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Hiring

I strongly believe that hiring is a critical focus area for a design leader. I’ve been part of hiring panels since 2015. I’ve seen companies usually do not focus on hiring flows leading them to have a bad experience for interviewing candidates. I gave a short talk about hiring designers at a friend’s startup in 2018.

1. Write good job descriptions The industry is filled with nonsense JDs ~written~ copy-pasted by HRs. If you need to stand out, you need to write a good JD. Hire a design consultant to help you out with this if you are hiring the first designer for your startup.
2. Don’t let a portfolio be a barrier for applying For entry level roles, I feel a portfolio acts like your resume but when you start hiring for senior designer roles you may want to broaden the application criteria. Most designers I know do not have an updated portfolio and this prevents them from applying to your startup if they are interested.
3. Customize application form to allow folks to upload a digital document The tool you use to run your hiring needs to be flexible to cater to your design hiring needs. At Gojek, we used Lever and for the longest time we did not have a way for designer applicants to upload a pdf portfolio. Binoy and I sat and figured out how to add it to the application form, however for internal referrals we were not able to enable it as Lever doesnt let you customize the form.
4. Keep the face-to-face rounds short In the interest of everyone’s time, its best if you can earmark a particular day of the week for interviews and schedule all the rounds on that day for candidates. For this to work, your screening rounds need to be well designed so as to not overload your panelists.
5. Scaling the process If you have a lot of reqs to fill, you will need to get others to take part in the interview process. Playbooks and evaluation templates help scale the process while maintaining quality.