How do you hire designers?

Business Issues
#9

That’s a good idea, but in practice, I’ve never known it to happen.

I’m usually against asking applicants to perform a task on the spot or put in several hours worth of their time to show what their portfolio should already demonstrate. I’m not so sure that a one-off project or, worse, a highly stressful on-the-spot task provides reliable information about that person’s actual abilities or potential anyway.

If the job has specific requirements that a typical portfolio doesn’t address, maybe it’s necessary, but I’d limit it to just the final cut of two or three applicants.

#10

Hi there , let me know if you still looking for designer
i Know someone who really great ,did alot of jobs for my company

once you want choose any person you should follow following :
1- Check his previous Jobs
2- appoint one who did similar design and has at least 3 yrs experience
3- usually if Part time job wont be more than 150 USD
Thanks and wish u good luck

#11

$150 per hour? $150,000 per year?
Did you read the thread?
No one is looking for a designer here…
And you certainly cannot price a job before even considering the brief.

#12

Thanks, PrintDriver. It’s really useful to get feedback from people in different industries. One of the people I talked to runs a design collective and never does portfolio review - she said generally she knows of someone’s previous work or through mutual connections. In contrast, I’ve talked to others who are the most focused on portfolio review above all other factors.

Either way, testing doesn’t seem applicable so I have to wonder why companies are offering various kinds of tests, including tool tests (like, “can you use Photoshop” tests). I’ll talk about this more in a response below, but I think the merit here might be for small businesses who have no in-house design experience (or ‘eye’) and are insecure about hiring a designer … or for job roles that aren’t “designer” roles but require some minimal graphics work (say, a social media coordinator for smaller businesses, who is doing a blend of customer service, copywriting, and creating basic images).

#13

Thanks, Just-B. You’ve touched on something here that’s a driving force behind our work on these types of tests - getting away from people with no expertise in the field deciding who gets to interview based on a short phone call (in other industries, HR people often do a resume review and initial phone screening to decide who goes to the next stage, and often they don’t really know anything about the work or skills required but look for things like “culture fit” - another very controversial aspect of hiring).

But where design is concerned, I’m not sure there is a fair, useful way to do anything apart from either reviewing prior work or asking for a controlled sample of work (i.e. when all candidates are given the same work-sample task).

Probably a lot of this depends on which industry is doing the hiring. For instance, my sister is a Creative Director at an ad agency in NYC. She’s pretty confident that her entire industry is entirely uninterested in using any sort of testing, as the subjective judgment of prior work is entirely the point. There is no interest in unbiased evaluations as the bias/gut instinct is exactly what they care about.

I’ve done a ton of reviews of job listings for designer roles and it’s quite interesting to look at these en masse. While specific principles of design are sometimes mention, the bulk of listings emphasize tool use and it’s usually the very common tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. This might be an artifact of HR writing job descriptions rather than design team leads. But I haven’t actually talked to anyone working in design/hiring in design that would test or question a candidate on those tools. It’s more like “if they show good work, they know how to use the tools to produce it”. And yet, tools tests abound for some reason.

More and more, I’m wondering if instead of companies without good in-house design “eyes” being the use case for such tests, the real use case is for non-designer roles. The example I mentioned in a response above: a social media coordinator who is doing a blend of customer service, copywriting, and creation of basic images for posts and articles. For a role like that, a highly skilled designer doesn’t fit, but you might want to make sure the people who do apply can use some tools and have some basic instincts in regards to design fundaments (alignment, repetition, contrast, etc.). But then, there are a lot of ugly images used in social media, and maybe the bosses in those cases don’t know enough to care whether the images are good or not.

Thanks again for weighing in. I welcome any further thoughts if you’d like to keep the discussion going.

#14

Thanks, HotButton. I sure hope the company you contract for is only asking candidates to do day-long interviews when they’re at the end of the hiring funnel, as that’s a huge time commitment and sounds stressful to boot!

You might be interested to know that there has actually been quite a lot of research on what kinds of pre-hiring evaluations are the best predictors of not only who can do the job but also who is a good long-term fit for a company. If you look at the various options individually, work-sample tests have the highest predictability (but combining them with interviews has the best predictability overall).That’s probably one of the reasons why you’re seeing these kinds of tasks creeping into designer hiring more over time (another big piece would be to give all candidates the same task as a control, since no control comparison is present when comparing them on past work alone).

I really like your idea about asking candidates to critique a design. That aligns with how we approached developing content for UX Design specifically in the past. Everyone I spoke to about UX was most focused on what the candidate’s process is, so for example, we had some tasks that let candidates write about how they would change a given design to meet provided user stories and why.

I wonder if there’s enough core agreement on design to have “correct” vs. “incorrect” answers for a critique. What do you think?

#15

Thanks, Mojo. I totally agree that companies should not be asking for large unpaid time commitments of candidates - especially early in the process. And it goes without saying (or it should) that using a job listing to gather free work a company intends to use is totally wrong.

#16

Yes, it is interesting, but not in a positive way. When economic downturn lead to companies over-empowering the “human resources” function, I doubt any expense was spared on research of methods for removing all subjectivity from the talent acquisition process, no matter the discipline nor the nature of deployment of the final product of that discipline.

I can see work sample tests providing verification of a person’s ability to produce a particular outcome. I used the word “particular” there because I recognize the potential value in running the experiment if there is only one particular outcome desired, like a series of cogs meshing to produce final rotation in a correct direction; the other direction being incorrect. But that doesn’t apply to design. What exactly is the empirical measure of whether a design task was completed successfully? The manager likes it? Agrees with it? Does the candidate know that going in? Does the candidate get an opportunity to interview the manager to glean what would be considered a successful result? From an initial client meeting to a design having the desired ongoing effect on the client’s market, design is predicated upon relationships—and the steering of perceptions among the players in those relationships—none of which exist in the vacuum of objectivity required for a “work sample test” to have a measurable outcome.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the very idea of “work sample test” disrespects the graphic design process and can’t measure anything essential about the subject of the test. It’s hogwash.

#17

Yes, obviously it’s not a small commitment of resources on the company’s part either. Only the small batch of finalists are subjected to it.

#18

Occasionally, companies ask me to participate in interview teams to provide an outside perspective. These companies view me as filling creative expertise gaps when evaluating candidates for roles outside the organizations’ core focus.

Sometimes, this evaluation involves hiring an individual, but it often consists of evaluating services, like which ad agency to select or which solution to choose. I’m never leading the process in these instances — just contributing my perspective.

Often, the questions and criteria considered during these evaluations lead to hiring mistakes. I’ll make my viewpoints known, but it’s often a minority viewpoint.

For example, a government agency once asked me to help evaluate finalists for a videographer position. Most people on the interview team had civil engineering backgrounds. Their questions focused on asking applicants to identify various cameras and explain technical details about video equipment.

After the interviews, most team members voted to choose the applicant best able to answer these technical questions and whose personality they liked best. They seemed unable to appreciate that this person’s portfolio of work was substandard and showed insufficient talent.

Whether online or in-person, the right questions and answers are essential. Often, the best responses are nuanced in ways that demonstrate the applicants’ appreciation of the subject matter’s subtleties.

Clearly unqualified candidates are easily eliminated with the basic must-know, black and white questions. For a designer, an inability to explain the difference between a raster and a vector file is usually a deal killer. It could be not knowing the rules of when to use an en dash for a copy editor.

When choosing between graphic design finalists who have cleared those easy objective cuts, an evaluator’s inability to rely on gut instincts and subjective judgments can lead to some bad decisions.

I can see value in what you’re proposing for situationally appropriate first- and second-round questions — especially if those questions cut to the heart of the matter and allow for somewhat flexible answers. Quickly narrowing down an initial field of dozens or hundreds of candidates is important. However, when evaluating finalists — when the decisions come down to subjective judgments regarding quality of work, creativity, nuanced viewpoints, thoughtful insight, and the like — I doubt it’s doable.

#19

I can tell you how NOT to do it…I once hired a freelance illustrator to do a cover design for me. I made my decision purely on his portfolio. When I received his artwork, it was pitiful. Like something I would have done in grade school. When I (very angrily) confronted him, pointing to his portfolio work, he said “Well I didn’t do everything in the designs. I was only part of a team.” Good golly! I never hired the guy again. Thankfully, I had enough time before deadline to finish the job myself, but at the time, I was so overworked I barely got it done. Lesson learned—The Hard Way!!!

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#20

Thanks for expanding on your thoughts about why testing does not make sense for this field. Even working in this field, I agree with many of your points. However, when companies post online job ads and have hundreds or thousands of applicants for one open position, there needs to be a way to separate out the completely unqualified from the qualified candidates because no one has time to do portfolio review + interviews for that large of a candidate pool.

I’m not talking about using tests to tell you who to hire (though some companies might do that), but more to check whether candidates have the minimum skill required to do the job … so companies can then spend time on portfolio review and interviews with candidates who possess skills other than being able to write a great resume of lies that can get past some auto-filter. In essence, testing to qualify people on the lowest level, and never to decide amongst the skilled people which is “the best” or most-suited or most-qualified for the role.

#21

This is such a perfect story of doing it all wrong - thank you!

I just replied to HotButton about this as well. Our tests are meant to be used early in the hiring process, for example, when you have hundreds or thousands of applicants and need a way to start removing the completely unqualified applicants from the larger pool so that you can spend your time with candidates who at least possess the bare minimum of skills required. To use your example, avoiding wasting time on copywriter applicants who don’t know how to use an en dash but interview well and impress HR with their culture fit, etc. These tests are not meant to be used to tell you who to hire amongst a small group of finalists - and they’re not meant to do that for any field, not just design.

What I think is probably hard for many people to appreciate is just how many people without any relevant skills will apply for jobs they are completely unqualified for. Online job listings tend to exacerbate these numbers, but it’s an issue that predates their use. It’s so common in some fields that, for instance, it’s often cited that 199 out of 200 applicants for programming positions can’t code at all. That’s not to say that 199 out of 200 programmers can’t code - just 199 out of 200 applicants. There is some strange cohort of people that will apply to jobs they are completely unqualified for - any job. It is these people we would like to fail such a test, while passing any actual designer, regardless of the subjective quality of their work. Candidates who pass could then move along in the hiring funnel and have their work evaluated by actual humans.

Those of you who are at more senior levels might not ever encounter such a test except when you’re in the hiring seat. But junior-level candidates, especially those applying for entry-level positions, are quite likely to encounter some form of testing meant to remove unskilled people from the pool, since those positions tend to attract huge numbers of applicants.

Deciding who to move past the first step in a hiring funnel based on automated resume scans just rewards people who design their resumes to pass automated resume filters (or hire someone else to do that for them, or steal someone else’s resume, etc.). Resume-writing skills aren’t all that pertinent for most jobs, though (in terms of the actual work), so it’s not a great way to separate skilled candidates from the unskilled masses. That’s a problem I’m trying to help solve.

Unfortunately, as has been mentioned in this and other threads, many companies use the wrong kind of testing, with way too much of a time-ask, and at the wrong part of the funnel, leading to lots of unhappy candidates.

#22

That’s a great example. So what did you do the next time you needed to hire someone after discovering portfolio review alone wasn’t going to work?

#23

Yes, that’s precisely what I was referring to as economic downturn over-empowering HR (and corrupting the hiring process). The circumstantial logic is sound, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.

#24

At two of my previous jobs, we’d typically get around 150 applicants for every design position. Our HR department would make the first cut based upon criteria we told them were essential — relevant university degrees, minimum years of experience, and so forth.

This worked reasonably well since a quick scan through the remainder would enable me to eliminate, probably, an additional 75 percent.

Even so, I always wondered how many good designers HR eliminated based on the black and white cutoffs we used.

We decided to experiment with using Robert Half and Ladders (if I remember correctly). Both offered prequalification testing similar to yours. I was not satisfied with the results.

For example, their pre-qualification exams included questions like, “In Photoshop, what is the keyboard shortcut used to zoom in?” This is a key combination that most that every designer uses, but the ability to recall the exact keys is evidence of nothing. Even though I might use that shortcut 50 times each day, it’s all muscle memory, not a sequence of keystrokes I could recall in the context of a quiz question.

Other questions involved basics from design school that are typically replaced through experience by other approaches. For example, “What is the complementary color to red?” That might be an easy question for a university design senior, but for an experienced professional who hasn’t looked at a color wheel in years and who relies on experience and gut instinct to choose colors, the answer might not be easily recalled.

In other examples, I disagreed with the premise of the questions. For example “Which of the following are 'modern fonts?” First, modern, when used in typography, can have very different definitions. Second, the correct answer might differ depending on whether the term font was intentionally or mistakenly used in place of the term typeface.

Several freelancer sites I’m familiar with also use these kinds of pre-qualification questions. The few that I’ve tested have suffered from the same types of deficiencies that I mentioned above.

As I said, in a previous post, I can see considerable value in pre-qualification testing, but I’ve yet to encounter the kinds of savvy and insightful questions that I could depend upon to yield good results.

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#25

Simple—I made sure to ask the critical question, “Is ALL of this work solely yours or did someone else work on the job as well?”

#26

So do you prefer designers who work solo, or is OK if their work is a team collaboration as long as you understand which parts the candidate was responsible for? You sound qualified enough to be able to understand which parts of a design represent an individual’s work if they honestly explain their responsibilities on the project. But I’m not sure all hiring managers (or HR, for that matter) would be able to do that.

#27

Thanks again, Just-B. Those are great examples of bad questions, and indeed the kinds of questions we strive to avoid. I would argue that none of those examples are truly work-sample questions. The Photoshop one might work if you asked the candidate to execute the shortcut, rather than have them select from a list of options or type in an answer.

Based on your responses, I think you would be an excellent reviewer. During our development process, we do a stage of reviews by external experts asking them to give critical feedback. If we move forward with trying to develop some graphic design questions, I would absolutely love to get your feedback as I can tell you’d be very good at explaining exactly what the problems are and why. I’ll try to get in touch with you here down the line to see if you’re interested if/when the time comes.

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#28

At the time I was attempting to hire this person, he said he was now a freelance artist, not a part of a team.
Just to clarify for you, I would not have any difficulty in giving a job to a team as long it is understood that I am hiring a team. But I generally do not hire “teams”, I only hire single freelancers, and this man presented himself as the sole illustrator who was applying for this single job.

By the way, here is the link to my LinkedIn Profile. https://www.linkedin.com/in/genedoyle/