates

If two candidates seem equally qualified, ask yourself if you would hire one if the other pulled their application. If the answer is “in a heartbeat” for both, congratulations—you have the mother of First World Problems. If there is any hesitation, it’s probably best to continue looking.

In either situation, don’t get hung up looking for “the best designer”—what you want is someone who will be successful in their role. Go back to the work you did right at the beginning.

A quick note on decisions: sometimes you just need to pick one—I find flipping a coin tends to show me the truth when I’m indecisive. Your mileage may vary.

Making an Offer

Once we’re sure we want someone, our job is to make sure they want us. Preferably, immediately.
—Ian

We like to move fast here. I witnessed this firsthand when I interviewed here—I went out to dinner with friends after the interview, and came home to an offer in my inbox.

You don’t have to be quite as fast as us, but it is important that you let the designer know you mean business. If your candidate’s that good, there will be other offers, if not now, then soon.

Summarise the things you already discussed, and include any additional information, along with all the boring legal stuff. Hopefully, your designer accepts, but if not, now you’ve got a system in place to keep going.

On Recruiters

If it sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. That’s why recruiters exist. If you really can’t give this the time it deserves, outsourcing is not the worst idea.

We’ve found the DIY approach has brought in candidates that are a better fit—nobody knows us like us, right?

I know this has been a long, rambling post, but hopefully it’s proven useful. If you have any specific questions about hiring designers, I would be glad to help where I can, and point you to someone smarter where I can’t.