By Marissa Louie · 11 min read

This post is for hiring managers who have practiced design, and who manage design teams.

Having a deep bench of talented designers is what sets world class design teams apart from, well, everyone else. Design is a competitive advantage and companies that score high on design achieve superior business performance, outperforming the baseline by as much as 2 to 1.

In my career, I have helped hire 100+ people, including some who have gone on to work for the likes of Square, Pinterest, Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Disney. I also ran a small design recruiting firm called Star Makers several years ago, where my team and I matched top designers in our network with startups who wanted to hire great designers.

What's the secret to successfully hiring top designers? First and foremost, for a hiring manager, it is ideal to exemplify the skills of world class designers: be a great designer yourself. Don't just talk the talk, but know how to walk the walk.

From my combined experience in being a design leader at Apple, Yahoo, Ness, and Animoodles, and having recruited designers for multiple companies, I have boiled down the essence of how to recruit top designers that covers everything from sourcing candidates to traits to look for in top designers.

The 20 laws of recruiting top designers:

1. The Law of Time
2. The Law of the Profile
3. The Law of Leading by Example
4. The Law of Resourcefulness
5. The Law of Designer Attraction
6. The Law of Craft
7. The Law of Problem Solving
8. The Law of EQ
9. The Law of User Centricity
10. The Law of Process
11. The Law of Creativity
12. The Law of Collaboration
13. The Law of Diversity
14. The Law of Compensation
15. The Law of Dreams
16. The Law of Impact
17. The Law of Passion
18. The Law of Demeanor
19. The Law of Multipliers
20. The Law of Success

Note that I have excluded aspects like location, work status, and work life balance, because those factors vary widely depending on the company.

I will expand on each of these laws below. (I didn't intend to write the beginnings of a book, but here we are...)

1. The Law of Time

Hiring managers need to put in the time it takes to source, interview, and close top designers. It can take more time to hire top designers than average or below average ones: top designers are harder to come by and are in higher demand.

The importance of recruiting should be proportionate to the amount of time you personally spend on recruiting. Recruiting is not a nuisance that prevents you from doing your work; it enables you to scale your team with excellence.

2. The Law of the Profile

Know which characteristics your ideal candidate has. If you could create the ideal profile of the candidate who would level up your team, what would it be like? Try to come up with the names of a few top designers you'd love to work with.

RecruitBot is a startup that uses machine learning to create the profile of an ideal candidate, then recommends similar candidates. Disclaimer: I've given them design advice since the early days.

3. The Law of Leading by Example

Leading by example means that you've started out as a practicing designer and know the work that designers do, inside and out. You empathize with difficulties that designer candidates have had on the job, because you may have been in similar situations. You know what success as a designer looks like, and you have the ability to spot it in other people, regardless of their educational background or pedigree.

Top designers want to be seen and appreciated by design leaders who can empower them to design at their full potential. They want to work with design leaders who are qualified to lead them, and will help them grow.

This is something that recruiters and non-designers who have never practiced design may never fully understand, even if they are effective at recruiting.

4. The Law of Resourcefulness

World class talent can be hard to hire, and hiring managers need to go above and beyond posting jobs on LinkedIn. Though that is an important box to check, also consider what you can do to bring top designers to you. Here are some examples of what I have done:

• Hosting and speaking at meetups, conferences, and university design programs: I regularly do public speaking, which attracts candidates to my orbit.
• Recruiting at job fairs: I have done campus recruiting at Stanford, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, CalArts, Art Center, and beyond.
• Working your network: Up your networking game by making a name for yourself on LinkedIn, or other social networks. I am somewhat known in the design community because I co-lead Designers Guild, a Facebook group that provides professional support and community for 20,000 designers.
• Leveraging coworkers from the past: Reconnect with coworkers whose judgment you respect, and ask them to recommend great candidates.
• Help designers out: Even if you're not hiring a designer at the moment, help designers out if you can. Evaluate their work, or help them find their next great role. They will remember you for it, and may potentially want to work with you later on.
• Working with professional recruiters: Stay in the loop with them regularly. Educate them on what you're looking for, and what to do at every step of the hiring process. Make sure they know they are accountable to you. When recruiters have poor communication or follow-through, it is often because the hiring managers don't have a good working relationship with them.

5. The Law of Designer Attraction

World class designers want to work on world class design teams. Once you hire a such a designer, do not lower the bar by settling for designers who aren't up to their level. Always seek to raise the bar.

If you lower the bar, expect to see top designers quit.

I was able to build a world class team at Animoodles because I kept the bar high starting with team DNA from Apple and Pixar, then expanded from there:

6. The Law of Craft

Top designers don't just exemplify the level of craft your team should have, they also help raise the bar for craft through numerous ways. They help mentor team members to level up their craft, and show what great craft is during design crits. They will help build a new design system, or help the team stay true to an existing design system.

Though not a requirement, designers with a high level of craft have often won design awards and received industry recognition for their work at some point in their career.

While looking at a candidate's design work, ask yourself:

• Do they show the level of craft you're looking for?
• Would they bring something special and exciting to your team?
• Could they both help execute at the current level of design required, and help raise the bar for design craft over time?

7. The Law of Problem Solving

The best designers can solve problems in a multitude of ways. They have a high IQ, and they don't only think about solving problems in terms of pixels. Whether you give them post-its, a notebook, algorithms, or code, they can surprise you with their clever, practical, and inspiring solutions.

They can see things in a way that you may never have, and help set the bar for the level of problem solving the rest of the team should have.

Signs of a great problem solving ability in a top designer candidate include:

• Ability to conduct market research and gather accurate takeaways
• Ability to make informed decisions based on both qualitative and quantitative analysis, such as user research, A/B testing, and analytics
• Achieving success in a domain that was previously unfamiliar to them, such as going from mobile gaming to VR, or from enterprise to consumer
• Ability to explain the rationale behind decisions in a way that stakeholders understand
• Ability to challenge assumptions
• Ability to identify gaps of knowledge and fill the gaps through gathering more information and problem solving
• Willingness to be wrong on the path towards finding a solution
• Identifying when they make mistakes, and course correcting appropriately

8. The Law of EQ

The best designers are some of the highest EQ people you'll ever meet. They are extremely talented at applying their emotional intelligence to communicating and solving problems with others. This makes people want to work with them.

These high EQ designers may have a hard time working with jerks, so it's wise to have a no jerk policy in your organization at large.

9. The Law of User Centricity

Top designers obsess about how to make their users' and customers' lives easier, more fulfilling, and more enjoyable. They want to make the world a better place, knowing that this quest begins with influencing the human experience. They will go to great lengths to understand user journeys and motivations, including conducting user research and diving into analytics. They fight for the user when nobody else will.

10. The Law of Process

Great designers don't just think about how to execute their work, they think about the entire process of how it gets done. This includes:

• How to do better design hand-offs
• How to make sure design has an equal seat at the product development table (product ownership trio)
• How to conduct better design crits
• How to align with stakeholders through workshops and design evangelism
• How to keep the design team motivated
• How to make DesignOps more effective
• How to structure design and project teams in a way that enables both people success and project success
• How to create a culture of mentorship and empowerment

11. The Law of Creativity

Great designers are also highly creative people: they show large doses of creativity in many ways, across many examples. They can execute designs in a variety of design styles. They will inspire you, and the rest of the team, with their vision and delightful solutions.

Great designers often exercise their creativity outside of work through hobbies like music, podcasting, photography, film production, acting, story writing, illustration, animation, fine art, arts and crafts, typography, cooking, and more.

12. The Law of Collaboration

Designers don't work in a silo, and the best designers are able to collaborate with a multitude of personalities while balancing many competing interests from many stakeholders. They are consummate design ambassadors and diplomats.

They foster passionate design advocates within cross-functional teams such as product management, engineering, and marketing. Non-designers want to learn how top designers execute their work, asking to sit beside them as they work, accompanying them to user research sessions, and seeking their design judgment on things.

13. The Law of Diversity

Great designers know that diverse teams are smarter and yield better outcomes.

They constantly seek new perspectives, to reduce their blind spots and achieve greater success. They seek to grow their design teams with people who are a culture-add, rather than a culture-fit.

They seek to work on a design team that has diverse design skills, where not everybody is the same - so that designers within the team can help each other expand their skillsets.

Look for candidates who seek to be in diverse environments wherever they go: at work, in their social circles, in the way they live life.

14. The Law of Compensation

Top designers can easily command top compensation.

If the compensation you're offering is below market, it is very hard to attract top talent unless you're at a startup that has product-market fit and is experiencing rocketship growth.

Top designers have friends, and will trade compensation notes with each other. I once received a soft offer for a large company that was $20-$30k below what their previous design leader (a man) received, even after I negotiated hard, specifying that they offered less than I was paid 7 years prior. The company said they couldn't budge, and fell out of my good grace.

There are other ways to attract top designers without offering top compensation, such as a title bump, or offering an increased scope of responsibility. But compensation is a very important factor for most people.

If a top designer has options, they will choose a variation on this combination every time:

Top compensation + appropriate title + appropriate level of responsibility + hard or interesting problem + capable team

15. The Law of Dreams

Get to know the dreams and goals of top designers you want to recruit. If recruiting is important to you, you will be willing to spend more time with them. Go for walks, a fun weekend hike or activity, or coffee - be in a less formal environment than a conference room. Open up with them, and they will be more likely to open up with you.

Figure out how you could help align their dreams with what your company can provide. Sometimes this requires creativity and flexibility on your end, including altering the job description a bit. It's up to you to decide how far you will push in order to hire a great candidate.

16. The Law of Impact

Great designers are likely to have shown that they can make a great impact, or have already made a great impact in their past work. They will want to continue to make a larger and larger impact, whether it's in how they positively affect people's lives, work on something personally fulfilling, drive billions in revenue, or create a top-performing design organization.

Find ways you can enable a great candidate to continue to make an impact with your team and company, without overpromising on what you can help deliver.

17. The Law of Passion

Passion and enthusiasm for our work is a must. Great designers dive into their work and are able to work within constraints to get things done, rather than spend time complaining about all the road blocks along the way.

Passion will get top designers through the toughest problems, and will inspire the rest of the team to do the same.

Look for designers who show genuine enthusiasm in the way they describe their past work, rather than checking off boxes to impress you.

18. The Law of Demeanor

People of a positive nature tend to work within teams and companies that are friendly and uplifting.

People of a negative nature tend to work within teams and companies that have strict rules and regulations.

Matching the demeanor of a candidate with the demeanor of your team and company is important for alignment. Otherwise, the designer who would have been a top performer will be like a fish out of water.

19. The Law of Multipliers

Great designers not only execute great design work, but their work often has a multiplying effect: their work positively impacts the team, company, or industry at large.

They contribute to the design community with thought leadership, organizing events, and/or mentoring designers. They have uncovered so much truth and wisdom in their work that they can't help but share it out and pay it forward. They are natural evangelists for whatever they work on.

They attract other great designers to want to work with them wherever they go. They are stars who everyone else wants to orbit around.

Show them how you will respect their multiplying efforts, and why they matter.

20. The Law of Success

Great designers care deeply about their careers - they want to continue the positive trajectory they have already been on.

As a result, they look for ways that their future employers will set them up for success. They want to be supported in their learning, they want strong mentorship, and they want to be empowered to do the best work of their lives.

Make sure to make it very clear to them how you will help set them up for success within your team and company.

In conclusion, I hope that these 20 Laws of Recruiting Top Designers will help you effectively identify and hire the best designers.

Have any more tips to add? Please comment below!