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Hiring top talent in Chicago remains a big concern for many digital startups looking to scale their teams. Even as one of the top tech ecosystems in the world, it’s not always easy to find — let alone retain — cream-of-the-crop new hires.
At our most recent Built In Chicago Digital Leaders Luncheon, illustrious designer and product development authority Braden Kowitz (Google Venture's first designer) sat down with Basecamp’s Mig Reyes and leading digital tech leaders in Chicago to talk UX design and product development.
Besides advising our local leaders on a number of design and product tricks of the trade, Kowitz (pictured left) also filled us in on design hiring strategy, including these five prudent tips to keep in mind when you’re looking for top-tier web designers.
1. Identify the granular skills your company needs and hire to fill those gaps.
Like most employees at startups, designers are often expected to wear a lot of different hats on any given day. Design encompasses a lot of skills sets, including visual design, interaction design, writing, user research, prototyping, and design process.
Given how young and diverse the field of design currently is, Kowitz said it can be incredibly difficult to hire versatile designers. Instead of hiring the entire package, it’s beneficial to pin-point specific design skillsets and start your search there.
“We ask ourselves: what does our business need, what skills do we currently have, and where is the gap?” Kowitz said. “Where are the skills we don’t have that would be really helpful? Those are the ones that we hire for.”
2. Focus on results rather than creativity.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but Kowitz said one of the biggest hiring mistakes he sees young companies make is over-emphasizing creativity. While hiring creative team members is important — from design and marketing all the way to engineering — Kowitz said that ultimately, results matter more than aesthetic.
“Oftentimes as designers, we care about craft and we care about visual presentation,” he said. “But sometimes, that just doesn’t matter for your business.”
And when hiring designers from an agency, make sure their vision aligns with your own. Kowitz added that designers with agency experience may be too focused on making business owners happy — and not focused enough on making customers happy.
3. Hire the best writers you can find.
Even if you have a visually gorgeous interface, all that work could be potentially useless if you have fuzzy or confusing messaging. Words are the key to understanding and navigating your product from every avenue and every angle, so it's important to hire people with a bit of poetic prowess.
If you can’t write, you’re going to have a really hard time building things for people,” Reyes said.
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When it comes down to it, designers often write most of the copy that ends up in your product. Designers also write customers and share ideas with the rest of your company via email. If they’re clunky writers, they could end up causing more harm than good.
“At Basecamp, when we’re given two designers with equal visual skillsets, we always hire the better writer,” Reyes (pictured right) said.
4. Celebrate overlaps in skill.
You don’t want to hire three designers who all specialize in front-end code. But you do want to hire designers with enough overlap in skills that they understand, respect, and celebrate each other’s niches.
“If you build an organization that has specialities but also has enough overlap so that people understand each other’s crafts, it generates a culture with more respect,” Kowitz said. “And if you have a culture where each role respects one another and understands the intricacies of each speciality, then you can grow without having to create formal departments. I tend to find the teams that are effective at scale are ones that have a lot of overlap.”
5. Ask them this killer question in interviews:
So, how do you vet candidates once you invite them in for an interview? Kowitz said he relies on a series of simple questions that have become one of his interviewing staples.
“I ask them some very basic questions: what were the goals for this project, what process did you use that can be repeatable at my company, and how do you know it worked?
“It’s amazing how few designers can answer that question about their work.” he added. “For junior designers, that’s fine — they can probably walk around it. But sometimes, even very senior designers can’t show you a piece of work where they’ve had those three things in place.”
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