I’ve taken a big dump on a lot of UX / design talents when it comes to their portfolios and their general not-so-optimised approach to job-hunting. All these I have addressed in previous articles and in direct mentorship, and I think I’ve done all I can to help those in need from the receiving side of the table.

But what about the ones on the giving end of the stick? I’ve had a few design managers approach me for my take when it comes to the process of spotting good talents for hire.

And I get it, not every design manager comes from a formal design background so it’s hard to actually see who’s great and who’s not in the always-ever-so-noisy industry.

It is very easy to blindside yourself by beautiful UI or get intimidated by UX artefacts that are hard to break down. But don’t worry. We can manage this.

And so, I’ve decided to write down what I personally think will lead you to hiring the best designers for your company.

Disclaimer: This is what I think based on my experience and the experience of a few hiring managers in my network. By no means is it the best way to pick someone out, but it has been extremely reliable so far after stress-testing these principles for a few hundred candidates.

Pre-hire conditions

Before I talk about what to look out for, it is important to note that you should make sure that your hiring process is optimal for candidates.

I’m not going to go too deep on this topic right now because I know these processes are dependent on other departments and the approval from upper management, but from my experience as both the candidate AND the hiring manager, I recommend the following:

#1 No take-home assignments

Really, I am such a huge activist against take-homes. Not only are they a waste of time for your hiring team, they are biased towards the candidates who are able to spend the most time on them.

The best candidates will have multiple interviews lined up, so they won’t waste time on silly assignments. Save yourself the trouble of reviewing dozens of poorly done assignments and optimise your hiring workflow by just not including them.

Portfolio interviews are so much better as an alternative. Do that instead.

#2 Commit to closing applications

While companies mostly focus on closing roles, one statistic that talent acquisition frequently overlook is the amount of applications they closed on time.

Give out feedback to every single one of your candidates, even if it’s rejections, in a timely manner. Don’t take 3 weeks to get back to them at every stage of their candidacy. Learn to pause listings when you have too many applicants in the pipeline. Communicate with your potential hires.

Other than being a respectable employer, this also saves you a lot of extra work reviewing all the leftover applications in bulk with even more candidates no longer interested thanks to your long processing times.

It’s a make-your-life-easier / efficiency thing, so trust us on this and clean the pipeline every end of the week.

#3 Make sure you know what you’re looking for

All roles in design have a specific scope for a specific department or product. There is no way a job listing is so utterly generic that just anyone will suffice.

Please make sure you know who you want to hire and how the ideal person would fit into the company. This makes screening so much easier and it increases the chances of you attracting the right applicant for the job.

General things we check for in portfolios

It is important to note that there is a difference in standard when seniority levels in design is added as a consideration. But before we talk about that, great designers, from junior to senior will have the following traits in their portfolio.

This section is about portfolios only. What to look out for during interviews will be covered later in the article so keep reading.

#1 They communicate well indirectly

This can come in many different forms, but the best portfolios are the ones that are the easiest to follow. You don’t have to crease your forehead to figure out what the designer is going on about, and from a look or a quick scan, you know what they were trying to do.

This can come in the form of visual communication (like neat layouts and strategic visual design) or from good writing and descriptions.

Because here is the thing: Communication is a MUST-HAVE skill for designers. If they can’t even communicate well digitally, you are so screwed when you hire them. For real.

In a working world where digital presentations, text-based messaging apps, and remote-work is dominant, you just can’t afford someone who can’t communicate well on-screen.

If they did a poor job communicating from their portfolio, instant no-go.

#2 Is their portfolio unique?

This is a very superficial criteria, but let’s be real, design is a creative job. If their portfolios isn’t creative and isn’t unique, you’re not hiring a designer. You’re hiring a sheep that followed a trend.

This has been our #1 open secret / bias in hiring. If their portfolios follow the same template or pattern as a majority of low-quality designers, we chuck them.

There is very little point giving a chance to portfolios that don’t break away from typical templates. As of today, I’ve officially screened 1,000+ portfolios and interviewed 60+ candidates from that same batch; So I can tell you quite confidently that candidates with cookie-cutter portfolios are not worth your time.

The dozens of them whom I’ve interviewed never make it to the final rounds, anyway.

If you have the time and want to give them a chance, go ahead. But if your organisation has hundreds of portfolios to go through, they are not worth it.

Again, it’s all about tolerance and how much you’re willing to bend. I personally don’t, my connections don’t as well. But we welcome you to check our biases as well, these are just our humble recommendations based on our own hiring diaries.

What you should focus on when seniority levels changes

It is unfair to pin the same standards we have for seniors onto juniors. Similarly, it works against you when you apply junior-standards to senior-level professionals.

There needs to be a balance in expectations when you are hiring to ensure that you don’t gatekeep wrongly and unwittingly let the floodgates open to the wrong crowd.

For junior designers, focus on their curiosity and and willingness to learn. Junior portfolios typically showcase a magnitude of different works, which they are forced to scale down, as they are generally told that it is frowned upon to many too much work as it confuses their hiring managers about what their specialisation is.

The problem with this advice, while catered to current hiring market needs, is that many hiring managers actually cut themselves off the best kinds of junior professionals when we narrow down our search this way. The ones who can do-it-all and want to learn-it-all immediately gets dismissed when we only focus on one design specialty.

In my opinion, deep expertise in a single design discipline is not a fair or wise expectation to force upon juniors. It is much better to allow juniors to explore the breath of skillsets they learned, be able to showcase them, and during the hiring process, understand what their goals are and if they have potential for the role.

You are more likely to get an outstanding junior designer this way. I’ve seen companies pass up extremely promising junior candidates because they don’t showcase a UX-only portfolio.

My network’s best junior hires were the ones with variety in their portfolios because they are equipped with holistic skillsets and great mindsets when it comes to learning on the job.

When it comes to mid-level professionals, details start to matter. Mid-level candidates should already have a clear specialisation in their design career, and a humble track record to prove it.

We are past school projects and fake apps at this point. Even if most of their work is under an NDA, mid-level professionals should be able to showcase something to prove their time at work in a portfolio interview, and this can mean screens or a few artefacts from real-life work.

If they don’t have a solid track record, the same principles of hiring good junior then applies. If they suck, chuck.

Senior-level professionals have the most colourful set of criterias in our opinion; because now it really depends on who you want to hire for your team and what their scope will be.

Processes, expertise, and crasftmenship becomes increasingly important when hiring for senior roles. Now, many senior designers and experienced hiring managers disagree on what the ‘oomph’ you should be looking out for is, and many great senior designers actually don’t have much of their work online at all.

This is where just looking at someone’s portfolio isn’t enough. For senior-level professionals, you’ll have to do your full-due-diligence on their resumes, professional profiles, and their portfolio review during the interview process.

Pre-interview conditions

Interviewing someone is the best way to get validation of a professional’s actual technical skillsets and their ability to communicate. That said, it’s very easy to get interviews wrong because we are prone to maintaining similar processes across departments for the sake of ‘consistency’.

But for the sake of hiring designers right, you really need to take these additional steps to ensure you don’t make the wrong hire.

#1 Get a designer to join the interview with you

Even if you come from a design background, interview candidates with at least one other designer from your team. Designers are the closest to the work and industry’s best practices, and can spot red flags and green flags that hiring managers might miss.

It’s also an efficient way to see if the two potential team mates can get along, so you kill two birds with one stone.

Try not to schedule the interviews separately; it helps saves a lot of time and you can tag-team with your designer on what questions to ask.

#2 Give clear instructions of what candidates need to expect

Too many companies don’t give good instructions when it comes to interviews. They just send an invite and expect candidates to show up and know what to do.

Please be fair and transparent about your processes and expectations. If you’re asking for a portfolio review, do not assume that all candidates would know what to present and what to prepare for.

If you only want one project presented, tell them. If you expect more than one project, tell them. If there is a particular format you’ll like, tell them.

Don’t end up creating a bias towards the candidate that magically managed to predict your invisible requirements. Candidates cannot read minds.

#3 Don’t be lenient

So many hiring managers I know have fluctuating standards and give too many chances to candidates at absolute random.

Look, we are all humans, it’s easy to be lenient on good days and extra strict on bad days. But as a tried and tested method, being extra strict on all days works the best when it comes to hiring the right person.

Never bend your expectations (assuming they are realistic) even if you can’t find the right person. The hiring process wears everyone down, but if you allow yourself to let your guard down, a sneaky unqualified candidate might just squeeze themselves into the organisation. When that happens, it’s not something pleasant to deal with*.

*Yes, you can train candidates you really like who didn’t exactly meet the mark. Again, something up to your company. We don’t work there.

Err on the side of caution. Enter every interview with an iron whip (ideally, a checklist of what to look out for, which I have some recommendations below).

What to look out for when interviewing

The long-awaited time to meet with the designers that gave you a great first impression! Some hiring managers, including myself, wonder if there’s a difference between hiring a designer vs. another tech role.

And knowing how engineering and product does their hiring, I would say yes. Yes, there is a difference. Specifically in what you need to pay attention to.

#1 Drill down on jargon

As briefly mentioned in one of my previous articles about industry imposters, do not assume that a candidate knows what they are talking about even when they speak of the correct keywords.

Don’t be afraid to appear like an idiot if you ask them to explain further what they mean. What the heck is design strategy to them in the context they were using it? How do they know that quantitative user research actually works well for their project? What do they mean by design system, or design workflows,or any sort of design process? Why would they pick card sorting over another user research method?

The list of jargon is endless.

Point is: Get them to explain every jargon or industry term they use. This is a great test to ensure that they are able to communicate effectively, and a great way to spot the ones who can only talk the talk.

#2 Ask about how they handle conflict

Building solutions is always an extremely difficult process because in the world of Agile and MVPs, every solution you see is a compromised one.

Ask about their experiences handling conflict in the workplace. Now, this will prompt a lot of scripted answers, but the main takeaway is not only get a sense of their personality, but also to sense how attached they are to their work.

Every hiring manager has different preferences, so I’m not going to dictate what’s the ideal amount of personality and emotional attachment a designer should have when it comes to their work. But these are important pieces of information that would allow you to determine if they are a fit for the company culturally.

What they do on the weekends or their hobbies isn’t going to get you that answer. How they say they handle work situations and how attached they are to their work, that’s going to provide the insight you need.

#3 Ask about technical interests

My favourite thing to check for in candidates is their passion for technology or the craft itself.

Real designers value craftsmanship.

Argue all you want, but we live and breathe design or tech. It is not just a job for us. So naturally, we get nerdy for the role outside of work.

Ask about side projects they might have, any contributions they make to the industry outside of work, or anything in the industry that catches their eye at the moment. This will prompt a few insights; whether or not they are seekers of knowledge, what their altruism and thoughtfulness levels are, and whether or not they have wit or awareness.

And we like to gun them down further by asking the purpose of their secondary pursuits, because the more information you have about someone, the better the decision you’ll make.

Judgement of someone isn’t gut feeling, it’s complied data.

Hiring after-care

I’ve intentionally oversimplified the steps it takes to hire good designers, because I cannot account for every single edge case a company would have in their recruitment process.

That said, the process doesn’t stop here. I would say the onboarding and probation period of your new hire is part of the hiring process, because it is your last chance to get someone out if they are not a fit.

I’ve heard too many horror stories of companies making the wrong hire and then being unable to fire or let someone go despite under-performance because there were no formal record of expectations.

I’m not saying you need to heartlessly fire someone if there is a conflict, no. We just really need to talk about this more transparently, and ideally get a process approved by HR before the new hire joins the team.

#1 Set clear expectations for the role

When you hire someone, there has to be a list of KPIs they need to hit. A lot of non-management friends accuse me of being cold when I mention this, but this is the reality of work. You’re here to serve the company, if you’re not down with that, go make your own.

Anyway, there would already be a few projects or features you’ll expect your new designer to work on, and you have to set a standard measure of success or failure for those items.

This metric can be whether or not they meet deadlines, how many design deliveries they make, how their work impacted OKRs, etc.. Failure to meet those metrics is the risk of being let go.

Make sure it’s documented, approved by HR, and communicated to your new hire.

#2 Ensure that they are set up for success

When you take off your hiring manager hat and put on your design manager hat, your job is to ensure that your designers can do their best job.

Make sure that the environment they are in doesn’t sabotage them from performing. Difficult stakeholder? Help them out in communicating and bridging the gap. Messy product pipeline? Clean that up with the product team or help facilitate that initial discussion to reach a compromise.

I’m not saying that you should shield them from every difficult situation at work, but you need to try and make things fair while you’re still measuring if they are up for the task.

Joining a new company is always difficult, and the whole point of proper onboarding and probation is balancing that new-environment-anxiety with a fair performance-expectation-ratio.

#3 If you need to fire them, do it

The industry is so sensitive when it comes to letting people go. This isn’t anything new; letting someone go is never pleasant, and with the rise of layoffs in the tech industry and in our current volatile, broken economy, it’s even less.

But if you compromise on a good design hire, you risk jeopardising your current and future design (or non-design) team. Weak links on the team can cause dissatisfaction to once-thriving members in your department, and if not spotted or fixed early, you risk dealing with more than just a bad hire.

Losing even one exceptional employee can be fatal mistake that accounting will wince over, and I’ve seen entire design teams pack up and leave because of a single individual.

I’m not going to nerd out on the numbers, but that is a very expensive mistake that no company would want on their books.

Always loop HR in, and have more check-ins with the team for more honesty and transparency on the topic.

Closing thoughts

In my opinion, design has ways to go when it comes to formal management and processes. We now have the privilege to be managed directly under our own department, so let’s design how we want to be managed moving forward.

Traditional management doesn’t really work for newfangled tech-creative roles, but it can definitely supplement it.

We’ve had a lot of detours when it comes to the proper process of hiring and managing design teams, and it’s really difficult to get any real insight online because every great process is customised to suit a company’s needs.

What works for Meta or Netflix is not going to work for you. So there is really little point in using BigTech processes as a reference.

Similarly to how we build MVPs, processes at the company changes as we go forward. This is a growing pain that we need to go through in order to reach an ideal state for both candidate and company.

At the end of the day, the best processes are born out of cross-departmental collaborations. Be inspired by what others in the company are doing, apply the same best practices to your process, and customise it to your context.

At the end of the day, you want to attract the keep the best employees for your company. So you need to create your own formulas for that. No one else can do it for you.

Replicating internal success is easier and more strategic than mimicking external processes that you have much less visibility on.

With the amount of outstanding talents the design world has to offer today, it is an exciting time to hire and groom some of the best people in the industry, from juniors to senior.

Keep an open mind, get creative with your processes, and have fun hiring!