Best recruiting practices for hiring product designers

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The most valuable resources for any organisation are time and brainpower of your best employees.

We know from this report that good design is good business.

Making the right hire at the right time will propel any organisation, so it’s critical to look into how you hire designers.

You will never get hiring 100% correct, but there are ways to mitigate risks.

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1. Experiment with top of funnel approaches

A conversation I’m having in the early parts of 2025 is designers can’t get a job and hiring managers cannot find the talent they need.

What is going on?!

What I believe we need more of in hiring designers to increase better top of level talent:

• Headhunting rather than sourcing

• Not relying on internal applications

• Community based approaches

• Overpay certain designers (hear me out!)

• Take more risks

The type of talent needed in product design in 2025 is hard to find unless you’re one of the most talked about companies in the world. Think OpenAI etc.

A lot of designers are becoming founders, becoming solopreneurs and in general want more ownership of their career.

The top % of designers can be more fussy over their next career step.

Overpay certain designers

Some strategic roles in design teams are difficult to source for in certain cities. I’ve seen an exodus of talent in London as an example.

What I’ve seen work well to counter balance this is to overpay for the more strategic roles, the roles that will truly push the needle of the team leaving the rest of the budget to hire more early-stage talent.

The amount of design teams I see where a Senior Designer is doing the work of a mid-weight is crazy. So, if you can overpay on certain cruical roles, you will be able to find strong mid-junior IC’s that can grow into the role.

Otherwise, you could also have a retention problem on your hands.

Headhunting not sourcing

99% of the best designers are working. You need to entice them out. There are so many AI companies and modern software companies popping up out of nowhere.

I personally build my own “Verified list” which I interview designers before I even speak to them about companies as the best talent is often passive, it’s who you know etc and they will not be simply applying online unless you are OpenAI or Anthropic or one of these buzzy AI companies atm.

Most companies I work with have headhunting lists, rarely get top inbound.

Hybrid vs Remote

The whole hybrid vs remote is another topic. Some of the best designers I know are not looking for in-office work 3-5 days per week. They want a level of flexibility, I understand the need for office work, but it’s something to consider.

Understanding who you want to hire and researching where these designers are based, work and motivations would set a solid foundation for you to source from when you do come to hiring. Especially the more strategic hires.

2. Double down on the cultural fit interview

You have to be obsessive about culture, especially early stage companies.

You can’t compromise on this. A bad culture will lead to a lot of pain.

Culture is unique to each company, which means not every candidate will fit. I believe if you have an amazing candidate on paper, but they do not fit culturally, it’s a no.

What to look for in a candidate at this stage:

• Do they align to your values?

• What environment does this person belong in? Can they cope here? Will they be able to handle when we scale?

• Motivations of the person? You will quickly find out if they are solely focused on money for example.

• How they handle critical feedback

• How you can help them in their career

This is a critical filter in the process. Without this bad apples will be able to creep in.

3. Have similar interview formats for each candidate

To properly assess everyone fairly, this is recruiting 101.

Everyone needs an even playing field at an interview stage, so by asking people a series of similar questions and themes you will be able to properly assess them.

Key steps:

• Actually define what you want

• Ask intelligent interview questions to test a range of hard and soft skills.

4. Test for product taste, design taste and critical thinking AKA “design craft”

I think this is the hardest point to talk about here when I think about “best in-class interview experiences” for designers. I see 4 options here on how to test this and it will depend largely on the preferences of the company to mitigate risk and ensure they are hiring the best possible person for the role:

• Take home design assignment

• In-person whiteboard exercise

• Work trial (Example here)

• No task, just a series of interviews.

But you need to find a way to find out the candidates:

• Design/Product sense

• Critical thinking

• Experience working on projects which could show relevance to you

• Understanding of their level of visual craft ability (if needed)

A nice way to get an understanding straight away of the above is to ask designers show the breath of work they’ve worked on and tell a compelling business story. Case study and raw Figma (or whatever tool) files combined work well, as you will get a better understanding of how hands-on the designer is and how they work.

Note on the take home assignment: I’m working with a company who pay $500 for candidates to work on a take-home task. No one has declined to do the task. It has a deadline. The process was smooth. You will get a lot of push back if you consider a unpaid task especially for your own product. It will often be seen as free spec work.

Either pay, consider a task not for your product, or think of another way of doing diligence.

And just be ok with the fact not every designer will want to go through your interview process if you insist on a task.

5. Bar raiser interview

This type of interview purpose is simple. Ensure the person hired is better than the majority of those currently in similar roles, or adding some unique to the company. Otherwise, what is the point in hiring?

A “bar raiser” interview usually is conducted from someone not associated with the team or will not have too much interaction with the candidate in the day to day. The role of the person conducting this round is to be a steward of your company values and spot anything that may have been missed by other interviewers.

This type of interview helps the process by:

• Assessing cultural fit

• Make sure there is an open, accurate and fair assessment of the candidate with every member of the interview loop participating in the discussion

• Be responsible for helping hiring managers and others prepare for interviews, ask questions related to the company values and the competencies that are needed for the position, assess the candidate, and provide written feedback.

6. Have a clear job description

99% of the time, I do not read job descriptions. They are so vague and boring.

My advice is to write your job description and advert like you’re writing to 1-3 of your dream candidates.

Less fluff. Get to the point.

What a lot of posts say:

• We’re hiring!

• Click here to see our jobs.

• Just reached unicorn status.

• Join the rocket ship.

• We need a Designer to do everything.

• "We need someone to come and do the UX"

Ideas when writing to designers:

• Why is this role live?

• How big is the team?

• What can they be fired for?

• Who’s going to be their boss?

• Where does design report in to?

• How efficiently do they operate?

• Whats their expected deliverables?

• How mature is the design organisation?

• How does design work with engineering?

• Who’s the highest exec sponsor for design?

And if you’re hiring a design leader:

• Information on OKRs linked to the business. (without much detail)

• How can a Head of Design can help you reach long-term goals?

• A note from the CEO or C-Suite on why they are hiring this role.

• What are the biggest design challenges and highest priorities?

• Does design play a meaningful part in business conversations?

• The current state of design maturity, and vision for 1-3 years.

• Is there CEO sponsorship? If not, who is the senior sponsor?

• Define "hands-off" vs. "hands-on". This is crucial IMO.

• Any details on ownership of budgets, P&Ls etc.

• What do the first 100 days look like in the org?

Many companies do not know the answers to these questions when hiring a design leader. In part, it's for them to set their own targets linked into the business goals set out.

Once you have qualified candidates, have a compelling deck to show them why they should join. i.e. founder talks, impact on customers etc. Show them the work. Do not hide this. Especially if you're not in a major city, you will have to do a lot of selling the role in order for people to relocate etc.

These topics provide clarity for someone to understand the impact they can have.

7. Get References

This is a vital step. For designers it’s even more important because often there is no tangible metric to determine if a designer will be a good fit or not, and even more so if the company/person hiring the designer doesn’t truly understand design.

With designers, it’s all about the work and the past jobs will indicate if they made impact or not and how you can help them set up for success especially if they are a younger designer.

The best designers have a track record of working in teams that have shipped meaningful work.

8. Move fast

You can be speaking to a candidate for months, that is fine. Sometimes it takes a long time to get candidates into your funnel as you need to focus on building long term relationships to secure the best talent.

But as soon as they enter your process, you need to move incredibly fast. It shouldn't take any longer than 30 days to hire a designer (IC not leadership)

If it does, the likelihood is:

• Your TA/Recruitment team is a blocker.

• Salaries are not aligned to the market.

• You are not selling the role enough.

• HR blackholes i.e. offer processes.

• Your interview process is too long.

• You don't know what you want.

Momentum is everything. A good metric to measure is how long each candidate spends in between each step. I’ve found you can have 3-4 rounds, but you don’t want too long inbetween each round.

9. Diverse candidates

I am not going to speak too much on this, as there are people out there far more qualified than me to talk about this. But from a sourcing perspective:

• Ensure you have diverse talent pools and pipelines

• Provide benefits that support underrepresented groups

• Focus on eliminating biases from your interview approach

“We need a woman now” you should never get to a position where you need to make a hire in order to hit quota. Plan now.

Here is a list someone sent me to help source designers from diverse backgrounds:

• Diversify Tech - Check out their job board for vetted tech listings from software engineering to product and design. You’ll also be able to join their talent directory, where companies can find you and reach out to you directly.

• Blacks Who Design - Blacks Who Design highlights all of the inspiring Black designers in the industry. The goal is to inspire new designers, encourage people to diversify their feeds, and discover amazing individuals to join your team.

• Women Who Design - Women Who Design is a Twitter (X) directory of accomplished women in the design industry. It aims to help people find notable and relevant voices to follow on Twitter (X) by parsing Twitter (X) bios for popular keywords.

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Until next time!