Please, Give Junior People a Chance
As a recruiter and HR Manager I often felt frustrated for the tremendous amount of talent we exclude from our processes. Although everyone of us struggle to secure good technical profiles, as employers we still do very little to make the situation better.
As recent data shows, 94% of the time we look for people who already “did the job” somewhere else. That’s still the number #1 metric leading our screening and interview processes. “Has this person already worked on a similar project with these technologies”?, “Does she have a proven track record of success in this environment?”
Of course, many times we need that kind of seniority to bring more skills to our organization. But this was turned into a rule for any hiring process. Now, pretty much every job post requires at least 3 years of experience in similar roles, which makes it incredibly tough for junior professionals to find a job.
Now more than ever, we are seeing the rise of bootcamps, intensive courses, digital masters to fill the talent gap. And that’s a good thing. But as employers, HR and especially hiring managers, we often don’t even consider many hiring “new graduates” by default.
And that’s a shame.
So, how do we convince the hiring manager to hire more junior candidates?
I recently read an article talking about the same topic in the UX field by Luis Beruman Castro , a Senior UX leader frustrated about the same issue.
In this Medium article he bust the most common hiring managers objections to this argument:
“We need somebody that can hit the ground running”
What you are really saying is that you are not going to invest too much (or nothing at all) in onboarding this new hired. You can have the most experienced designer in the world, but if your requirements, processes and ongoing projects are not well documented, your designer is going to take between two and six months to be productive regardless of the experience.
Hit the ground running… uhm, also sounds like you started several projects without a UX designer and you need to play catch up. Don’t tell me you requested that position several months ago, the budget was just approved this month, and now you need to find somebody very quickly to fix issues before the next release. If that is the case, you do not need a Senior UXer, you need a time machine.
“We need somebody with experience working on agile environments”
Really? Working on agile or any of its variations is not really hard to understand, what sometimes is hard to understand is why everyone is doing agile differently, even teams inside the same company. Over the years I have not seen a single dev or product team working 100% according to theory and best practices.
How many sprints and retrospectives do you think a junior designer would take to learn to work with you? If you have a competent dev manager, healthy dev teams, keen product owners and a clear road map, communicating your needs and deadlines to a new designer should not be difficult.
“We need somebody to bring the best UX practices”
A.K.A. You are asking a single individual to revolutionize the whole company. Designers are agents of change and innovation, but it is really delusional and unfair to put that weight on a single individual. Change management is an organizational effort, and most of the time this needs to addressed, approved and orchestrated from top to button. If your company is development centric, I just want to understand how any UX designer is asked to bring “the best practices”, without challenging the status quo and getting into fights every day.
In plain words, UX best practices are Product best practices. If you do not already know your user, or empathize with their needs for any reason, your UX designer will face the same blocks and resistance. If you do not have budget, time or analytics in place for the simplest user research, your designer is going to struggle to set them up. Be the change you want to be, and then hire your way to a user-friendly future.
“We need somebody that can take feedback”
Ok, I am going to give you this one. Giving and receiving feedback is hard for some designers. You see, there are many reasons why somebody chooses to be a UX designer, some people just want to make the world a better place, while some others… they want to be right. Some growing environment do not help too, specially those where it is understood that the alternative to be right is to be dumb.
It is most likely to find this situation with juniors, because the experience of failure makes you humble. It is hard to describe the pain of making a huge mistake, loosing client, ruining a project and financial lost to a junior designer. This professional scars are constant reminders of how important it is to seek for feedback, to listen carefully, to test and overall, to know that you can do everything right, and still get it so wrong. I do not wish that to anybody, and it should not be a job requirement.
The good news is that humbleness is a personal trait, it is available in students, juniors, seniors, leads and heads of UX. Hire the right character, the personality that hits the right balance between creative confidence and healthy self-doubt. Maturity and EQ does necessarily not come with age.
“We need an expert in every UX skill possible”
Wow! Some job descriptions are so aspirational, that the only thing is missing is the desired height and weight. If you are setting up impossible expectations by asking high expertise in every single domain of UX, self-aware individuals (juniors or seniors) are going to self-exclude, clearing the path to less than optimal individuals. If you are familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, you will know that self-professed experts are climbing the peak of “Mount Stupid”.
Be very honest with yourself and ask only for what you need. If your UXer needs to know a bit of code to communicate with your team, cool, write it down in plain words. If you are asking for a unicorn, a UX designer who codes, but it is not going to write a single line, then if you get to hire one, it is going to be frustrating for him or her not putting in practice the skills that took so long to acquire.
Let’s say you are not technical, do your research before adding a requirement. It was funny to see a post asking for 3 years of experience with HTML5 back in 2015, while the initial release happened just one year before. Back then, the only guys with three or more years of experience in HTML5 where the developers creating it.
Do not forget that you need to invest in your UX designers. The only way to know you are getting the expertise you need is by developing it. Mentorship is extremely rewarding, having a junior onboard is an opportunity for you to step up as a leader and maybe revisit those books you have not read in a while. The best way to predict the future is to create it.
Dear hiring manager (hr, recruiter, etc.) you need to realize the incredible the amount of talent out there.
Today, more than ever, junior designers have every single piece of knowledge, tools and technology at their disposition. The field of UX has matured so much in the last decade and junior designers are asked to grow fast, to compete among themselves and to break into an unwelcoming world that still do not seem to be ready for them.
If they come knocking at your door, challenge yourself to develop an eye for talent. Who knows, maybe you will be able to say you knew him/her, before he/she was cool.
