Design hiring bottlenecks in one place: portfolio review. A single opening can attract a hundred portfolios, each needing fifteen unhurried minutes to judge fairly, and that work almost always lands on the one design lead who has the least time to spare.
Beautiful work and good product thinking are not the same thing, and a polished case study can hide either. The question that matters is what the constraint was, what got cut, and why, and most portfolios answer none of that on their own.
The other trap is level. Someone excellent at executing inside a mature design system is not automatically the person to build one from nothing, and job titles do not distinguish between them.
We review portfolios properly before anything reaches you, and we look past the visuals at the reasoning. Our shortlist notes say what the candidate actually decided, not just what they shipped.
We also flag level honestly. If the brief is a first design hire who has to set direction, we will not send strong executors who have only ever worked inside someone else’s system, however good the screens look.
Product designers, UX and UI designers, design system and interaction specialists, plus UX researchers and content designers.
We cover both individual contributor and lead tracks, including the first design hire, which is a genuinely different search from adding a designer to an existing team.
A scoping call covering level, team maturity and what the first six months look like, portfolio screening with written notes, then a shortlist of three or four. Permanent placements carry a 90-day replacement guarantee.
Yes, that is most of the value. Every shortlisted portfolio has been reviewed and written up, so your design lead reviews three or four rather than a hundred.
Sometimes, but keep it short and paid if it is substantial. Long unpaid exercises lose senior candidates first, which leaves you choosing from the people who had the most spare time rather than the most ability.
Yes, and we treat it as a distinct search. A first design hire has to set process and direction with no scaffolding, which is a different profile from a designer joining an established team.
Yes. Dedicated researchers are a different market from product designers and we recruit them as such rather than hoping a generalist covers it.
Send us the brief and we will come back with a shortlist inside five working days.