A savvy web designer is the backbone of your website’s beauty and conversions. This person is responsible for your website and the first impression of your product or service. On the shoulders of the web designer falls the entire responsibility for the visual appeal of your website or landing page. This is precisely a third of the business’s success. Well-thought-out website design can play a crucial role in turning potential customers and regular visitors into buyers. After all, in the first place, the user pays attention to the appearance of the service or product visually. Finding a decent web designer for a company is complicated and time-consuming. In this article, we will try to facilitate it, prescribing all the necessary steps to find and hire a web designer to create a beautiful website for your business.
How to Automate the Process of Hiring a Web Designer?
In the spring of 2019, two young Ukrainian entrepreneurs created a startup at their own expense, which helps companies and designers find each other, and quickly and qualitatively implement the necessary design tasks. Today this project is called Awesomic.io.
The Awesomic platform connects companies with designers. The algorithm breaks down the client’s tasks into parameters and selects a specialist for them on the same day. Awesomic clients get access to a community of professional designers capable of performing various tasks. These include logo development, branding, web and product design, presentations, animations, and printed materials.
The startup has already won the Ukrainian Startup Awards in the Bootstrap category, attracted European investors, created a library of UI animations and implemented over 2000 design tasks. Several hundred global companies have become clients of Awesomic. Among them are the Ukrainian application Reface and SilviaTerra – an AI partner of Microsoft, venture capital funds, and international agencies.
Create Competency Profile
You should start by formulating a web designer competency profile. This is your internal document, which will allow you to structure your thoughts and expectations about the candidate and thus improve the quality of your search. Later on, you will use this document when training a web designer. In it, you specify the expected result of the web designer’s work, area of expertise, and functional duties (you describe them at the level of behavior and actions).
Vacancy
The next step is to compose and post a vacancy. The essence of the vacancy is to interest a potential candidate in employment precisely in your company. During the web designer vacancy description, you should mention what you will offer the candidate, the working conditions, and what knowledge and skills you want to see in him. In detail, state what the work will be and what human qualities the candidate should have.
After creating the job vacancy, it is worth posting it on job search resources, preferably in as many places as possible, to enter as many suitable candidates as possible.
Preliminary Interview of the Web Designer Candidate
All candidates are worth a phone interview. The script for the phone call is below.
“Candidate name,” good afternoon. My name is “name,” I’m calling about the web designer position at “Company Name.” Are you comfortable talking right now? Please tell me what kind of job you are looking for. Can you please tell me if you have experience creating a layout on a grid? Do you have experience preparing a structure in layers for design? Do you have any experience with CMS? Rate your technical and aesthetic skills as a web designer on a 10-point scale. Can you argue this assessment? What salary level do you expect?
“Candidate’s name”, thank you for your time. I will send you an email with a short and exciting test assignment. Additional questions are also asked during the phone interview, if necessary, to clarify the candidate’s professional qualities. In case of a positive result of the telephone interview, you should send the test task to the candidate and ask to specify the time needed for its execution (within 15 minutes). The email should praise the candidate (at least because they have already taken the time to your company, sent examples of work, and talked on the phone – this is worthy of praise) and offer to answer some test questions.
Test Assignment
You should give the test assignment following the tasks that the web designer will need to perform. You should not abuse the web designer’s time and assign unpaid commercial tasks (which you can then use in your activity without payment). It is worth giving the task, which obviously will not have a commercial purpose.
Come up with an exciting test that it would want to do, like a quest, which will show the web designer what he will have to work with within your company. With test assignments, you can consider several web designers simultaneously without much time commitment.
Check a web designer’s verbal communication, level of interest, self-organization, and adherence to deadlines. This is what a test assignment for a web designer might look like. “Candidate Name”, good day. The following is a test assignment for the web designer position at “Company Name.”
- Give 3 examples of websites that inspire you. Argue your point of view.
- Check the correctness of the landing page and make edits if necessary.
- Describe potential points of improvement for the page to increase conversions. Link to the website https://ideasoft.io/
To check the attention to detail, it’s worth setting the format of the answer file name. For example:
The answer to the task should be sent in the following format:
“AmV-web_designer_Alex_Green_120622”, where AmV – company name, web_designer – the position you are applying for, Ivan_Ivanov – your first and last name, 120614 – date of file sending (for example, here June 12, 2022).
Processing Test Assignments
You should immediately weed out the blatantly weak web designers when you have received the completed test tasks. You can write a response to them in the following format. “Candidate’s name”, thank you for completing the test assignment. Your current knowledge level is insufficient to continue being considered for this position. We wish you the best of luck in your job search.
You should answer something like this to not-so-weak web designers:
- What in the test performed well
- Point out potential points of improvement
- Ask for specific changes in the design
You can also tell them how they can improve their design skills. It won’t be redundant.
Personal or Group Interview
After the test phase, only a few web designers are left whom you need to invite for a personal interview. A group interview can be organized by inviting several web designers who have successfully completed the test.
Tell them about the company and the vacancy, and make them interested. At this point, you have already checked the practical web design skills. It’s time to go a little deeper into the theory. After that, invite the candidate to ask questions that interest them. Frequently asked questions can say a lot about the interviewer and their interests.
Requesting References and Additional Information
If you have not yet decided, collecting recommendations on the selected finalist web designers makes sense. A telephone interview with at least two or three previous employers is sufficient for this. These must be the web designer’s immediate supervisors. During the conversation, you need to get information about:
- Previous employer’s level of satisfaction with the web designer
- Specific duties and types of work the web designer performed, with a possible evaluation of the web designer for each kind of work
- Web designer’s attitude toward meeting deadlines
- Web designer’s reaction to criticism and comments on the work
- The reason the candidate was terminated
After such communication, you are likely to be able to make the right decision. If the web designer gets rejection, it is a good idea to explain what the lack was to get the job. When asking for references, it might make sense to ask for links to the web designer’s social profiles. Not always, but you can often look at the person from this angle.
Find and Hire a Web Designer in 2022 – Final Points
You should pay special attention to the playlist of the web designer. Music preferences can sometimes be used to determine a person’s character traits. For example, there may be a situation: a young web designer has a musical preference associated with protest or challenge. With a high degree of probability in such a case, you will encounter difficulties making edits and comments on the layouts.