The state of design recruitment in 2024

Design recruitment in 2024 is wild.

People are confused. There’s a million different job titles as illustrated by Phil on LinkedIn recently.

I did a talk at DesignOps New York recently on my observations of design hiring in 2024:

1) Designers do not know how recruiters work.

Recruiters are not career coaches. Recruiters work for companies. The good ones push back on companies if they feel it’s not going to attract the right talent, but ultimately companies pay our bills.

2) Job descriptions are wild. Some make 0 sense.

Companies are looking for more with less. Because of the economy and uncertainty, money isn’t as easy to acquire as it was in 2021, so we need a sense of pragmatism around having to do more in certain organisations, but some companies take it too far.

You can get a solid product designer to work on UX and UI, but you can’t get someone to be excellent at research, UX, UI, Motion, front-end, animation, no-code tools, branding.

99% of the time, I do not read job descriptions. They are full of fluff.

I always advise making it concise, identify a dream candidate and write the JD as you’re writing to them and mentioning what they care and value in a role.

Ideas when writing to designers:

- Why is this role live?
- How big is the team?
- What can they be fired for?
- Who’s going to be their boss?
- Where does design report in to?
- How efficiently do they operate?
- Whats their expected deliverables?
- How mature is the design organisation?
- How does design work with engineering?
- Who’s the highest exec sponsor for design?

Talking about engineers is underrated, you could do great work, but if engineers are below par it will be slow and tedious.

Make it clear you see design as a value creator, rather than a "nice to have"

Or, have a clear plan to get there. Many of the best leadership roles include coming in with a white canvas, and starting from scratch, so it's hard to say the company sees design as a value creator yet, so clearly defining the plan to get there is just as important.

Think of companies such as Airbnb, Apple, and Spotify to smaller companies such as Linear it's obvious they value design.

Think about:

- A well-thought-through Interview process
- How you present the opportunity to candidates
- Landing pages for the design team, giving insider access.
- Transparency on current state vs future vision. Sell the vision.
- Salary bandings. Think 6-figures for senior IC and above. (UK, US etc)

Great talent will look different for each company.

3) I don't understand how some people are in leadership roles.

I often wonder how some people made it to leadership roles. It’s often their friend got into a leadership role, and hired them. This creates hiring made in a certain bias leading to UI design leads getting Head of UX roles and then hiring UI Designers into “UX” roles. Causes dilution and weak teams.

4) People want to remove design from their title

There's so much opportunity to utilise design experience in other areas of the business.

Design is one of the only disciplines where design can benefit every part of an organisation.

Interesting career moves I've seen:

- Designer to Founder
- VP of Design to Senior IC
- Head of Design to Head of People
- Head of Design to Director of Product
- Senior Design Director to Design Partner
- Director of Design to Director of Engineering

4) "Design recruiters" who don't know the difference between UX and UI.

Enough said? Been going on for years.

5) Managers spending 10+ hours PW on hiring tasks

I recently surveyed 171 design leaders on state of hiring within their organisations, 70%+ said they were spending over 10 or more hours per week sourcing, interviewing, giving feedback. This seems like a lot of time to me.

6) Designers being interviewed by companies who don't get what they do.

Designers are getting ghosted or rejected because they don't have X years experience in Y domain/technology mostly from companies who don't seem as progressive and understand the nuances of design.

If people are not even open to talking to designers at IC level from different industries i.e fintech into social, we have a problem.

Hire people on potential, not just what their CV says. I understand sometimes domain experience is important, but often not at IC level, unless it's a really niche role.

7) Everyone is a design leader nowadays. CDO's of one.

Go on to LinkedIn and type in “Chief Design Officer” you get 121,000+ results.

In digital, I believe there is only 300-350 “genuine” design leaders who are excellent at what they do.

8) Many hiring tasks are exploitative

Here is your typical design recruitment process:

- Designer has a 1st interview.
- Company gives a task, which is UI focused. On their product.
- Designer submits task.
- Companies don't even get back to the designer when submitting.

Feedback: "We've decided to go with someone else"

Don't give UI tasks for a UX role and please, book time with a candidate if they've taken time.

Approaches like this show you don't understand UX and you do not value the human behind the screen/emails.

Tasks have their place, they just need better thinking through often for example I’m working with a company who pay $500 for candidates to work on a take-home task.

No one has declined to do the task. It has a deadline. The process is smooth.

I’m not against interview tasks when done right.

Permanent headcount is harder to get approved so having extra due diligence to ensure the candidate is the right fit is important. I get it.

9) The “Glamour” search

“They are too agency”

“Not enough start-up experience”

”I want someone from Airbnb or Apple”

Great people are being overlooked daily. Even more so in this market as companies look to be more "efficient", often they are hiring with a cost-focused mindset not customer-focused or people-focused. You need both.

Because they don’t come from the exact background companies look for.

Result is they spend months trying to fill a IC role.

To get top talent, go beyond their “CV”.

Look at what they can bring, not just where they’ve been.

If you look at the best product design agencies they actually ship product, and some are 10x better than some in-house designers. For example some in-house designers just work on a checkout page for 2 years. Whereas a studio designer can be part of shipping 10+ products a years.

We as recruiters, hiring managers etc need to look deeper into someone’s experience. Go deeper, test this person in an interview, put them into 2-3 hours of working with your team (paid) to see how they flourish. There's a lot we can do here.

10) Ageism in design is rife. "Leaders" build teams in their images.

We need more people who have 30+ years experience to be hired as easily as someone with 3 years with some trendy names on their portfolio. They bring battle scars, knowledge, business maturity. Insanely valuable.

11) Companies want more with less

You only need to look at the economy and a year in which 64 elections are taking place to know we are facing uncertainty everywhere. Design is no different, and it’s not just design.

We need to understand what constraints companies have:

• Permanent hiring budgets are harder to access

• They need to be creative with how they staff up projects

• Hiring more people equals more pressure to prove ROI

2024 is the year of the deep generalist.

For example roles which I see most in-demand (IC, not leadership):

• Design Engineers AKA Creative Technologists. This role is re-emerging strongly, and seeing a great uptick in clients looking for top-tier design engineers to bridge the gap between design and engineering teams.

• 0-1 Product Designers. People who understand business/product, nice visuals, strategic thinking etc.

12) AI ATS bots filter out genuinely good designers.

Great thread on Reddit about how to navigate the ATS, and insights into companies using them.

How to beat the ATS thread.

13) Designers obsessed with “buy-in”

The more companies I speak to, and hear how C-Suites overlook design, I'm starting to understand why they do.

The problem some designers have is they cannot articulate what exactly their value is. When challenged to provide strategic guidance, they fall back on the comfortable tactical aspects of design or process vagueness.

Most design leaders can hardly justify the existence of a proper design practice beyond the idea that engineering needs design support to build the right products.

More and more in 2024, we are seeing design less as a strategic function, and more as "styling".

Just a thought, but spending time thinking and writing about how to solve problems will help structure thoughts on how to talk to non-design peers, to continuously get the elusive "buy-in".

That’s it for now.