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& how our approach to hiring helps companies rethink what it means to be a qualified designer
Before founding poe, two of us (Kayla Gilbert and Megan Weibler) led global talent recruitment efforts at IDEO. A major takeaway from our two-plus decades of experience recruiting world-class designers? That a phenomenal designer may not necessarily identify as one.
In this post, we dive into why ‘design/designer’ can be limiting terms, the many ways to be a designer, and why learning to use a growth mindset when evaluating talent matters—especially for candidates with unconventional journeys to design.
First things first: what is design? ‘Design’ can mean many things depending on one’s exposure and experience. At its core, we believe that design is the practice of using patterns to identify insights gained from curiosity-driven learning to develop services, products, and experiences that make people’s interactions with their environments more natural and complete. This learning happens through a number of activities—research, conversations, observation, and/or other methods—that enable understanding of how people navigate a challenge, and uniquely resolve it to meet their needs. A “designer” uses these learnings to design solutions that meet an end-users needs.
Deliberate decentering and hyper-vigilance to personal biases are critical to the design process. By setting aside their personal experiences and knowledge gained therefrom and consciously making space for others’ perspectives and experiences, designers are able to empathize with and center the needs of people most impacted by the problem they aim to address through design. Ultimately, design is about intentionality, and is inherently human-centered. Intentional design entails centering people’s interactions with a business, product, or service at each point of the problem-solving process.
Though the title ‘designer’ is common in a specific set of industries, people across diverse industries and disciplines often practice the central principles of design without self-identifying as designers.
Why does that matter? As talent consultants that regularly partner with organizations seeking design talent, a major part of our work involves helping hiring managers recognize candidates’ potential to step into roles they may not have previously held and, equally important, empowering candidates to uncover and communicate key stories from their unique journeys that demonstrate mastery of relevant skills and capabilities.
Recognizing the many pathways to design and proactively valuing the nontraditional avenues by which a candidate can develop relevant skill sets breaks limiting assumptions around what makes a designer—which is especially important for IBPOC talent and candidates with nontraditional career journeys whose pathways to design (as a consequence of racism, sexism, ableism, and design elitism, among other systemic factors) may look different than those of typical candidates.
For that reason, poe’s approach to evaluating talent is anchored in growth mindset (ala Carol Dweck) and perspective-taking. By evaluating talent using a growth mindset, we can help mitigate the deleterious impacts of unconscious bias in hiring processes and enable hiring managers to recognize a candidate’s immense potential. Interviewing with a growth mindset opens us to the possibility of teaching aspects of the role with which a qualified candidate may not yet be familiar (but is entirely capable of learning with standard onboarding support). In short, practicing perspective-taking empowers us to understand and value diverse experiences with which we aren’t personally familiar.
By contrast, interviewing with a fixed mindset promotes unicorn hunting: fixating on (typically illusory) candidates that “perfectly” meet all criteria. Because doing so fails to recognize the value of unique experiences and journeys, and how they demonstrate potential (or have skills developed in other roles parallel to the skills needed for the position), searching for unicorns invariably results in hiring people whose experiences are familiar to us (aka “known archetypes”) and the exclusion of candidates—especially IBPOC candidates and individuals with nontraditional journeys. By contrast, when we approach interviewing with a growth mindset, we’re inclined to see the potential for a candidate with an unfamiliar journey to add to an organization by bringing their highly valuable set of skills, contributing something that an organization may not have realized they were missing, or growing into a position over a specific duration with support. This opens the talent pipeline to diverse experiences that positively impact organizations.
Some of the most impactful design practitioners we’ve helped companies hire are those whose resumes were entirely devoid of the title ‘designer’ and whose experiences, absent a growth mindset approach, may have been undervalued. One (anonymized) example of a designer-by-another-name whose unique journey afforded them the skills necessary to step into a design role is “Lily.”
Lily entered into a client company’s hiring process for a designer position with over ten years of experience in schools, nonprofit organizations, and community engagement. Our client was seeking a human-centered designer and Lily, despite having developed skills core to the position, had never held a role with this title. Viewing Lily’s unique career journey through a growth mindset enabled our client to see the many ways her past experiences mapped to the criteria for our client’s human-centered designer role.
With the support of poe. and our tools, our client saw how a candidate who designed a curriculum through a deep understanding of cultural norms and history combined with research demonstrated how the key experience, skills, and capabilities needed for the role were forged in a similar experience.
If they hadn’t practiced growth mindset and perspective-taking during evaluative moments, our client company’s hiring team may not have recognized the value of Lily’s experiences. Mitigating bias when assessing alignment between a candidate’s background and a role’s criteria is a gamechanger: it can make the difference between a candidate accessing a new opportunity and being inequitably precluded from it.
When helping companies evaluate talent, we take the following steps (among others) to mitigate bias and make visible a candidate’s unique pathways to skill development:
We help client companies craft highly tailored job descriptions (“JDs”) that reflect the core responsibilities and qualifications for a role, ensuring that the JD is as inclusive and transparent as possible.
Based on what we learn from client companies during the exploratory/kickoff phase and while developing the JD, we extract the key criteria for the role, ensuring we are clear on and aligned with the reason behind including each piece of criteria. The question steadily underpinning this part of the process is “why”. Each qualification or criterion must be anchored in what a person needs to have learned (or be capable of learning) to successfully step into the role. When aligning with client companies on the key criteria, we make sure to identify those which are reachable (again practicing growth mindset).
We then ensure the key criteria is used throughout the process by placing it into what is traditionally known as a “scorecard.” While we oftentimes don’t use strict quantitative methods in a scorecard, they are a tool to gather feedback from hiring teams in service of debriefing interviews. Using these scorecards when interviewing talent ensures that hiring managers are anchoring on the actual criteria for the role during evaluative moments rather than their own biases and assumptions around what makes someone a “good fit.”
After each round of interviews, we debrief with client companies’ hiring managers. Debriefs are moments where we discuss, as a team, the evidence collected from each interview. Doing so helps us align as a team on the candidate's capabilities as they relate to the criteria, ultimately empowering hiring managers to decide who advances in a process. These debriefs also enable us to highlight where hiring managers may be defaulting to their own biases—and it’s often during debriefs that powerful “a-ha” moments around valuing unique career experiences occur.
Hiring practices commonly involve scanning resumes for similar titles and then making “gut feeling” judgments during evaluative interviews. In our experience, even when there exists a process that is formalized insofar as interview structure and set questions, even the most well-meaning interviewers who are not well-practiced in growth mindset still default to bias. The impact is less equitable and inclusive hiring processes and less diverse workforces. The (mis)use of AI to make hiring decisions only deepens the problem.
Perspective-taking and growth mindset are the most powerful tools an organization can leverage to ensure they’re recognizing and valuing unique career trajectories—in turn increasing access to opportunities for nontraditional and historically undersupported talent.
well-designed, equitable people practices and healthy workplaces can reshape horizons.
If your organization is interested in learning more about poe.’s approach to designing and managing equitable hiring practices, email us at hello@peopleovereverything.com
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