Your design team is growing and you need to hire a designer. How can you make sure you’re hiring the best person for the job? There are plenty of ways you can ensure your hiring processes are effective—even with a whole team of people involved. We’ve collaborated with our friends at Playbook? to bring you actionable advice on how to streamline your interview process and standardize your team’s criteria for evaluating design candidates.
Cap Watkins, former VP of Design at BuzzFeed and founder of Practical Works? shares his actionable strategies to get your team on the same page before interviewing design candidates.
Write a career track
Everyone on your team needs the same context in order to properly evaluate folks. If you don’t have one, it can be as simple as just a set of bullet points for each role’s responsibilities at different skill levels. Regardless, make sure that it’s actually representative of the work people do day-to-day, and that the people you assign to interviews have read over those bullets.
Be targeted with your interviews
Every interview should have a purpose behind it. Every interviewer should be attempting to gather data that’s different than what’s being gathered by other interviewers. Have people focus on different areas, rather than performing general-purpose interviews in order to allow people to go deep on specific topics and get a clear picture. Additionally, help interviewers come up with questions that get you, the hiring manager, the information you need to make a good decision.
Don’t let individual interviewers evaluate candidates
If you think about it, each interviewer only has a sliver of the information you need to make a decision about whether to hire a candidate or not. If you have five different interviewers, each only has 20% of the overall picture from the interview, so having people “evaluate” a candidate based on their one interview is at best misleading as an indicator. Instead, ask interviewers to document where candidates are clearly strong, and where they may need professional development. Take all that data and compare it to the shape of the role you’re hiring for. Do the strengths and growth-areas make sense for that role, level, team, part of the org, etc.? Do they make sense in another role you have open? You as the hiring manager are the one with the holistic perspective and understanding of what the role entails and what strengths and growth areas are deal breakers.
This post was originally published on Playbook?. See other perspectives or ask your own career question on Playbook.
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