What to look for when hiring a designer.
Hiring a designer is easy if you're a designer. Here's a guide for everyone else.
Hiring a designer is easy—if you’re a designer. Design training allows us to separate timelessness from trend, strategy from bullshit. But how can someone without this background assess a designer’s talent? Here’s what I look for when hiring.
Clarity
Regardless of personality type, I look for a person who can bring a project into clear focus. I get distracted easily, so I’m a big fan of detailed design briefs. Some people hold all of the information in their head and can explain it in the final deliverable. However a person thinks through a given design challenge, I look for their ability to clearly state:
The end-user: Who was this built for? It might be an investor, the executive who approved the budget, or the team that has to maintain the work. If they did it for themselves, that’s art, not design.
The scope: How long did the project take? How much did it cost? How many engineers were involved? Did the scope change throughout the project, and how did that impact the work? Understanding the scope of a design project defines its endpoint, which allows the designer to understand the impact the work had.
Impact: What change did the design produce? How was that measured? The metric doesn't need to be quantitative. “My boss loved it” or “12% lift in conversion” both count. What matters is that the designer sees their work as part of the world it lives in, not just their portfolio.
A good designer can speak to these comfortably, as if they’ve discussed them before (if only to themselves). They shouldn’t be reaching for answers or making jokes about how the project was crazy and no one understood it.
Strategy
Can the designer say no to a feature, push back on a brief, or argue for a different direction when the work calls for it? Designers who just execute what they're told produce uneven work; designers who can push back productively are senior even at junior levels.
Listen for moments in their portfolio review where they describe disagreeing with a stakeholder, advocating for a different approach, or saying no to a request. Designers who never disagree with anyone in their stories either haven't really led work, or aren't being honest about how it went.
Taste
Taste is hard to define and harder to measure, but it shows up clearly when you look at a designer's work. Does the work fit its audience? Does a piece for K–12 students look like it understands K–12 students, does enterprise software look serious, does a children's product look joyful? Taste is appropriateness—sensitivity to context, respect for the viewer, fit with the medium.
If you're not sure whether a piece of work shows taste, ask yourself: would you trust this work to represent your company? Does it feel considered, or thrown together? Does it match the seriousness of its intentions?
Collaboration
No designer works alone. End users, senior leaders, product managers, engineers, brand teams, researchers—every designer is part of a chain of decisions that include all of these voices.
If the candidate talks about “their” work or “their” process, take heed. I like to hear about how the design was supported by many people along the way, and how competing perspectives got resolved through discussion, prioritization, and judgment.
Listen also for whether the candidate can explain their thinking in language a CEO, an engineer, or a salesperson can understand and act on. Designers who only speak design-jargon stay junior; designers who can translate are senior.
Unlike art, design is about problem-solving: clarifying the problem, working with those who can best solve it, and measuring how well it was solved. Good designers come from a wider range of backgrounds, training paths, and ways of working than you might expect. Hire on the work and the thinking, not on personality or pattern-match.
As a non-designer, you can assess their work from outside the discipline, which is where most design work is experienced.
