How to find a designer without having to sort through 100,500 responses from artists and those who “loved to draw as children”
We at Ryba make a lot of content, and we often have to look for specialists. Usually, there are a lot of responses, but finding good ones is a difficult task. Especially in design. For example, we recently posted a vacancy in 15 Telegram channels, and out of 70 responses, only 10 were normal. We talk about the intricacies of selection and share advice.
How to Prepare for a Search for a Specialist
Figure out what kind of designer you need. Employers may be confused by design areas and not understand which specialist can do what and is responsible for what. To avoid wasting time sorting through unsuitable responses, focus on the main specializations:
Graphic designer. Makes logos, infographics, collages and identities. Can package your social networks, design advertising creative or presentation, develop a corporate style and assemble any picture from ready-made illustrations.
Programs that a designer may own: Figma, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, CorelDRAW, Adobe InDesign, Affinity.
Web designer. Develops layouts for web pages. Comes up with a design and thinks through the mechanics of elements for a landing page, website, online store or blog.
Programs that a designer may own: Tilda, WordPress, Figma, Adobe Photoshop.
Illustrator. Draws illustrations from scratch – for example, for covers and banners, creates infographics and other visuals that the client may need.
Programs that an illustrator may own: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Cinema 4D.
Motion designer. Animates illustrations and infographics. Will make gifs and moving screensavers for videos, will design video infographics, advertising and educational videos.
Programs that a designer may own: Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Maya, Cinema 4D, Adobe Illustrator, Autodesk 3ds Max, Blender.
3D designer. Transforms static images into three-dimensional ones. Can make any element three-dimensional: product photos, illustrations, logos, graphs and diagrams.
Programs that a designer may own: Blender, SketchUp, Autodesk 3ds Max, Adobe After Effects, Nomad, Cinema 4D, Maya.
Make a to-do list. If you formulate the designer's tasks incorrectly, the vacancy will contain a lot of unnecessary work. For example, in the description of the illustrator's tasks, there will be development of landing pages, and for a web designer – animation. This will confuse and scare off normal candidates.
If you have a lot of visual tasks — you need to make landing pages, draw covers for articles, animate intros for videos — be prepared to hire several different specialists at once. You can find a jack of all trades, but the quality of work will be low. And so that candidates immediately understand whether they can handle the job or not, add to the vacancy only what is included in the responsibilities of a specific specialist.
Set the payment amount. It's good when a company already has a designer on staff and the manager understands how much to pay employees. Especially if it's a permanent job with a fixed salary. But it often happens that a designer is needed only for a one-time task or individual projects that cost differently. For example, a landing page can cost 20,000 and 60,000 rubles. Then it won't be possible to indicate the exact salary in the vacancy.
To give the candidate at least a rough idea of what income they can expect, include a range in the vacancy and explain why you can't set a fixed salary. Better yet, show examples of your work and tell us how much you can pay for such tasks. For example, we paid the designer 40,000 rubles for the landing page for the beer competition, and 20,000 rubles for the landing page for the Figma course.
Approximate prices for design tasks
Write a job posting. To ensure that the right candidates respond to your vacancy, please include in the text: type of employment – full-time or part-time, tasks that will need to be performed, skills that will be required, and approximate salary level.
Specify in the vacancy that you need a commercial designer. Otherwise, you will waste a lot of time on irrelevant responses from book, game, and even landscape designers. They may be good at design, but not understand how to make a cover for an article to hit the target audience's pain points.
This is what the job posting text might look like:
Create a feedback form. If you are going to look for designers on Telegram, fill out a profile in Google Docs and add a link to the job posting, otherwise your personal messages will be flooded.
To create a form, you can use the Google Forms service. Select the “Contact Information” template, fill it out, and customize it. Link the form to a Google spreadsheet so that all responses are automatically entered there.
It is important that the questionnaire corresponds to a specific vacancy and is convenient for candidates. Adding complex questions like “attach your photos to the profile and full face” is definitely not worth it.
Prepare a refusal letter. It happens that a candidate sends a response and does not receive any feedback – it becomes offensive, and you do not want to cooperate with such a company anymore. But it is better to part ways on good terms: in the future, the candidate's skills may improve or he will be suitable for another task.
To be treated loyally, send a letter of rejection to all candidates who did not pass the selection. It is better to prepare a template in advance so that when you are looking for employees, this process does not take much time. Write that you have reviewed the resume and for now have to reject the candidate, but perhaps in the future there will be vacancies for which he is suitable.
For example, a rejection letter might look like this: “Hello! This is Alexey Rozhkov, the founder of the Ryba editorial team. Most likely, we never got a chance to work together. But I don't want to disappear from the radar, so I suggest staying in touch. We continue to publish vacancies for authors, editors, and designers. Sometimes we send announcements of new courses – free and paid. We advise you to try your luck next time. Thank you for writing to us!”
Where to find a good designer
Social networks
To find a designer on social networks, you can post a vacancy in specialized communities. For example, if you type the query “designer job” into the VKontakte search, communities with vacancies in design will appear: Work for designers: vacancies and orders, Design Hunters, LOOKING FOR A DESIGNER. To publish a post, you need to contact the admins. There is a large audience in social networks, but we usually use other channels for searching – about them below.
If you have your own groups in social networks with a loyal audience, you can also throw a post with a vacancy there. For example, we duplicate the text of the vacancy from Telegram to our community in VKontakte. This does not take much time and effort, but it increases the chances of finding an employee among the audience that knows us and wants to work with us.
Telegram
Messenger is a convenient place to search for designers through professional chats and channels. Here are our top channels for placement:
Tildosha Chat. You can find web designers who work with Tilda and specialists in other areas of design. Posting is free, and you need to post a vacancy directly in the chat.
Tilda Chat & Community. Chat from the community “Zerocoder”, where designers and developers live. Posting is free.
UX UI design — vacancies and resumes. You can post design-related vacancies here for free. The main thing is to follow the design requirements and not post the same vacancy more than once a week.
WORK ON. You need to publish a post with a vacancy through a bot – one post in the design niche costs 800 rubles. You can find a specialist for a one-time job or full-time.
LOOKING FOR A DESIGNER. Channel for free posting of vacancies for designers. To throw a post, you need to use bot.
To post a vacancy in a channel or chat, write the text and contact the admin. In some groups you will have to pay for posting, and in others you will have to format the text according to the template. Don't forget to attach a feedback form to the vacancy so that responses are not sent to you in a personal message.
Sites and services
Standard job boards are suitable for searching for designers, for example Headhunter or SuperJob. You can post vacancies there or search for candidates yourself in the catalog. To find the right specialist faster, use filters. And to promote a vacancy, additional services are available: publications on social networks, SMS mailings, and targeted advertising.
More often than not, designers are sought not on job posting sites, but on specialized platforms: Dribbble, Behance, and Tilda.
Dribbble. The sitewhere designers create personal pages with screenshots of their work and information about themselves: experience, skills, links to portfolios.
To find a specialist, you need to enter a keyword in the search bar, for example, “Tilda”. The results will include designers who have indicated in their skills that they can work with Tilda, or have added the Tilda tag to their work.
Behance. The sitewhere designers display their work and describe their experience and skills in detail. Each profile page displays the number of views, ratings, subscribers and subscriptions.
To find a designer, you need to use the search. For example, if you enter the query “Figma”, all specialists who indicated in the profile description that they work in this program will come out.
Tilda. Service to create websites where you can search for designers in two ways.
The first way is to send an application in Tilda Experts. To do this, click on the “Find a designer” button, fill out the form and confirm the application. All responses will be sent to the specified email.
The second way is selection #madeontilda. The best works made on the platform are collected here. Landings can be sorted by topics: “Business”, “Event”, “Portfolio”, “Education”, “Other”.
Foreign selections of the best sites are also used to search for employees: Godly, Pixelfika, Minimal Gallery, SiiimpleThey host portfolios from different countries, but Russian-speaking designers are also found there.
How to select candidates
We tell you how we do this in Ryba.
1. Check responses and form data. We filter it out right away candidates who don't read the job description carefully. For example, they respond to a position that requires experience, but they have just completed an online school course.
Then we compare candidates in a table, into which data is automatically entered from a Google form. Our table has 10 columns: response date, comment, name, position, experience and projects, three best works, link to portfolio, price list, link to Telegram and additional information from the applicant.
2. Evaluate the portfolio. We focus on the tasks that the designer will have to perform. For example, if you need to make landing pages, and the candidate's portfolio contains only creatives from social networks, he will not be suitable. It is good when the portfolio contains cases in the business areas we work with: banks, online schools, digital platforms.
It is important that the works in the portfolio are:
understandable – the site clearly shows where to look, all the buttons are in place, there is no unnecessary noise, and the logic is clear;
diverse – the designer finds different solutions for projects, rather than doing everything as if from a carbon copy;
relevant tasks – creative, if unusual projects are planned and new solutions are needed, and standard, if many similar tasks need to be completed and efficiency and the ability to work according to guides and instructions are important.
We also appreciate it when a designer provides an explanation for each job, what task he faced and what solution he found. This makes it easier to assess the amount of work that was done and the candidate's skills.
3. Take skills into account. In terms of hard skills, we look at what programs the candidate can work in and what additional skills they have. For example, if a motion designer can create 3D models, this will be an advantage over other candidates. To assess soft skills, we ask them to complete a test task – we evaluate how the designer reacts to edits, defends their ideas and explains project decisions.
4. Please complete the test. If we like the candidate's portfolio, we offer him to do a paid test. Usually, this is a real editorial project – a landing page for a competition or illustrations for merch. For example, the landing page for a beer competition was made for us by a designer, whom we then invited to work on other projects, because the site turned out to be very cool and creative.
While the designer is working on a test project, we watch how he behaves in his work:
tries to understand the goals of the project, asks clarifying questions, or simply does something without thinking;
speaks honestly about problems or keeps silent and ultimately brings something other than what we asked for;
meets deadlines or comes with work 2-3 days after the deadline;
tries to answer questions on Telegram for several hours or plays the silent game for days;
communicates positively and simply or tries to be smart and stifle.
If you give candidates a test, make it short and paid. A great designer is unlikely to agree to free work just so you can evaluate their level.
Checklist: Which candidates are best to eliminate immediately
1. They send bad feedback. It happens that a cool specialist cannot tell about himself coherently or simply does not read the vacancy carefully and responds to a position that does not suit him. For example, when we were looking for a layout designer on WordPress, many layout designers from Tilda came.
In such cases, the decision is up to the employer – they can try to extract the necessary information from the candidate, or it will be easier to refuse him outright.
2. Place your portfolio on Disk (Google or Yandex). When a candidate sends a portfolio posted on Disk, it does not characterize him as a specialist. A designer must think through the user's path on the site and be able to manage attention. If he has not tried to make his portfolio convenient, then you should not expect good results from him in work either.
3. Only academic work is included in the portfolio. If the portfolio contains only academic work, then the applicant is most likely a beginner. It is important to consider that he was assisted by curators. Usually, on such sites, at the bottom, they write that the work was completed as part of a course. To understand the real level of the candidate, you can ask him to send commercial projects or offer him to complete a test.
4. They don't take their work seriously. Some candidates immediately turn you off: they take a long time to respond to messages, act smart, don’t ask questions, and miss deadlines for test tasks.
If you don't want to waste your nerves and time, it's better not to cooperate with such specialists. No matter how cool the designer is, if he doesn't deliver the work on time, you can lose money and the trust of clients. It's better to hire a specialist with average work, but responsible and pleasant to communicate with.
Conclusions
To find a good designer, you need to prepare: decide on responsibilities and payment, write a job posting, create a response form and a rejection letter.
When searching for candidates, write only relevant responsibilities in the vacancies, indicate at least an approximate salary range, use forms to collect responses.
You can search for designers on different platforms: social networks, Telegram and special services. The main thing is to understand exactly what kind of work the designer will do.
When selecting candidates, you need to look at the response, portfolio, and test. If several designers meet all the parameters, it is better to choose the one with higher soft skills – he calmly reacts to edits, knows how to work in a team, and meets deadlines.
Try to avoid candidates who send bad responses, post portfolios on Disks, show only academic work and do not take their responsibilities seriously.
