With design playing an increasingly important role in product, website, and web development, more and more design teams turn to hire remote workers. The problem here is how do you find and recruit the best talent out there when you sometimes have a 12-hour difference between your time zones?

Companies worldwide are engaged in heavy competition for the most talented people to join their teams remotely to help get their products put together better than their competitors. While more significant, more reputable companies can put together offers that reach the best and brightest designers, particular challenges are encountered when considering their distance and time-zone separation from the companies themselves. But there is a separate category of UX teams – agencies in San Francisco that have figured out a way of finding and recruiting top talent even if they are located on opposite sides of the world.

In this article, we are going to take a look at how San Francisco agencies manage to interview and hire top talent for their teams. By the end of the article, you’ll have a much better understanding of the challenges SF agencies often encounter while looking for remote workers.

 

ux talent hiring

 

Choosing Between Generalists And Specialists

A San Francisco UX design firm needs to make the first decision to determine if they require a generalist or a specialist. Before deciding between the two, it is essential to understand the distinction between them and the pros and cons of hiring a particular position.

A specialist is an employee who has mastered a particular area (sometimes several) by acquiring a deep, granular discipline or set of skills and has improved these acquisitions over many years. In their experience lies the primary advantage of having a UX specialist join your team. They have been honing their skills for a long time and are well suited to assist in short-term projects with clearly defined project outlines and parameters. If your in-house team needs project support in a particular area, hiring the services of a specialist in that area assures an experienced hand in any related matters. On the other hand, while specialists are great go-to’s in their area of knowledge, if the project’s scope were to change, they may not fit well in another part of the process, making their flexibility on the team very minimal.

On the other hand, a generalist is a “jack-of-all-trades” type of team member, adaptable to various aspects of your project, and a helpful utility player in any area that needs help. If a different part of the UX process needs help than the one a generalist initially assists with, their adaptability makes them easy members to transition between various roles. Because they can be moved around to different projects, a generalist is a more beneficial hire for projects with a more loosely defined scope or ones that are not yet formally defined. In situations like those, a generalist offers the UX team a higher level of flexibility. However, what they possess in adaptability tends to be lacking insufficient deep knowledge in each particular area. If a complex aspect of the project or an expert role is called for, a generalist may not be adequately equipped with knowledge and skill in that particular area to assist.

The Skills San Francisco Agencies Consider

The best thing San Fran UX agencies can do when looking to fill a role in a project is to detail the needs they need from the team member they are seeking to add to their UX team. Ironically, most companies tend to take the exact opposite approach. When looking for candidates for the positions, agencies tend to make the details in their descriptions sparse and intentionally vague. They fear that being too detailed and precise will drive away prospective candidates who do not feel they are a good fit, and in doing so, dwindle the pool of potential contenders to a far smaller number.

The drawback of this ambiguous strategy is, of course, that while these UX companies get more applicants, they are far less likely to get many (or any) of those that specifically meet the aspects of the role they are looking to fill. Agencies also overlook the fact that when hiring from such a broad pool, they are inviting those who will be available only to assist remotely. This is a vastly different experience than working with in-house designers. For an in-house team member, it is easy to check in with a team member on-site to get an update on the project’s status, but there is a lot more trust and patience needed to involve a remote assistant in the project.

UX companies also need to consider the level of autonomy that a remote candidate will require. In that regard, the small consultant’s work ethic is comparable in importance to their design skills.

Regardless of the candidate’s station (in-house or remote), there must be a firm understanding on both sides that communication is pivotal, irrespective of the nature of the UX work. The candidate that the UX company considers should be evaluated on how they can communicate their thinking. Otherwise, the company risks hiring someone whose design is scattered, messy, and unclear as to their cognitive ability.

It is also vital that the designer has a deeper understanding of design principles rather than mastering a particular piece of design software, as the latter is in no way a suitable replacement for the former. A candidate must comprehend core design principles and be able to adapt them using most industry-standard tools.

Evaluation Of Remote Designers

Finding a candidate that seems like a good fit is one thing, but assessing whether they can meet the needs of a particular role is a different story. While a UX design portfolio is an impressive starting point, most candidates applying, especially for remote work, need to evaluate their qualifications with some design task or aptitude test to gauge how well they can adapt and handle the workload.

These tests should be presented in such a manner as to reflect the daily design responsibilities. When such a test is applied, its deadlines should be consistent with those expected of a candidate should they be hired for the UX company’s role to accurately test their ability to meet the company’s actual needs and demands.

Onboarding Remote Employees

San Francisco design agencies strive to treat every candidate with respect and courtesy, regardless of whether they seek a consultant on a short-term project via contract work or try to lock down a potential superstar employee.

New remote designers are typically introduced to the rest of their coworkers either by channel or company-wide announcements and in group video calls. Every agency has a set of best practices or documentation with how they onboard new team members. This is essential to communicate to new employees their expectations and outline how they will be working and interacting with their coworkers.

Included in this documentation are:

  • Links to important company resources including internal references, department breakdowns, links to wikis and knowledge base sources, and the company intranet page.
  • The employee handbook formally outlines company policies.
  • Any login credentials to online services.
  • Contact information to all essential company personnel, including heads of every department, project stakeholders, and team leadership positions.

San Francisco companies also outline the expectations of new team members to attend team meetings, which the projects will be presented to for review, who the final product will be delivered to, and who to contact to report any issues or seek assistance from.

The more important and comprehensive the information provided to new employees with the documentation, the smoother the onboarding process. The new employee will be able to reference the documentation for most of their concerns if it is robust enough to be updated with all pertinent information.

Conclusion

San Francisco agencies are always seeking out the top talent to help in their ventures. A lot of that talent, however, is not local. However, the world is a lot closer now, and remote workers can provide invaluable resources to provide assets to fill the companies’ needs. Such hires are quickly becoming the rule instead of the exception. That being the case, it is essential to know the right things to look for and provide incoming candidates to maintain a strong team for a design agency.