How to hire a product designer for your organization

Product designers build innovative, seamless user experiences that improve your company’s customer loyalty and bottom line. However, finding the right person for the job is difficult. You must ensure you assess the right skills and recruit on appropriate platforms without mishandling key factors like compensation and driving strong candidates away.

In this article, we delve into how you can find, attract, and screen top product design candidates, thus avoiding negative outcomes like poor customer experience.

We also cover general considerations, skills to focus on, creative ways to find candidates, and methods for selecting top talent.

What you need to know before hiring a product designer

To attract and select top product designers, consider these key factors.

Product design needs

Product designers improve customers’ interactions with your product. However, some designers may be better suited to certain product types or design stages. Therefore, you should clearly define your product-related needs before you hire a designer, including:

• Product type – for example, the sell-side of a consumer marketplace interface

• Product development stage – for instance, the testing, launching, or scaling stage

• Current design challenges like attracting a new user segment

• Required design skills, such as web, mobile, or UX/UI design skills

• Required software experience, such as Sketch and Figma

Once you’ve highlighted your design needs, use this info to write a detailed job description and prepare scenario-based interview questions. This ensures you hire qualified professionals who are ready to handle your unique challenges.   

Compensation 

Product designers are highly skilled and sought-after professionals. Thus, it’s well worth meeting or exceeding the average market compensation for specific seniority levels – not only to attract talented applicants but also to retain them. Here’s how to identify the compensation sweet spot:

• Use job boards like Indeed to research direct competitors’ compensation packs for product designers. Some sites, like LinkedIn, also provide average salaries for specific roles.

• Look up compensation levels from alternative career paths – such as coding or consulting – to attract career-switchers. For example, research job ads for business analysts in your wider industry.  

• Adjust the market figures to your company’s size and growth stage, plus the role’s seniority level and responsibilities. The bigger your company and the more senior the role, the more competitive the salary should be. For instance, if a direct competitor has a smaller workforce and revenue, you might offer a salary that’s between 10-30% higher than theirs for a similar position.

• When you can’t meet or exceed market salary figures, boost the benefits package, perhaps by offering free gym passes or extra paid time off (PTO).

Remote and hybrid work

While product designers can certainly benefit from on-site collaboration, they can also productively perform many independent tasks in a remote or hybrid setting. So, it’s worth offering work-from-home perks on a case-by-case basis. For instance, consider offering two remote days per week if 40% of your designer’s workload is solo work.

This strategy will expand your applicant pool with skilled individuals desiring more flexibility. Additionally, you’ll capture talent from outside your immediate geographic area – which is great news if your offices aren’t based in a major urban tech hub.

Skills and qualifications to look for in a product designer 

Many product designer roles don’t require formal qualifications like bachelor’s degrees or specialized certificates – though these could be a plus. 

Rather, they need a specific combination of hard and soft skills, which they often acquire on the job.

Product designer hard skills

• User research: Product designers translate user needs into digital journeys and experiences, which requires substantial customer research. They should excel at both secondary research (e.g., analyzing market reports) and primary research (e.g., interviewing users). 

• User-centered design: Designing user-friendly products means prioritizing speed and ease of use while increasing key metrics like views, clicks, or sales conversion rates. For this, designers use tools like hypothesis testing, user journey maps, and user personas. 

• Prototyping: Before launching products, designers create simplified prototypes. This usually involves applying UX principles, building a sketch of the interface and user journey (also called a wireframe), and re-iterating based on analytics and feedback.

• Technical skills: Candidates should be comfortable using common product design software including Sketch, Adobe XD, InVision, and Marvel. Some roles may require experience with database querying or niche software (e.g., SolidWorks for industrial product design). 

Product designer soft skills

• Collaboration: Designing foolproof products means working closely with stakeholders, including product owners, developers, and marketers. Designers must listen deeply and pick up important details while clearly communicating requirements and results. 

• Adaptability: No product is perfect in its first iteration. So, designers must execute improvements based on new information, including user feedback, top-level strategy shifts, and competitive pressures.

• Creativity: Product design requires high creativity. Suitable candidates explore innovative ideas and build creative user journeys that give your business a competitive edge.

Where to find skilled product designers

Traditional job boards like LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter give you access to a wide range of candidates. However, these platforms cater to a broader audience, which can dilute the pool of specialized design candidates. While these job boards are a useful starting point, niche platforms and direct networking often yield more targeted results, enabling you to find skilled individuals who meet your requirements.

5 creative ways to find product designer candidates 

Post on designer job boards

Platforms like Design Jobs Board, Designer News, and Coroflot let you post job ads aimed at designers – including product designers. You can also use tech job boards like Dice and Hired, which have large audiences of product design jobseekers.

Tap into design and freelancing communities

Head to portfolio platforms like Behance and Dribbble to select designers whose skills and experience match your job opportunity.

Furthermore, consider hiring a freelance product designer if you’ve given permanent hiring a good shot already. Put them on a trial period with the option of permanent employment if both parties are satisfied. Freelancer websites like Fiverr, Upwork, and Freelancer.com provide access to candidates actively looking for gigs. 

Organize design-centric hackathons

Hackathons are intensive events, usually between one to three days, where teams build new products from scratch and present their results. Successful hackathon participants must demonstrate market and user research, collaboration, idea testing, and pitching skills.

While expensive to organize, hackathons can spotlight candidates with exceptional product design skills who otherwise might not apply to your open roles. 

Host design workshops and bootcamps

Training opportunities, such as design workshops and bootcamps, are particularly useful for finding entry-level product designers. These candidates are usually college grads with relevant degrees, self-taught entrepreneurs, or career-switchers passionate about design. 

Make sure course entry is selective, and find measurable ways to identify top performers during the training.

Attend product and design conferences

Attending a product management or product design conference lets you network with bright individuals who are active in the design market.

So, send your recruiters or hiring managers to big events across the US, like Mind the Product, ProductCon, and User Experience Conference. They should engage as many relevant attendees as possible while paying special attention to speaker or organizer contacts.

How to select the best product designer candidates 

Here are our expert tips for correctly assessing product designer skills at every step of the hiring process.

Use skills assessments

Pre-employment assessments are a quick, unbiased way to screen applicants based on their skills, traits, and abilities. For instance, TestGorilla has a library of 300+ tests, including cognitive, job-related, personality, and culture-add tests. 

Compile a product design assessment using relevant tests – for instance, our collection includes communication, product management, UX/UI design, market research, and software-specific tests. 

These can help you identify top applicants more quickly, leading to more productive interviews and better-fit employees.

Ask for portfolios

A portfolio of previous designs – such as webpages and mobile interfaces – helps you ascertain applicants’ skill levels. It also serves as a starting point for interview questions. For example, you could ask how candidates approached a past design and what challenges they encountered. 

Some candidates, however, won’t have portfolios, especially when transitioning from other career paths. Here, you can use practical exercises to test their design skills.

Have a structured interview process

Structured interviews involve asking standardized questions and ranking candidates according to predetermined role-related criteria. Test both hard and soft skills, from design knowledge and logical thinking to communication and openness to feedback. 

For instance, you can ask UX-related interview questions such as “Tell me about three UX design methods you’ve used at work” and look out for answers containing specific methods.

Recommend reading: 26 product designer interview questions and answers

Use practical case studies

During interview case studies, you provide a scenario and ask candidates to work toward a solution step by step. They’re similar to scenario-based questions, but they’re more in-depth and involve practical exercises. 

Case studies are essential to testing a product designer’s practical skills using real-world challenges. You could, for instance, ask them to design the interface of a takeaway mobile app that’s looking to get its first 1,000 users.

Look out for key skills, including prototyping and user-centered design. In addition, assess whether candidates ask relevant follow-up questions and clearly communicate their design steps.

Common mistakes when hiring a product designer

Here are some of the common hiring mistakes for the product designer role:

Preferring candidates with formal design qualifications

Many talented product designers develop their skills on the job or through similar roles like product management or graphic design. You risk missing out on suitable candidates if you target individuals with design-related degrees or certificates exclusively. Instead, consider using pre-employment assessments to test applicants’ skill sets.

Prioritizing hard skills over soft skills – or vice versa

Product design requires a balance of soft and hard skills. Overemphasizing technical skills may result in hiring a designer who’s a poor communicator with little creativity. Conversely, prioritizing soft skills could lead to poor prototyping performance or low numerical ability. 

So, give these skills equal attention in your job description and interview process.

Being vague about role responsibilities

Aim to describe the required tasks in detail, including the product type, target audience, tools and processes, and current design challenges. Without doing this in your product designer job description and during interviews, you risk attracting unsuitable candidates who don’t have the experience to use certain tools or work with a particular design or user base.   

Attract and retain product designers with TestGorilla

Finding the best product designer for your business can be tricky due to the niche skills required and the limitations of popular hiring platforms. To combat these difficulties, use creative ideas like hackathons and bootcamps to source candidates, plus skills assessments and case studies to test skills like prototyping and communication.

Learn more by reading our guides on hiring a UX designer and applying skills-based hiring in your business.

Keen to start your own product designer assessment? Join TestGorilla for free.