How to attract great designers
Hiring top designers is hard and expensive. They are often not actively looking.
Design recruitment in 2024 is strange.
One day I hear companies struggling to find talent.
The next day I hear designers can’t find decent roles to apply to.
Regardless of a lot of designers being on the market, companies still like to do intentional searches to attract what they determine to be great designers.
But how can companies who are lesser known attract top-tier designers?
Let’s dig in.
Show the actual work
People want to know what they will be working on.
The best talent care about the work you do. Not some fluffy BS on a JD. The best talent want to ship work that impacts customers, looks incredible and work on hard projects.
Stop hiding your work.
Start showing the community.
Your inbound rate will shoot up.
Show interviews with your leadership team and wider business on how they view design. Talent want to see sneak peaks of how companies think about certain topics to get them inspired to go into the interview process.
Examples:
Spotify: www.spotify.design
Wise: www.wise.design
Intercom: intercom.design
Share a deck with candidates after they are interested on the team, mission, values, upcoming projects etc (where possible) to get them as excited as possible about going through the interview process.
Have patience
I was involved in a placement this year which took 6 months from first conversation to first day. Often great talent is locked in with big bonuses, RSU's, equity etc.
Sometimes you need to pinpoint the top 1% and have patience. They are often not in a rush to move. You should always be scouting the very best.
Set an appropriate task, or not at all.
Confession: I am not against tasks. I am against when they are done badly. I used to be anti-tasks, but after seeing the "other side" of hiring more I've understood how many people can blag interviews and it's expensive to re-hire and not make the right hire.
Let's use two examples:
I worked with company this year who paid $500 for candidates to work on a take-home task. Refreshing. No one has declined to do the task. It has a deadline. The process is smooth. I’m not against interview tasks when done right.
I'm working with two companies at the moment who do not pay, but set deadlines between 24-48 hours to do the task. This is an indicator of how someone works to deadlines, and if they need more time, they will push back indicating this person is comfortable pushing back to get the right level of work done.
I’m seeing an uptick in companies setting tasks. Permanent headcount is harder to get approved so having extra due diligence to ensure the candidate is the right fit is important.
Don't be obsessed about needing to see a polished portfolio
Let's get real. Many designers do not have an updated portfolio with their latest work.
Having a polished portfolio for any designer is a huge plus. Many portfolios these days can look slick because they are templates. But, the real magic is in the actual work they've worked on.
Figma files, decks, case studies to send over should give you an indication of someone's quality.
Stop the glamour search
We have a natural bias to see big logos and believe that person must be good.
But the reality just because someone works in big tech does not make them an automatic fit for your company. For example, I spoke to a designer at a FAANG company who has been working on a button for 2 years.
I know you can make a lot of money constantly optimising, but surely, this is underutilising design capacity? This designer does not have the breadth of work that you may be looking for in a smaller organisation.
The most common biases I hear:
They're too agency
Not enough start-up experience
Great people are being overlooked daily.
Even more so in this market as companies look to be more "efficient", often they are hiring with a cost-focused mindset not customer-focused or people-focused.
You need both.
Because they don’t come from the exact background companies look for. Result is they spend months trying to fill a IC role.
To get top talent, go beyond their “CV”. Look at what they can bring, not just where they’ve been.
If you look at the best product design agencies they actually ship product, and some are 10x better than some in-house designers. For example some in-house designers just work on a checkout page for 2 years. Whereas a studio designer can be part of shipping 10+ products a years.
We as recruiters, hiring managers etc need to look deeper into someone’s experience.
Go deeper, test this person in an interview, put them into 2-3 hours of working with your team (paid) to see how they flourish.
Some of the best designers do not work in big tech, but companies you've never heard of.
Look for things such as:
Dig into their level of design craft and rationale
How do they judge and talk about design taste?
Do they have natural empathy? Any ego?
Do they understand technical constraints?
Do they have courage to be bold?
Being a designer in a company is tough. You see things others don't and have to go against the grain, so having courage to do that is vital to drive design forward in your company.
Invest in recruitment
Hiring world-class designers is difficult and expensive. If you want a great design team you need to back up your words with investment but also patience (to my point earlier).
Top design teams cost well into 7-figures per year and more depending on size.
Spend hours crafting your story as to why designers should join you. Talk about design as a value creator, or how you will turn it into one. Designers can have multiple job offers, think about why they should join you?
Allocate a multi-year budget at the correct compensation bands. Invest in recruiters to help you source and then spend countless hours crafting your narrative for designers. Talk about your investment, your vision, why you want people to come help shape it.
Be truthful. Don’t have it figured out? Cool. Show designers how you plan on getting there, how they can be part of the journey. Some designers love coming into companies at low maturity levels and helping increase it.
Write a proper job description + advert
99% of the time, I do not read job descriptions. They are so vague and boring. Write your JD and advert like you’re writing to 1-3 of your dream candidates.
We need less fluff like:
What a lot of posts on LinkedIn 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?
Until next time!
100% agree. Well said!