The Importance of Hiring the Right Designer for Your Company

In this two-part blog series, we will be exploring the impact of design on LogoGrab and the importance of hiring a designer for any company. Part One will delve into the world of design, exploring the trials and tribulations of hiring a skilled designer.

I recently spoke with Luca Boschin, the CEO from innovative logo detection company, LogoGrab and a recruiter, Mindaugas Petrutis, who specializes in helping companies hire designers.

Luca, who along with his co-founder Alessandro Prest, hired a designer for LogoGrab with the help of Mindaugas. I asked both of them about the process of hiring based on their individual experiences. Let’s take a look at how an employer and a recruiter view both design and hiring the right designer for any given company.

The importance of design

A company such as LogoGrab that is involved in an advancing industry needs to embed design into its culture. It should ideally act as a symbiotic relationship between the company and the overall design of the brand. I asked Luca about the role of design within a company like LogoGrab:

“There are many ways in which you can interpret design. The more it evolves, the more fundamental it is for our products to evolve along with it. The products act as the customer’s first interaction with the company so design helps when it comes to aligning our customers’ needs to our value propositions. It gives each client the best user experience possible.”

When LogoGrab was starting out, it was just beginning to commercialize its product offering. It needed to first develop its corporate branding, illustrate the product use case clearly, and then convey the value proposition through the company website and sales channels to capture inbound leads. Luca required a designer with a core ability to understand and communicate a sometimes intangible A.I. technology, and apply a broad set of creative skills to design across a range of touch-points, from the marketing funnel to the product UI:

“When we were still developing our core algorithm at the beginning, we focused solely on that. We knew it would be crucial to hire a designer from the commercialization of our product which is why we began to think about the important skillset required for this role.”

Design permeates every aspect of the business, not just in the external branding and other content, such as the website, but also through the relationships that are formed between a company and their customers. Let’s now look at LogoGrab’s process of actually hiring a designer.

Hiring a designer- an employer’s perspective

When hiring a designer for the first time, it’s important to know why you are hiring them. What problems will they solve? What can they offer you? What value will they bring to your business and what value can you bring to them? As long as you answer these questions, your job description will strike a chord with the best designer for you and your company. Luca told me about the process of hiring LogoGrab’s first designer, Wesley Roddy:

“Understanding what we needed from a designer and the value that they would bring was important for us, so it was mostly about education at the beginning stage of the hiring process. We searched for recruiters that specialized in design because a general recruiter wouldn’t be able to provide the same level of expertise and we needed them to fully understand the type of designer we wanted. We wanted to work with a recruiter who could help us to get to know the designer and the benefits they could bring to our company.”

Luca and Alessandro chose Wesley to work for LogoGrab due to his passion and unique ability to provide them with his own knowledge and expertise. Luca was impressed by Wesley from the start:

“His passion was obvious as he was already thinking ahead. We knew we could learn a lot from him because of his previous experience with startups and his many years in the design field and that’s exactly what we were looking for.”

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Hiring a designer- a recruiter’s perspective

Mindaugas Petrutis of SketchLabs assisted Luca and Alessandro with hiring a designer for LogoGrab. I asked him what advice he would give to companies such as LogoGrab who are starting out and are thinking about hiring a designer:

“It’s about presenting the role of the company as honestly as possible and to ensure that you’re not pretending to be someone else. For example, smaller companies often try to act like larger or better funded companies which becomes very obvious to potential employees. No one cares about ping-pong tables if you have an interesting challenge on offer and treat people well. Being honest about your own experiences and challenges will be appealing to the best designers. People want to add value to your company instead of just being another number.”
I also asked Mindaugas about his experience with recruiting Wesley for LogoGrab:

“It was one of my favorite roles, mostly due to Luca and Alessandro’s engagement with the entire process. I suggested that Luca take Wesley out for lunch because it’s important to get to know who you are hiring on a personal level to see how well you can get along with them outside the office environment. In an interview situation, you aren’t going to be your complete self, so getting to know them personally will help you understand if they are a good match, not just for your company and for the job at hand, but for you and your team.”
When hiring anyone, whether they are a designer or not, it’s important to understand that you are actually matching people to people, not just matching skills to a business. Mindaugas explains the process he goes through before introducing a designer to the hiring company:

“I usually meet around ten designers and present the hiring company with five. It’s important that I meet the designers beforehand to get to know who they really are as people in order to know whether or not they will get on with the hiring company’s CEO and the team when they meet. It’s more about understanding their process and how they think when designing and coming up with ideas. It’s also very important to be super clear about what you’ll want this person to do when they join and it needs to be figured out before anyone comes in for an interview. Jared Spool had some really fantastic advice on this recently”.
So now that we have covered how LogoGrab hired a designer, let’s delve into the role they will have in the future of a constantly evolving industry.

Design in the future

With the concept of Machine Diversity in mind, I asked Luca how important he believes design and designers will be for A.I. going forward:

“A.I. and designers are, in a way, completely different as A.I is simple automation, while designers offer a level of creativity. Designers will become more and more crucial as it’s going to be important for us to ask the right questions. Designers asking the right questions, sparking creativity and getting other people to ask the right questions is what’s to come.”
I finally asked Luca how important he believes design is for the future of LogoGrab, particularly when Machine Diversity is at the forefront of its progress:

“It is fundamental. If we want to differentiate ourselves from everyone else, it’s very important; not just in how we look, but in how we solve problems. The only way we can be successful in the future is by working collectively and welcoming diversity, because that’s the only way we can truly ask each other questions that we hadn’t previously thought about. And as a result, we can be creative and differentiate ourselves not just from others, but also from automation.”

Part Two of this blog series will take a look at the role of design at LogoGrab from the point of view of LogoGrab's designer, Wesley. Sign up here to read Part Two.

“When creating great experiences, it's not so much about doing what users expect. Instead, it's about creating a design that clearly meets their needs at the instant they need it.”
- Jared Spool.
This post was originally published on LogoGrab's Blog.

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