Navigating Hiring Pitfalls as a Design Executive
Note: Hello again! In this series, we’re focusing on what new design leaders need to do in order to build a winning design team (and a broader design culture) from scratch. If you’re just joining me, I’d recommend you start with my earlier posts on getting buy-in, the early role of the design executive, working with TA, and a hiring toolkit for design. Otherwise, let’s dive in.
There are challenges that every design leader eventually faces (and that every design leader probably wishes they didn’t have to face). Ideally, they don’t come up often, but they can, and when they do, they can wreak havoc on your budding design team.
I’m talking about the inevitable pitfalls in interviewing, the ones that can impact not just the hiring process, but the organization at large. And if you’re a new design exec, understanding these risks isn’t enough. You have to be able to recognize and respond to them in a way that doesn’t break your relationships while also not resulting in a bad hire.
In this post, I’ll focus on two of the most common challenges you may face while building your design team: identifying red flags and managing those moments when you and/or others on the hiring panel butt heads.
Lean on your values
While everyone likes to think they have a strong bird’s eye view of what their team needs (and what it definitely doesn’t), some red flags are easier to spot than others. That said, even if you can’t get a perfect picture of a candidate and how they’ll work with others on your team (which, let’s be honest, can be hard to do even on full teams), you can still weed out some of the most obvious warning signs.
I remember interviewing a candidate who started their presentation by saying, “I’m well-known in the so-and-so community, and a lot of you here might already know who I am.”
None of the panel members, myself included, knew who this person was. To add to the awkwardness, one of our values in this particular Design Org was “Be humble.” Now, candidates can’t be expected to turn every interview into a research project, but if this candidate had researched the company's values or any specific qualities emphasized in the job description for this role, they might have realized that starting their interview with a boast might not have been the right move. (For more on screening for values and culture fit, check out my last post.)
The moral of the story? Keep your values in the back of your mind as you’re interviewing. Candidates who demonstrate those values aren’t just showing culture fit; they’re also showing they’re invested in embodying those values.
Clarify, clarify, clarify
Prioritizing values isn’t the only way to screen for red flags. I was once interviewing another candidate who presented their process of building a feature in a very linear way. They said something along the lines of, “We conducted research, validated concepts, built a winning candidate, launched it, and succeeded.”
Now, this may have been the reality of the project, but it always gives me pause when a design candidate provides such a happy path or high-level answer. To get clarity in these cases, I might ask questions like:
How were your initial insights developed?
What was your role in gathering these insights?
Who were you primarily targeting?
What methods were most useful for this audience?
What did the conceptualizing phase look like?
What were some of the challenges you faced?
Did you use any other data to inform your decision-making, and if so, which data?
Who was the core team working on this? What did your collaboration look like?
A little prodding revealed that this designer didn’t contribute to any of the early stages of the project; they had spent most of their time executing the final designs. There’s nothing outright wrong with this, but what our team needed was someone who could be in the weeds early on in a project, not just get it over the finish line.
Situations like these illustrate why it’s so important to dig deeper with your questions. Don’t read into people’s responses only what you want to hear. High-level answers can be a good starting point, but when it comes to building a team—especially from scratch—you can’t afford to make assumptions.
Green flags
What experiences like these have taught me is that successful design hires often display a few common “green flags,” such as:
Great communication
Authenticity
Humility in the ways they talk about their achievements (framing them in the context of a team effort)
Providing clarity about their contributions and the challenges they’ve faced
Of course, every design team has slightly different needs, but in my experience, these traits are the most likely to lead to a positive outcome.
Remember, when you’re interviewing, you’re not just listening to the answers themselves. You’re listening to what the answers tell you about the candidate, their personality, their values, and their mindset. The takeaway? Pay attention to the stories a candidate tells you about their work. They can reveal a lot.
Managing disagreements
What happens when your hiring panel is excited about a candidate, but you aren’t—or vice versa? This really depends on the situation.
Let’s say the hiring panel said yes to a candidate, but you picked up on something the others didn’t. In this situation, you can probably say no to the hire without too much fallout, as long as you’re clearly communicating what you noticed to the rest of the team so they can look out for the same thing in the future. In this situation, you are in a great position to help coach and guide the team on a signal they should look out for.
But what about a situation where everyone else on the panel is a no, but you’re a yes? If you’re an org leader or hiring manager, you always have the final vote, and when there’s a tie, the decision may fall to you—but that doesn’t mean you should be trying to overrule the decision of the team.
Why? Because if you’re having to make that type of executive decision, there’s probably something more going on. This is where it pays to do a root cause analysis and understand where you’re misaligned. Is it an issue with the interview process or the questions or the panel? A lack of clarity about the role and responsibilities? Getting to the bottom of the mismatch is better than forcing a candidate through when everyone else is against it. (Besides, is that a dynamic you really want to create on your team? Talk about starting off on the wrong foot!)
Avoiding problems before they become problems
The best time to scan for red flags is before you’ve made the hire. Getting ahead of issues like poor culture fit, problematic traits, and misaligned experiences can save you headaches in the future. The same goes for managing disagreements on the hiring panel. You have to be willing to take a step back and reassess what’s behind those conflicts, not just throw your weight around, if you want the best possible outcome.
That said, sometimes hiring still goes wrong, even when you do everything right. Knowing what to do in those situations can help you minimize the damage, so be sure to tune in for my next post on hiring mistakes if you want to learn more. See you then!