Good morning. 👋 Tom here from Verified. This is the first newsletter I’ve written in years, so I hope you see the changes as we keep releasing more. Let’s dive in.

Here's what I am serving up today:

• 7 reasons why companies struggle to hire top designers

• What to include in a compelling job advert for designers

• 10 ways to speed up the process of hiring ICs.

🤯 7 reasons companies struggle to hire top designers:

1) Your career ladders are rigid.

2) You’re looking in the wrong places.

3) You're not showing people the work.

4) You’re relying on generalist talent teams.

5) You're not building a consistent inbound network.

6) You’re not appealing (yet) to work for as a brand.

7) You're slowing down by insisting on a polished portfolio.

It should not take 4 weeks to close a Senior IC role with one candidate end-to-end from 1st interview to offer.

🚀 Write compelling job ads PLEASE

A lot of companies don’t attract top designers.

Because they’re not enticing them or offering anything special.

90% of JD’s on LinkedIn:

• We are hiring

• Join the rocket ship

• Click here to see our jobs

• We’ve reached unicorn status

• We need someone to do the UX

• Oh, someone that does everything

Instead, tell designers:

• What is the actual salary

• Leadership develops teams

• The senior sponsor in the org

• How you build an inclusive team

• Where design report to in the org

• GSD mindset without excess meetings

Understand what designers want and talk to them. They need to see if they will get meaningful career growth, if their work will get shipped, if the company cares about design or is open to deeper understanding, if their OKRs have a meaningful commercial impact on the business.

An underrated thing to talk about in an advert is your product and development team. sHow strong is your engineering team? The amount of times I’ve seen engineering slow or change design work is staggering.

⏰ 7 ways to speed up the process of hiring ICs

At Verified, we work to a 2-week sourcing cycle from briefing to offer stage. We understand the importance of time delays in securing and closing the top IC designers. They will have offers elsewhere, you gotta move!

Our process roughly looks like this:

Day 1 - Briefing

Day 2-3 - Initial sourcing via our talent network. We have an invite-only network, with our own career grading framework.

Day 4 - Calibration with the client. We provide 5 sample profiles, we discuss each one, resulting in us focusing on 1-2 sample profiles with the aim on securing the candidates (and similar profiles) into the process.

Day 5/6 - Continuous sourcing ensuring we are securing the profiles we’ve aligned on in the calibration phase.

Day 7 - Interview slots for 3-5 designers.

Day 8/9 - Interview slots for 2nd interview.

Day 10 - Any final chats with 1-2 designers with C-Suite/CEO.

We’re adding to our talent network 24/7. If we get to the end of the process and no candidates are chosen (touch wood, it’s not happened in over 2 years) we conduct the same process.

Ok, let’s dig into 7 ways to speed up interview processes:

1) Stop asking for a polished portfolio from Senior ICs and above.

I want to see raw files, scrappy work, not always a polished portfolio which someone else could have put together for you. Often templated portfolio doesn’t show me enough.

2) Making sure everyone is aligned internally on the role.

Before a role briefing, you need to ensure the budget is signed off, the key stakeholders for the role are all aligned, and you’re not going to get to the end and someone will say “I think we need someone a bit more UX” 😂 

3) No more than 2 stages for IC roles, 3-4 for leadership.

I’ve yet to see a legitimate argument for an IC role being more than 2 with a 3rd for CEO/Founder “culture” chats. Please email me if you have one. Interviewing is a skill, you should be able to get enough information from an IC interview in 2 to determine if they are a good fit.

For leadership, I believe 4 max of “proper” interviews. Coffee and intro chats do not count. But with leadership, often these coffee chats are vital to determine connection as you work so closely with your peers.

4) Have a strong EVP to attract talent who WANT to work for you.

Industries in which people have strong ethical views i.e Gambling may struggle to attract the right calibre of talent needed. Now, I genuinely believe these companies need design more than ever and need to change, which they are doing. But, with experience, I’ve witnessed them paying over the odds just to get 7/10 designers in the door to get projects off the ground.

Talk about what people can do there, career path, CEO messages on change, how you will raise design maturity, how the CDO is integrating design effectively etc.

5) Build talent pools. Designers love being part of communities.

Every day is an opportunity to engage with “passive” talent.

6) Interview with intent, not "to look around the market"

This will come through everyone being aligned, the budget signed off, a clear 100-day plan once hired, sourcing strategy, JD approved, a headhunter in place, and interview slots booked out.

Do not waste designers’ time, they are off the market quickly.

7) Hire on potential, not where they've been = great untapped talent.

Interviewing is a skill. This should be obvious. We don’t need to be always doing “vanity” searches chasing after sexy logos like Instagram, Spotify, and Google. Sometimes the best designers are working for small agencies, pumping out incredible design work.

LinkedIn comment of the week

It comes from Stephen Schroth EVP, Enterprise Design Officer at KeyBank in Ohio. He was commenting on a post of mine talking about designers’ incessant need to want a “seat at the table” and how we need to adapt how we talk to non-design executives about design.

DISCLAIMER: This newsletter today was written using my thoughts and insights over 10+ years of hiring designers. You’re welcome to disagree, I’d love constructive feedback. This is the first newsletter I’ve released with lots more planned with leaders (design + non-design exec). This was more of a tester for me to get used to writing long-form again. I hope you see the changes and improvements in the following articles. 🙌