It can be hard to hire for something that you don’t actually do. It can be hard to hire for something that you DO actually do. As a designer with over 16 years experience, I am amazed at how in demand designers are now, especially when it comes to technology projects. I’m also sad at how terrible most job descriptions I read are. So I wanted to help.
This is a worksheet, you could print it out if you wanted and if there is demand I’ll even make a pretty PDF version, to help you gather your thoughts about what it is you’re really hiring for. The amazing team over at UIE wrote a great summary of their findings with recommendations on how to design a better job description. I highly recommend you read it, but sometimes we don’t have time to read an article to jog our memory. That’s where this worksheet comes in. Based on UIE’s findings, and my experience in research design, I’ve put together a list of questions to ask yourself (or your team if you really want to do this well) and answer honestly before you pump out that job description asking for “4+ years of design experience” and “HTML/CSS/JS are a big plus!” Those things might still be in the final job description, but now you’ll know why. More importantly, people like me who want to find awesome design teams to work with will also know why. And we’ll be excited to talk to you. And we’ll all dance a happy jig under a rainbow…or something.
Anyone and everyone. I’m putting this out in the world for free, although UIE owns all the rights to their content. The worksheet itself is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. That means you can use it however you want, you just have to point back to this Github repo as the source of the original.
This is by no means perfect. This is my first stab at this after having a couple conversations today and doing a little bit of research. If you have changes or updates, please contribute. Together we can make the best job description worksheet that has ever existed in the history of the universe!