Why Hire Like a Designer?
If we hire a Senior Graphic Designer, we are hiring someone to solve graphic design problems, right? Not really. We’re hiring someone to apply graphic design abilities to help in solving problems faced by the people we serve.
Whenever we hire someone, we want them to apply what they are able to do to solving problems, overcoming challenges, or capturing opportunities for the people we serve. Asking what problems we are trying to solve by hiring someone, helps us see the problem we are trying to solve clearly before we dive into that resume pile.
As we create that list of problems we think hiring someone will solve, we do two things. First, we make sure we really need to hire someone. We list the problems we are trying to solve and ask, how we might solve them without hiring someone? If we can, we’re done with hiring. Second, creating the list of problems we intend to solve by hiring someone helps us see the reality of what we do when we hire — add the ability to solve a collection of valuable problems.
Think About Positions Like a Designer
Positions and roles are fiction (and usually barely plausible fiction). The Senior Graphic Designer position is just a vessel for the collection of problems that person needs to be able to solve. Organizations are best viewed as large vessels for an aggregation of solving ability with a capacity for a limited number of problems. Leaders who think like designers see through roles and titles to the underlying problems faced by the people they and their organization serve.
Seen this way, hiring someone based on past positions isn’t as useful as it seems. We don’t know how many of the problems we’re trying to solve by hiring are analogous to what someone faced in that past position. We’re looking at a range between 0% and 100%. We also don’t know how to compare organizational problem-solving capacity. Innovating well on a heavily resourced team in an organization with a healthy innovation culture is very different from attempting the same work on a struggling team with an emerging innovation culture.
Design Your Hiring Signals
Resumes and interviews are only useful to identify who we shouldn’t hire. Both give people chances to disqualify themselves. It’s easy to pass on the person who makes a sexist remark while handing over a typo-riddled, comic sans resume.
What’s harder is when the interview and resume look good or even excellent. Are those signals telling us what we need to know to determine whether this person has the right abilities and can apply them to solving problems like ours?
Resumes collect evidence of past performance and experience to create a professional trajectory. A resume makes an argument that a particular trajectory means someone will perform well while solving the problems driving our need to hire. Degrees, universities, prestigious organizations, job titles, publications, and awards tell us that someone solved the problems associated with them.
They don’t tell us much about their ability to solve our problems. In fact, if someone designed their resume to describe their ability to solve problems like ours, 90% of the time that resume would be too weird to get past the humans and software at the screening stage.
An interview only teaches us how good someone is at interviewing. They might talk about work they’ve done and deliver detailed, witty responses to our questions. They might display industry knowledge and demonstrate that they understand the kinds of problems we have. But we aren’t hiring them to interview, we’re hiring them to solve a certain set of problems. All that talking about the work can accomplish is helping us judge the talk and imagine how someone might perform in our world. And that would be fine if we could trust our imagination.
Designing Better Hiring Decisions
Every person’s imagination hates someone a little, and sometimes a lot. Every imagination will give some factors or evidence more or less weight than they deserve when predicting how someone will perform in the future. We don’t have to believe in bias for it to be real, for it to cost us money and time when we hire the wrong person. When we rely on imagination we rely on a poorly calibrated instrument to evaluate candidate data that is poorly suited to revealing their ability to solve problems like ours. Bias makes imagination an unreliable hiring tool.
Even the least anti-racist person in the room wants a good teammate who generates a slightly fatter paycheck, better quarterly results, or a chance to work fewer weekends. Shifting away from a reliance on imagination will help with those goals, while reducing bias in the hiring process, and providing better evidence about someone’s abilities.
Hire Like a Designer Using Micro Jobs
To learn how a solution idea might work, designers create prototypes. To find what interviews and resumes hide from us, and learn how candidates might perform, prototype using Micro Jobs. A Micro Job is where:
- candidates apply their abilities
- to the kind of problems they will need to solve
- with one or more of the people they will work with
- under conditions similar to the work environment, and
- create a tangible work product.
Here’s how to set up a Micro Job. First, look at the problems the successful candidate will likely need to solve. Create a project where someone can work on those problems and produce something you can evaluate. Determine how many hours each candidate should spend on the project. Decide how you will evaluate the Micro Job work product before hiring each candidate. Plan to hire each candidate.
A Micro Job is not a test. It is a very small job. Candidates are asked to spend a few hours doing real work. A Micro Job is not free work. Each candidate is paid market hourly rates to do the work. Asking people to work for free shows, at best, blindness to abusing power. It’s just wrong and contributes to organizational cultures people think not unlawful is the same as ethical. And, when someone complains about the budget for Micro Jobs, walk through the cost of hiring the wrong person.
After a group of candidates completes the project, review each project based on the evaluation standards and ask these questions: What is this candidate’s work telling us about what we hope to accomplish by hiring someone? Is this candidate showing the ability to solve problems beyond this role? How might we have created a better project for the Micro Job?
Try to remove candidate identifiers from the project to eliminate some bias from the reviews. After reviewing all the Micro Job projects, there are two choices: hire someone or try again. If we have standards about who we’ll work with, not hiring someone is a necessary option.
The hardest part of adopting Micro Jobs isn’t creating the projects — it’s choosing to step outside established hiring practices. But that’s where transformative change begins. Prototype the hiring process the same way we prototype our solutions before learning from small experiments. When we hire like a designer, we create space for evidence over imagination, for ability over weak signals, for real problem-solving over performative interviewing.
