The UX of Hiring for UX Positions — Medium

This is decent article about how to hire a UX Designer, I don’t agree 100% with their take on it, but it’s good to get other perspectives.

TLDR; it’s hard and there is a lot to consider.

Hiring has been one of the most challenging and important tasks I’ve had in my career. Hiring the right person for the job is your chance, as a manager, to get things started off on the right foot.

Hiring for a creative design position is a bit easier than for a UX position because you can really get a sense of someone’s design skills simply by looking at their work and asking the right questions. It’s hard to bullshit your way through a portfolio if you didn’t do the work.

UX is different I think. Usually you can’t really see some of the thinking and work that’s done on the UX end of a project. It requires you as a hiring manager to really know what you need. Assessing needs for UX is tricky and then finding the right person is next to impossible.

Another problem is the people doing the hiring. Most of them don’t know what the hell UX is or how it should be set up within an organization. It’s sad really. It’s such a new field and everyone thinks they can just call them selves a UX Designer. I’ve seen product managers, project managers, print designers, account people, all of them try to pivot to UX Designer and I believe it’s going to hurt the industry in the long run, more than help (which isn’t a popular opinion apparently)

Luckily for the savvy and experienced UX Manager you can spot these frauds easily. The problem is there aren’t a lot of managers that were true UXers that have moved into that manager role yet to hire properly. No one knows where to put UX either, its just a mess in pretty much every organization.

By Dan Maccarone & Sarah Doody

Source: The UX of Hiring for UX Positions — Medium