How to find designer for business?
This is always a complex question with no single answer. Many details depend on the size of your business, how you work and what goals you have.
It is impossible to create one universal and correct guideline for the selection of designer for everyone, but there is a way to reduce the number of potential problems, as well as save time. In this article, I will answer several interesting and popular questions for theme "designer recruitment". Most likely, these answers will be useful for aspiring entrepreneurs, startups and small businesses: for corporations everything is much more complicated (and besides, they themselves know what to do).
1. How to evaluate a designer by portfolio?
In terms of quantity, quality and focus of work.
If designer has only 2-3 projects behind him, he may be inexperienced. It is not worth weeding out him right away, because individual projects can be large and time-consuming. Low-experienced designers are suitable for experiments and low budgets. But there exist one standard and safe solution: >8 works with different topics, goals and tools. A variety of projects will tell you about designer's flexibility and horizons.
Be careful: portfolio with hundreds of different projects can become a bad indicator: designer is not used to work with one company for a long time. In addition, due to the abundance of experience, the services of a designer can be overpriced. If you don't want to overpay, then you won't need such professionals.
Of course, if designer has already worked in your industry or even for your competitor, then it will be easier to bring him up-to-date. But working for a long time in one industry can hurt creativity and the generation of original ideas.
2. Is it possible to find an excellent specialist without education and work experience?
There is a statistically significant chance of finding a good designer with no experience, but it is very small chance. Yes, now you can study any profession without universities. Projects in your portfolio don't need official employment.
Talk to the applicant, complicate the test task, offer to work 2 weeks at 2-4 hours a day in exchange for his portfolio. During this time you will get to know each other better in order to make a final decision.
Young "nuggets" exist and can become a source of unusual ideas and effective solutions because they haven't yet formed "corporate barriers". But finding such specialists will take a lot of time and your efforts.
3. Freelancer or in-house?
If you don't have a lot of "design" work yet and you work 24/7 (at the stage of starting a business it can happen), then it is better to hire a freelancer. You shouldn't expect him to be completely immersed in your project, because you (as a customer) are definitely not alone for him. Some freelancers may have problems (bad meeting deadlines, poor communication), but this option will be cheaper than an office worker.
At a certain point, you and your marketing team will feel that there are more and more design tasks, and the outsourced person isn't coping. It's time to hire an employee for the office! Within the company, he will be able to develop the corporate identity of the brand, scale and also protect it. Communication will also be easier: it can help generate new ideas.
4. Or maybe it would be better to contact an art studio?
B2B solution will be optimal if design is secondary for you or is needed only for separate temporary projects. The contractor company will handle faster and more responsibly on individual important projects with tight deadlines and complex terms of reference.
But services of an art studio permanently will cost significantly more than individual employees in the company's staff. Problems with communication and new ideas are also possible.
5. How to create test task for a designer?
Don't ask a potential job seeker to design an app or website for your company – it's a time-consuming practice that few will agree to. Don't filter good people with hard job. If you want to understand worldview and experience of designer, then pay more attention to the portfolio.
Test task should be an indicator of the applicant's interest in your vacancy, as well as display at least his superficial understanding specifics of your business specifics.
- Ask to send criticism and suggestions for your current products: website, application, packaging. This assignment will give you opportunity to test analytical thinking.
- Ask a job seeker to find style references that fit your business concept and industry, can improve it or solve any problems. This option is suitable if you don't have your own resources yet. This assignment will help determine the designer's level of observation and understanding of your product.
- Create a basic design element according to your instructions. Advertising design, product card for the marketplace, Stories – whatever suits you best. This assignment will test person's real skills with tools and basic knowledge of typography, geometry, color combinations.
6. By the way, do recruiters need to pay attention to the tools?
Vacancies usually indicate what programs or services designer should know. This is really important and depends on the needs of each individual enterprise. If you don't understand anything about ot or you don't have special requirements, then you can specify the three most basic programs: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and Figma.
Note: if you hire designer, but he doesn't have printing examples in his portfolio (but you need them), it is better to ask about his skills in layout of brochures and business cards personally and immediately.
7. Does the applicant need to know the history of design, schools, great masters?
It depends on specifics of your business and specific tasks, but often not worth it. Additional knowledge is bonus to the expert's observation and karma, but they don't solve specific problems.
8. Does designer have to know about marketing?
YES. Any design solves specific marketing problems. If you need a beautiful and attractive site, then this is also marketing. This "attractiveness" in sum of factors makes your users stay with you, look at catalog or list of services, and then become your client.
Designer doesn't have to understand ad settings or media planning. But analyzing the needs of target audience, predicting UX and improving are the parts of the necessary base.
9. Should designer have skills in site layout or programming languages?
These are always additional options for which you will have to pay extra. Universal specialists with broad knowledge of marketing, programming languages, ATL-advertising formats will be able to solve more interesting problems, they can become leaders of design teams. But they will rightly ask for more money for it.
At the very beginning, you can hire a simpler specialist and "grow" him within the company. Together with the development of the business, he will expand his horizons, will be loyal to you and in the future will be able to take control of other specialists.
If you want to save on two employees while trying to hire one general-purpose employee, then saving can be a problem. One employee almost always can't replace two, especially with a tight deadline and an 8-hour workday. In addition, a universal specialist will either cost more or he will do everything much worse than an individual designer and an IT specialist.
That's all for now! Thank you for attention! If you have ideas how to make this article better, write there: https://t.me/vowasemenov
This text was created with Maria Bodrikova: https://www.behance.net/mb25