That’s already been a while since the industry leaders (Google, Facebook, Airbnb) started building smaller recruitment teams within their recruitment organizations. Now, all of these companies have Design Recruitment Teams that work with design (UX, VisDi, Research, etc.) exclusively.

Some smaller companies and startups started adopting the design recruitment practice at the very early stage of their development (Grammarly, Bolt).

There’s a good reason for that:

<aside> 📍 You won’t be a good recruiter if you don’t fully understand the roles you’re hiring for.

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There are some essential things to learn and skills to develop to be able to recruit design talent (compared to a generalist recruiter):

• being familiar with UX sourcing (linkedin, dribble, behance, UX communities)
• understanding that design is not about the tools (the most common mistake of the ones working with engineering roles is to look for candidates by “Figma”, “Illustrator” keywords)
• knowing the basics of visual design and being able to tell if the portfolio is visually appealing
• being familiar with the design process to read the case studies
• knowing all the roles in the design team: product, UI, UX, service, content design, research, industrial design etc.
• understanding the role of designers in the product teams, to discuss the candidate’s experience at the interview

For your recruiters to get started with design roles, we recommend:

• create a detailed onboarding, which will include sourcing, portfolio review, visual design, and design process chapters
• give The Design of Everyday Things book as an onboarding gift 🎁
• set up onboarding meetings for recruiters to meet with designers
• encourage recruiters to take a basic design online course, at least the theoretical part (for instance, the one from Meta on Coursera)
• give them resources to keep up with visual design trends (as simple as recommending some YT channels: Satori Graphics, Flux Academy, Will Patterson, etc.)