Three Reasons Why UX/UI Recruiting Is Broken (And How To Fix That)
Close your eyes, imagine yourself as an enterprise that produces anything that your customers interact with — and think of something that is hard to find (or build), extremely valuable and very crucial to your customer’s decision to accept or to reject your product.
There’s a huge chance you’d be thinking about User Experience as a whole — and the User Experience Design as the way of getting there.
The UX/UI market has evolved into one of the most fast-paced ones, one of the fastest-growing ones — and into one of the most confusing ones. Finding a designer isn’t a problem. Finding a good designer isn’t a problem either. Finding a great one is a little more of a challenge, but the biggest challenge is.. can you guess it?
Finding one who is great at exactly what you need him/her to be.
Look, there is something very wrong with the way enterprises go about scouting, headhunting, recruiting top UX / UI workforce. The usual route includes:
A. Putting together a highly generic (even deceptive) job description that reads like a secret code for marketing people, which is, once read, is meant to take control over their marketing brains and unleash a full-scale marketing war (if you think otherwise, you are welcome to enlighten me what constructs like “You are a strong communicator who is dedicated to driving the innovation throughout the company” have to do with hiring a UX designer).
B. Activating the recruiting agencies who multiply those job listings throughout the internets and then begin dancing around a voodoo doll with the letters ‘UX’ on it in the hope to somehow lure the possible candidates into finding the postings and reacting to them.
C. The recruiters will then ‘screen’ the determined ones who were lucky enough to detect the postings and brave enough to apply. The recruiters (who, mind you, are by no means designers themselves) will judge the prospects solely by the facts like education, previous positions and so on, but there is absolutely no way that a clerk (the recruiter) will be able to tell a good designer from a bad one. Anyone who makes it through the initial screening, will be passed on to the hiring manager(s).
D. Hiring manager will then review the applicants more closely — by himself or by putting together a team. The chosen prospects will then go through the process of interviewing, re-interviewing, re-re-interviewing and re-re-re-interviewing. You’re still reading, right?
E. Now that the interviews are over, a decision will be made and the chosen one(s) get(s) their job offer.
The process that I have described above usually takes from 2 to 6 months (or even much longer), depending on the size of the company, the number of prospects and the willingness of the recruiting agency to let go and admit that they ran out of candidates.
One might argue that if a company is on the lookout for a really, really great match, 2–6 months (or even much longer) are not an issue. Right. The thing is, though, that even after this long and exhausting process no company is guaranteed to have hired the best matching professional. Or that the professional they have hired is not going to jump ship within the next 12 months. Or that the professional is a priori the right person for this position (people may be ‘ok’ with doing what they are hired to do, but their real strength lies elsewhere). And so on.
Which conveniently takes us to the 3 reasons why UX recruitment is broken — and how to stop doing things wrong.
1. Companies are not making sure that the best matching candidates get attracted by your job offering.
First of all, companies are definitely not telling them the three most important things they want to know (note the emphasis on ‘want’): duties, pay, benefits. Yes, that’s what we all want to know. So by being shady, potential employers are kind of killing people’s interest (unless you are Apple and think that people would eat their own grandma to come work for you).
We don’t care for marketing speak like “work in a fast-paced environment” or “unleash your potential”. We care for interesting tasks, money and benefits.
Going the aforementioned usual route, employers are being very (very!) shady about what the candidate’s daily work will be until halfway down the road. They are not clearly saying how much they are going to make. They are not making clear what benefits the candidates can expect (I’ve seen people skipping on job offers for the lack of dental insurance of joining companies because that entitled them to drive a Tesla. Not kidding).
How to get this right: employers should meet every effort to describe the job as exactly as possible, and narrow down on details as much as possible. Compare:
“Your tasks will be to support our continuous UX efforts to build exciting products that millions of people worldwide use in their daily life. You will be working in a fast-paced environment and will be responsible for creating pixel perfect prototypes for web and mobile” (A snippet of a real life job posting on Glassdoor).
and
“You will build prototypes for iOS and Android apps and ensure their consistency with Apple’s and Google’s guidelines. The products you will be working on are remote engineering access systems, monitoring software and fleet management applications. The customers will include global airspace, engineering and consulting companies. You can work with Sketch, Framer, UXPin, Invision and quickly pick up other techniques and tools if needed. The compensation is ca. 25% above the average. Benefits include an extensive insurance package, stock share, dental, vision, 30 days paid vacation, company car. Travelling is around 20%. There will be 12 other members on your team.(what this job posting on Glassdoor should’ve looked like).
2. The employers do not fish for the great candidates where the great candidates are.
Wrote up a job description? Check. Attached a generic image (office in the background, company logo in the upper right corner, smiling female face)? Check. Posted it on LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Monster, wherever? Check. Paid for premium placement? Check.
What now? let’s sit and wait till someone notices.
Dear enterprises, recruiters, agencies, this may come as a bit of a shock to you, but: we do not wonder around the internet, continuously hitting ‘refresh’ in a hope that we stumble upon a great job opening. Unless you’re Apple and we have a spare grandma, see above.
How to get this right: Designers, like any other species populating this planet, tend to build communities. Young designers who dabble in creating creepy graphics in Photoshop build communities for designers who create creepy graphics in Photoshop. Top UX people build communities for top UX people.
Communities (think Telegram channels, WhatsApp groups, Slack teams, web-based forums etc.) are where it’s at. That’s the marketplace you need to be seeking to enter and to target. Here’s a quick example:
A company that I once worked for in my freelance times, had an open position for a UX Director. They are a pretty big company, so they had this position advertised through multiple channels, yet they were not able to close this position in over 8 months by the time when I first heard about it. Yes, they have been receiving applications, screening portfolios, interviewing some prospects and so on. But they could not find the perfect match. So one day I was congratulating one of the this company’s product managers for a promotion on LinkedIn, and 5 minutes later a message pops up from this guy, asking me if by any chance I could recommend anyone I knew from the thousands of design folks I have in my network to fill this position. Another five minutes later we had a quick call where I asked him all the things I needed to know (tasks, compensation, benefits), and then I went ahead and threw the word out into the vast space of my network. The manager also told me that they would rely on my expertise to be sure that the people I’d suggest would be suited for this job, and trust that I can directly introduce the prospects to them.
One week later I have called him back and said that I have 3 top-notch professionals in standby, ready to be brought in — with 2 of them being able to start within 2 weeks. After a quick cultural interview, one of the two available was offered the job and accepted.
Learn the lesson.
3. The candidates are not screened by the right people.
Clerks working for recruiting agencies (and recruiters who work at the employing company itself, for that matter) may be great at what they do, but they are not designers. They can discern potentially matching candidates by applying a raster (education, years of service, the availability of a portfolio etc., but by no means can they differentiate between a good designer and a bad one. Which means that bad (I am using the word ‘bad’ but I mean ‘not matching’) prospects will only get thrown out of the race at a much later point (and I presume, it is in the interest of every employer to close the open positions as fast and as efficient as possible).
How to get this right: potential candidates should be screened for their professional suitability much earlier in the process. Just have a design professional of a certain level screen their portfolios and available works — before you pass them on to the hiring managers. Nowadays, the turnaround time for this process (application — check — hiring manager — screening) takes weeks (or months). Why not have it done in days (or hours)?
The takeaway:
If you are an enterprise or a recruiting agency, looking to hire top-notch UX/UI design people, please start re-thinking the approach you are taking.
Start going to the right places. Any of us would take a colleagues recommendation over 50 letters from headhunters (headhunters are bad anyway, but I will elaborate in a later post).
Provide as much information as you possibly can. Say the numbers. Use insider terminology. We don’t care for marketing speak like “work in a fast-paced environment” or “unleash your potential”. We care for interesting tasks, money and benefits.
Have a professional brought in at a very early stage. Let an experienced designer screen your candidates’ portfolios and ask the prospects all those professional questions that reveal a designer’s true level.
Good luck and talk to me if you need help.
Originally posted on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-reasons-why-uxui-recruiting-broken-how-fix-eugene-koplunik?trk=prof-post
