We recently hired more “junior/mid-level” designers for a senior position because they had better work and better communication skills than self-described “senior” designers.

I want to share this because it often feels like the discussion around jobs on this sub is squarely focused on resume optimization and people with +10 years of experience being puzzled as to why they can’t find a job. Here’s a perspective from the hiring side.

We are not hiring anymore. Please DO NOT DM me asking to review your portfolio or for the job link. These positions have been filled.

For context, I’m a senior designer at a very small branding studio in NYC. By very small, I mean four full time employees, including me.

Four months ago, we created a job posting for a senior designer. We received 200ish applicants, and interviewed about 11 people. We looked at their portfolios to categorize them into “interview” and “reject” categories. I’m so happy it’s over because so many of these portfolios were utter shit. We didn’t really look too heavily at their resumes. People embellish them and it’s hard to get a clear idea of a person’s experience and personality without actually talking to them. To us, resumes aren’t important.

Then, we started interviewing people. Some portfolios had a lot of individuality to them and some were more template-like. It didn’t matter. All we cared about was their work. If we liked the work, we interviewed them to see if we liked the person behind the work, too.

We ended up sending offers to three people because our workload has picked up substantially in that amount of time. These designers were much more junior/mid-level than we had originally intended, but they understood how branding is more than just slapping logos on various applications and they had much better work than some of the senior-level people we talked to. Their designs had intention and their brand work was built off of a brand strategy. You could tell from their work that they had a really strong foundation to build off of. They all had personalities that came through in their interviews, and they could clearly articulate their thought process and what the client goals/restrictions were for the project. They weren’t perfect interviews, but they left us excited to see what they could bring to the team.

The people we didn’t offer a job to were either: terrible communicators who couldn’t clearly explain their projects without rambling, overqualified for the role by many many years; perfectly capable but they only had experience working in Affinity, or were pretty good designers but lacked the refined perspective we were looking for. You would not have known about these things until you actually spoke to the person. Their resumes hid these things.

We hired all three designers. They’re two months in to working here and I’m realizing I have a lot to learn about managing people.

I feel like the sentiment on this subreddit is so fixated on tailoring your resume and portfolio to perfection when much of the decision-making on an applicant is based on their communication skills and just them as a person. A portfolio could be immaculate, but if you don’t interview well then that’s a major problem. We hired people with 3–4 years of experience over people with +9 years because their work and their communication skills were so much better. They had a general sense of openness that many more senior people are closed-off to. They had more skills we could develop like experience with 3D software, illustration, copywriting, and motion design. I know people are curmudgeons about how skillset expectations have changed over the years with companies expecting people to do more and more, but you’re competing against people who can do more. Sink or swim folks.

A ton of the portfolios we threw out were from senior/design director level people whose work was comparable to that of a college grad. There were a few self-described creative directors who had a terrible eye, and we seriously questioned their design decisions. Sometimes, years of experience do not equal a qualified candidate.