what sort of people do you want to work with?

Tags: Conference,  Design
May 20, 2009 by Steven

I love this post from Dante Murphy on… well a lot of things I think. But it’s anchored around a panel discussion of how to hire and develop interaction designers at IXDA earlier this year.

While I went no further than making snarky comments in twitter, Dante actually stood up and asked a question during the session.

Of course, it’s relatively easy, when you work for frog design or IDEO or Adaptive Path (and others) to demand only top-tier talent and turn away those with incomplete credentials, unpolished portfolios, and imperfect instincts about design. But when you’re the hiring manager at an agency without marquee recognition, or at a company looking to build or expand an internal design team, you can’t just roll out the red carpet and wait for the Josh Porter’s to come strolling up.

My question to the panel was this: what level of incompleteness are you willing to accept in a new hire, in order to turn that rookie into an all-star. Skip ahead to the 53:00 mark of the panel and you’ll see why I walked away feeling that the panelists either couldn’t or didn’t want to answer that question…

And the reason I want to post this is that I could hardly agree more with his thinking on this.

At the individual level, the only criteria I demand of every person I hire are passion and intellect. Experience is nice, and a mix of experience is absolutely necessary at the team level, but I would much rather hire a recent grad who has Louis Rosenfeld’s “polar bear book” on her summer reading list than the person who read it ten years ago, has been milling out websites ever since, but doesn’t know who Dan Saffer and Jennifer Tidwell and Barbara Ballard are. I know this is true because I’ve done this time and again.

The results have been quite amazing. Smart people who really love their job learn from experienced people at an alarming rate…

He goes on with lots of good points about collaborating and nurturing their talent. Do read this, as it’s full of good reminders (like try not to take over their design, but help them improve). But I wanted to add a little about how I’ve hired people.

Unlike everyone else I’ve worked with as a hiring manager, I am only marginally interested in people who have experience in this specific field. Sometimes, a focus on a specific area of interactive is bad, as people have acquired bad habits. I like, instead, to work with people who have the right core skills, care about the product space and are generally interested in how things work, and how people use stuff.

For me, this is artists and designers. I think I indeed prefer working with graphic and packaging and industrial designers, as they have some sort of a grasp on the real world. This also meshes nicely with the universal design philosophy that I’ve started working out. Design truths are always true, so any good design (or art) background is the same as any other. The differences between media or contexts are smaller than the similarities.

And we’re not alone in this. While a lot of places (see above) seem to insist you have all the technical skills and experience day one, lots of successful places do not. I think I first became aware of it when I heard an interview with some Pixar guys. Partly because they use internal, proprietary tools, they cannot go hire people who know their toolsets. But they also value artists, so that’s what they hire. People with passion and desire and basic skills. They then train them as needed.

And also, they let people wander between jobs. Getting stuck in one job you do well can be a terrible thing. Letting people explore other avenues has led to some of the best work – and happiest workers – I have ever had.

It can take time. One guy I hired years ago never was a really top performer while I still managed him. He’d come from a very boring technical job, and while he kept learning and trying, he never became my go-to guy for anything. Well, I heard just the other week (five years after I hired him on) he is that guy I always hoped for and is a design leader in the current team.

Yes, most folks learn faster, but – unlike many of the panel answers Dante commented on – this sort of thing pleases me a lot and gives me faith in the whole concept of hiring the right people and letting them become really useful producers for you,


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4 Comments »

  1. This is very inspiring. Thanks, Barbara

    Comment by Soo — May 20, 2009 @ 1:35 pm

  2. You’re welcome! But this one, also, is Steven’s. I just commented in Dante’s original blog post.

    Comment by Barbara — May 20, 2009 @ 1:50 pm

  3. Hi Steven,

    Nicely said.

    You noted: “I like, instead, to work with people who have the right core skills, care about the product space and are generally interested in how things work, and how people use stuff.”

    Me too.

    You also noted: “For me, this is artists and designers.”

    For me, this is anyone who knows how to use both sides of their brain (so to speak). Good artists and visual designers do this. So do good musicians. More controversially, so do good software designers, good healers, etc.

    To me, it’s the creativity and empathy that matters — in addition, of course, to the core skills you mention above.

    Comment by Laurie Lamar — May 20, 2009 @ 3:59 pm

  4. Ideally, any arbitrarily trained smart and interesting person would do. In practice, it /does/ save a few years to get people with a visual arts background :)

    Maybe I just never learned how to talk to writers, musicians and doctors, but even landscape planners and architects seem to have the same category of understanding of visual communications, so it’s easy for me to find common ground and build on that to seek a common working language.

    Comment by steven — May 20, 2009 @ 4:03 pm

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