Hiring well is critically important to having a successful team. It sounds obvious, but given how important it is, it's remarkable how many people don't spend the time necessary to get it right.

Here are just a few of the key things to keep in mind. There's far more wisdom out there, including in the Library, so read all of that, too.

Start with why: how do you know you should hire someone?

Hiring should always be based on a genuine need. Ask yourself:

• Do we have a gap in skills or bandwidth that can’t be filled by the current team?
• Will hiring this person directly contribute to achieving business or product goals?
• Is the workload sustainable without growing the team?
• Are there specific design challenges we’re not solving well right now?

Assessing and managing team workload

All teams are somewhat elastic—they can stretch or contract to accommodate more or less work. That's especially true for creative teams given how ambiguous the definition of "done" is. In the vein of the good/fast/cheap tradeoff, we can often compromise a bit somewhere to satisfy a requirement elsewhere. For example, if we need to go faster, we can sometimes "overclock" the team a bit, or temporarily reduce output quality (again, in service of a more important goal: speed to ship).

This ability to load balance and flex is typically a good thing since work is rarely 100% steady. In real life, there's a lot of volatility in workload, the requirements of work outputs, and the resources available. Projects come up and then die down, people go on leave or vacation, etc. It's important to normalize or average this volatility when considering the need to hire.

Similar to how we should think about promotion having a sense of lag (that is, we only promote when the person is consistently outperforming by a significant margin), we should also apply this thinking here. Our base posture should be that we're reluctant to hire. Are we consistently running up against this need? Is our company's velocity unduly limited by headcount?

Everyone always want more resources. Knowing how much is the right amount requires a sober look at the tradeoffs between bandwidth, various risks, and workload. In many startups and high-growth companies, your ability to hire good people will be the first factor that limits you; next will be budget to hire; and only lastly then will be need.

Writing a job description

A good job description is concise, reasonable, and focused. It's useful not only for the candidate seeing it, but for recruiters to find the right person, and for your team to interview well against a common understanding of what ideal looks like.

Be sure to include the following:

• About the company: It's best practice to start with a brief blurb about your company. Don't rely on the candidate to know or recognize it, even if it's well-known. Moreover, JDs are frequently syndicated elsewhere besides the company's website, such as on LinkedIn, in external recruiter emails, etc., so having this context right there is important.
• About the team: Tell the candidate about the team they'd be joining. What is this team's culture specifically? One of the things it's most helpful to include is who this person will report to (you, in this case).
• About the role: What are you looking for? What will be this person's daily responsibilities? Include the role's title here and be practical and specific: "We're looking for a <title> to <do XYZ>...".
• Requirements and nice-to-haves: How will you assess candidates? The biggest thing to make clear here are your expectations on seniority. Frequently people do this with years of experience but this is often not the best measure. Try to craft a nuanced definition of what's truly needed to make this person successful.
• Location: Is this role fully remote (ideally it should be)? Remote-possible? Hybrid (on what schedule?)? Are there physical offices if I'd like to go in to one? In-person required (where?)?

• A salary for this role: Many jurisdictions require JDs to disclose a salary range. It's also best practice for you to be transparent about this. Ideally, you are a no-negotiation company and you can say a specific number here. If this varies by geography, include that context.
• A DEI statement: Research shows that certain demographics—namely women—are far less likely to apply unless they meet or exceed all of a JD's expectations. This means you won't even see a lot of great applicants. But research also shows that even one sentence about this has a dramatic effect on this issue. So it's always worth it to explicitly include this.
• Legal statements: Some employers have disclosures they should make on JDs, especially if they do business with the government as a contractor. Do your research on this.

Sourcing candidates

Finding outstanding talent is really hard. One quantitative way we know this is to see how large the market is for this service: the US search and placement industry is expected to exceed $20B in 2024, and recruiting firms routinely charge a fee equivalent to 20-30% of the hired candidate's first-year's salary. The only way the market bears such numbers is that finding qualified talent is hard. Really hard.

In such a landscape, it's understandable, and also a bit unfortunate, that many hiring mangers rely heavily on direct introductions and word-of-mouth recommendations from colleagues and friends. While this is one of many ways bias is introduced into the hiring process, it's also probably the most effective way to find great talent. Most first-time hirers rely a bit too heavily on public posting. Like finding a great job, finding a great candidate often requires a bit more of a targeted approach.

That said, it's a good idea to post roles publicly, including, at a minimum, on LinkedIn. Other places like AngelList's Wellfound, YC's Work at a Startup, and VC job boards can also be great places to post. Your company's VC firms also have talent partners that can help you find candidates for free. And don't sleep on regular social media posts, like posting on Twitter.

Hiring external recruiters

If you'd like to get help from an external recruiter, going to the right people is important. You'll likely get no shortage of inbounds on LinkedIn by random people offering services of questionable quality and often managing these relationships is not worth your time, even if they don't get paid unless you hire their candidate. If you reach out I'm happy to introduce you to some recruiters that I like and have worked with.

Particularly if you're hiring very senior level design talent, it can often be worth it to partner with a firm that specializes in finding these kinds of people since you're looking for a needle in a haystack. For design, Wert & Co. is many folks' go-to. (Tell Daniel I sent you.)

The interview process

Let's say you've found some great candidates. Perhaps they applied or you found one or two directly and encouraged them to consider a jump to this new role you have open. Now you have to assess them. Here's how:

Good hiring processes are structured and standardized

When setting out to hire, it's really important to standardize your hiring process. That means creating a defined roadmap of the steps you'll go through to hire (and not deviating from that). Pre-script your important communications, like the email a candidate gets to schedule an interview.

Most importantly, require interviewers (including yourself) to document (write down) feedback immediately post-interview. If needed, schedule time for this just as you schedule the interview itself.

Structure helps reduce bias

Standardization of process is also important in ensuring that the outcomes of that process are fair and as bias-free as possible. Reducing bias as much as you can is incredibly important. It's not only the right thing to do, it also means you're hiring the person who's truly the best candidate. And especially on design and creative teams, having a real diversity of backgrounds and lived experience is a big part of ensuring that you're making great work.

Studies show that most people dramatically overestimate their objectiveness and the degree to which their hiring process predicts future success. People are particularly bad, statistically, at interviewing candidates. Numerous studies have shown that success in interviewing is a very poor predictor of future performance. In fact, it's a great predictor of bias-laden attributes like gender, instead.

Structure is necessary to get a good signal

Without structure in your process, it's very hard to know that you've covered every angle you need to. When every candidate interviews a bit differently, it's impossible to compare like-to-like and make effective decisions.

Hiring is a team activity, so make sure you're really a team, not a set of individuals

Each interviewer should have a clear guide (set out for them by the hiring manager or internal recruiter managing the process) outlining the purpose of their interview, with a clear focus differentiated from other interviewers.

If there's a portfolio presentation (and there usually is), make sure all interviewers are present for it.

Pay close attention to the candidate experience

Your hiring process is candidates' first exposure to your company culture. It's a major influence in whether they choose to accept your eventual offer.

Avoid challenges, take-home exercises, and work trials

Given how hard it is to assess talent, it's natural to assume that the best measure of a candidate is in seeing them do the actual work. There are several issues here, however, that usually get in the way of this being successful:

In reality, work trials and take-home exercises are rarely a good indicator of a candidate's future success in a role for a few reasons:

• Good work requires onboarding and context that can take months. It's rarely reasonable to expect a candidate to onboard sufficiently in a few hours to perform at the level that they would in the role itself.
• It's really hard to assess the quality of work done this way, especially by (interview) committee. Familiar designs are often valued over ones that may prove right but aren't as recognizably "good" up-front. Just as business models dictate the kind of work you get in real life, so too does the assessment method dictate the kind of work that you'll see. These systems do not reward risk-taking or inventiveness.
• Real work is team-based and iterative and these kinds of exercises don't meaningfully allow for that. No designer ever really works as independently as these exercises necessarily expect them to.
• Good candidates are often employed and/or busy interviewing elsewhere and therefore can rarely dedicate the amount of work needed to get to a high-quality outcome. What ends up happening, then, is that they do worse than lower-quality candidates who have more time (and lower standards for the value of it).
• The thing that these are intended to assess can more quickly and effectively be assessed by other means. If a designer is good enough to get through the resume screen, it's very unlikely that their ability to operate Figma (which is really what this tests) will be the limiting factor in them being a fit.

Further, if you do an assessment that requires more than 15 minutes of a candidate's work you have to pay them (a reasonable market rate—at very least $100/hour for most roles paying over $100k).

Last but not least, these exercises are a bad look for you as a brand from a hiring standpoint. It will turn off high-quality candidates who know how poor of an assessment measure these are. Some may even decide not to apply, or advise others to think twice. Design and tech are small worlds and word gets around.

So don't do these.

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