The Art of Hiring UX Designers (Read 7 Chapters for Free)

Here are 7 free chapters from my book The Art of Hiring UX Designers: A Quick Guide for Design Managers. 

I included the preface for a better reading experience.

• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Clarity Equation
• Chapter 2: The Culture Catalyst
• Chapter 3: The Competency Amalgamation
• Chapter 4: The Design Conundrum
• Chapter 5: The Leadership Factor
• Chapter 6: The Portfolio Limitation
• Chapter 7: The Independent Thinker

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Preface

Hiring and enabling exceptional talent is the single most important job of a leader. Organizational excellence is an outcome of hiring great leaders, who in turn hire exceptional people and empower them to think more, do more, and achieve more. Only excellence breeds excellence. As a hiring manager your success is directly proportional to your ability to spot and enable great talent. I have interviewed hundreds of designers and had the opportunity to closely work and learn from competent executive leaders. I have also been on the other side of the table, over the years — interviewing with great companies that have built some phenomenal hiring processes, as well as the mediocre ones — that don’t have an iota of intelligence to spot and enable good talent.

The objective of this book is to enable you to hire only the best — the A players. This short book is based on my experiences, outlook, and a vision to see a positive change in our industry. The ideas and methods shared here — are in the the mutual interest of the employer, hiring manager, and an employee. I strongly believe — effective hiring and mutual success — stems from understanding the intersecting aspirations of these three parties. Hiring managers should note that, this book is concise and generic in nature. The ideas presented here, should be adapted, improved, and applied to suit your specific business context. I am confident that these ideas will enable you to bring in A players and support you in building an extraordinary design team with rich possibilities of collective success for you (hiring manager), your team members, and your organization.

To improve the quality of the user experience, you have to first improve the quality of your people. Which implies that your hiring strategy is the foundation for your success. Let’s explore the art of hiring UX designers.

Chapters in this book

1. The Clarity Equation 
2. The Culture Catalyst 
3. The Competency Amalgamation 
4. The Design Conundrum 
5. The Leadership Factor 
6. The Portfolio Limitation 
7. The Independent Thinker 
8. The Collaboration Oscillation 
9. The Versatile Asset 
10. The Potential Investment 
11. The Resourcefulness Quotient 
12. The Renaissance Man 
13. The Second Job
14. The Culture Integration 

Chapter 1: The Clarity Equation

First things first. Are you clear about what you are seeking from the marketplace? Hiring is a job done well, when you have absolute clarity in terms of what you want. Clarity in terms of defining the job designation, role, responsibilities, expectations, results, career path and a 2-3 year plan for your new hire. You’re setting yourself for failure, if you are not clear on why and whom (the candidate persona) you want to hire. Once your job opening is advertised in the market, the published job description represents your company, your design culture, and your leadership style. It’s imperative to spend time on crafting a compelling job description and avoid depending on recruiters and templates. (Recruiters only help you realize the vision, they can’t define your vision) Poor planning always has a negative domino effect, leading to issues in terms of candidate sourcing, shortlisting, interviewing, and closure of the hiring cycle.

Like any other problem, the hiring problem needs to be defined well. The better the clarity, the better your position of being sharper and faster in solving the problem. A job description is an opportunity to reach out to the design community and advocate your design and organization culture. The closer it is to reality, the better the outcome of this entire exercise. Hiring managers should never take the job market for granted by posting jobs with templates and half-baked job descriptions, unless your hiring intention is to seek mediocre talent. Hiring works like matchmaking. The tone of your job description makes a great difference in how your company is perceived by job applicants. Focus on the three essential elements of a job description. The candidate’s fitment in terms of culture, core competencies, and value addition, and in that order.

You should contemplate on how a new job role fits into your team, your vision and and the organization’s vision? Clarity makes you a sniper, not the random shooter. It’s also a good practice to outline the hiring process in the job description. Once you’re clear, be proactive in aligning talent acquisition teams and your extended interviewing team with your vision and hiring objectives. This early alignment with recruitment and cross-functional teams — builds a shared vision. This speeds up the entire hiring process and sets the stage for sourcing only the best candidates from the market. Make sure you avoid any affinity bias in your hiring process.

Begin with the end in mind.

Chapter 2: The Culture Catalyst

As a design leader, it’s all the more important to emphasize and address the aspect of diversity. Only a truly diverse group of design professionals can build a winning user experience that is diverse and inclusive. Diversity is not just about organizational compliance — It is about being more just and human-centred at work. Understanding this perspective is of paramount importance — when you’re venturing into building your design team. To begin with, take stock of your team composition and study the group’s diversity in various aspects like ethnicity, colour, age group, gender, location, prior work experience, educational qualification, domain specialization, and core competencies. Check your premises. You might be unknowingly building a homogeneous team, that thinks alike, works alike, and in some extreme cases — where everyone looks alike.

What’s your diversity quotient as a design leader? This is the fundamental question you should ask yourself. In today’s progressive workplace — you have a great responsibility and transformational opportunity to ensure diversity and enable inclusion through dialogue, collaboration, and a shared mission. I call this the culture catalyst.

Don’t limit your diversity thinking to demographics. Incline yourself to hire people who have a prior exposure of diversity in domains, markets, technology platforms, products, processes, users, and organization cultures. This kind of diversity and versatility enables peer learning and the capability of your design team to solve a range of problems for your business. As a hiring manager, having fixed ideas and hiring people only from a select school of thought builds a mediocre team, in turn generating a mediocre user experience. For example — hiring people only from a certain design school, alumni group, ex-colleagues, or only with a specific domain experience, or only hiring people from a certain cultural background is a culture destroyer. However talented they may be, a homogeneous group of professional can’t think much different, due to their similar backgrounds and life experiences.

Building a heterogenous group of designers is in the interest of your culture, product outcomes and organisational growth. The primary function of a design leader is to enable creative dialogue, empower people to challenge the status quo, and promote diversity and inclusion at work. Diversity in design hiring leads to diversity in design outcomes. This is a strategic and winning hiring strategy — the one that builds your culture and also contributes to the end business outcomes. Leaders need to create and nurture a goldilocks zone — where a culture of creative dialogue thrives. This automatically translates into advocating and building an inclusive user experience for your products and services.

Hiring managers should leverage the diverse domain expertise of new hires to infuse unique learnings to existing teams. Leaders should explore the possibility of cross-domain hiring, enabling a fresh perspective via cross domain learning and innovation. Cross domain learning can be transferred to other team members through workshops, activities and twinning on projects. Let’s say your product is eCommerce focused. Design leaders hiring the entire team only from the retail domain builds a homogeneous pattern. How good is this pattern for critical, interdisciplinary and creative thinking? How different can your product be in the market?

Identify gaps in existing teams and infuse new talent with complementing skill sets. Every UX designer has their own career aspirations and expertise in one or more core areas. It is the job of the hiring manager to identify and leverage the interests of a new hire to build mutual synergy. This is win-win for talent and teams. Always look for value adds. This way, everyone grows and contributes their best for the success of product or service delivery. Finally, hire for right values and attitude to build great culture.

Turn hiring into a culture catalyst.

Chapter 3: The Competency Amalgamation

We discussed about diversity earlier, and here’s another point to reinforce that idea. Hiring a mix of design professionals works best for the team and organization. To my understanding, there are 5 types of designers, when you consider — how they arrived here. As a hiring manager, you very well know that, unlike other professions, the UX design community is thriving with people from diverse backgrounds. The subject of UX can be learnt and mastered with practice by anyone who can build a design mindset. The only difference between UX designers is their background. Eventually, every designer works with the same methods, processes and frameworks at varying degrees, based on their competence and experience. Identifying these five types is not a way to differentiate without an objective. The idea is to identify and leverage on the strengths of each and every type. Likewise their adequacies should be addressed by other team members.

1. The Autodidacts
2. The Schooled
3. The Boot Campers
4. The Certified
5. The Mashups

The Autodidacts

Autodidacts are self-taught designers who mostly learn on the job and depend on mentors, books, online learning programs or other self learning methods. From what I have seen, they are go getters from non-design educational backgrounds with a passion for design.

The Schooled

Designers who hold a bachelors or masters design degree. Not every design degree is based around HCI, Interaction Design or UX. We see designers from multiple disciplines like Fashion, Environmental, Industrial, etc. They have a solid understanding of design fundamentals, a good grasp on fine arts and applied arts. Their advantage is experiencing a rich educational opportunity of spending years of structured and quality time at school — learning from professors, peers, industry leaders, and collaborating on hands-on projects.

The Boot Campers

Boot campers are fast learners when it comes to building the right skills needed to enter the industry. They mostly learn from the industry experts via 3 to 6 months boot camps. This group learns from the industry leaders and has the opportunity of a late-mover advantage by building skills that the current market wants and needs. You can find fast learners from a wide range of educational and work backgrounds.

The Certified

Certifications are a gateway to the corporate world. Designed to advance careers in consulting, design managerial and leadership positions. Most corporates insist on hiring certified professionals as there is a certain rigour in their work methods and an attestation from reputed bodies in terms of passing stringent licencing examinations.

The Mashups

The mashups are a mix of all the above. This type comes with a strong learning mindset and they continuously invest in learning to grow in their careers. This is a rare type and works best for every organization.

Unity in diversity.

Chapter 4: The Design Conundrum

When you hire a designer, you’re not just hiring their time. You’re hiring their values, ethics, thinking, and design philosophy. There’s a great need to understand a candidate’s work philosophy in the creative space. Leaders should understand how the candidate thinks when faced with a moral crisis in terms of design. (It’s more easy, when leaders understand their own morality quotient in their business context) 

Morality is subjective and every product defines the user experience based on that quotient. This is the primary difference between companies. That’s why you’ll find the design of a booking.com way different than that of a cleartrip.com. If you study them you’ll notice a stark difference in their persuasion tactics and overall product design strategy — even though both operate in the same space. Every business and product defines their morality quotient. They choose to do — what they do. The point is — hiring managers should seek people with similar values and design philosophy to meet mutual interests. Nothing right or wrong here. Companies have their own way of doing business.

I strongly believe that our ethics, values, and philosophy are what makes us. For designers this is all the more important, as our work is merely an extension and reflection of those values. You can devise various scenarios in your business context and ask questions to see how a prospective candidate would respond to these situations — where there is no right or wrong answer. The value of a response is subjective, however should be seen objectively in your own business context.

Values beget value.

Chapter 5: The Leadership Factor

The leadership quotient of a candidate talks a lot about their potential to show leadership at the workplace. Hiring managers need to go beyond the resume to understand this element. Apart from work, you must observe a designer’s passion for the subject and thought leadership initiatives. In the current market, thought leadership like speaking, writing, mentoring, coaching, community building, content creation like hosting a podcast or a video channel are proof of abilities of the candidate. It’s easy for a hiring manager to research and understand a candidate’s thought process — even before the interview. Smart hiring managers do their research and go beyond the resume.

While thought leadership is one angle, action leadership in another aspect altogether. The ability to show leadership and presence of mind to take initiative, ownership, and creatively solve problems. Thought leadership is subject based, while action leadership is behaviour based. Behaviour and scenario based questions also illustrate how a candidate has displayed leadership or probably would act it in a given context. However such questions can be tricky to evaluate as well. You don’t have any way to verify, unless the information provided by the interviewee is in the public domain. Both thought and action leadership are equally important to evaluate the potential of a prospect.

People who challenge the status quo are what you should be looking out for and seeking as an addition into your team. They are the real troublemakers — for good. They can be a great addition to your team and even help others challenge the status quo through their attitude and work.

Leadership is influence.

Chapter 6: The Portfolio Limitation

Hiring managers should see beyond the portfolio to understand the capabilities of a prospect. Don’t make the mistake of scanning through portfolios and making judgments on the potential of a prospect. Portfolios are only a beginning and it should never be the sole driver in your shortlisting and candidate evaluation. So, how does one shortlist? If you ask me, seasoned hiring managers see beyond your design portfolio. Portfolios are a good start point, however I believe it also limits the understanding of a candidate’s potential.

Focus on the unique perspective and value addition that a candidate brings to the table. A real portfolio is the designer’s personal brand. Focus on what they are doing beyond design and how passionate are they about the subject. Passion beyond work, implies a designer would automatically excel at the workplace — otherwise why would they bother to invest their time and energy in building a personal brand. Once you see a promising profile, look up on the candidate’s work online. What kind of passion projects are they doing. Like a book, blog, podcast, YouTube channel, speaking at events, supporting the community, training young designers, mentoring junior designers, volunteering for design related initiatives. You’ll start to find passionate content creators, curators and collaborators.

As UX designers grow in their career, they should transform into thought leaders at work. Nobody wants another UX designer sitting at a desk, all day long. (A UX designer should be mostly away from the desk, in the first place — researching, collaborating, ideating, facilitating, and solving problems away from the screen) On top of basic design skills, valuable companies hire design advocates, independent thinkers, creators, curators, community builders, collaborators, mentors, leaders, and potential change makers.

Go beyond portfolios.

Chapter 7: The Independent Thinker

Independent thinkers take control and think for themselves. They don’t wait for others to think for them nor wait for guidance and direction from others. Your questions should focus on how independently can a UX designer think. While designers work in teams, they should have the ability to think independently and solve problems. Following others and thinking alike — anyone can do. What sets apart good talent is the ability to think independently.

However thinking independently or freely comes with its own set of challenges in certain workplaces, where thinking or being different is not really encouraged. Hiring managers who seek exceptional talent know that independent thinking is what sets an A player from the crowd. This is all the more important when you’re hiring people as individual contributors for strategic initiatives which demand a spirit of entrepreneurship, ownership, accountability, resourcefulness, critical thinking and working alone on a different tangent. The independent thinkers are the ones who challenge conventions and can be a real value addition to your team. They ask a lot of questions, and mostly the right questions to solve the right problems. (The fundamental skill to be a UX designer)

The world needs free thinkers.

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