Written by Vicki McKay, Senior Manager, Aquent

Today staff are the most important resource to businesses, and this is especially the case for design studios who are relying on the talent and individual expertise of their designer employees. By employing merely an average worker, a studio could lose its competitive edge through a hiring decision.

Once risk management in organisations was judged mainly on physical assets, financial reporting, on-going client relationships etc. Today, management and retention of key people in businesses has become a huge factor. Many business analysts argue that one of the main competitive advantages for organisations is their key people.

Hiring inappropriate staff is a very costly exercise – lost productivity, mistakes, extra training, legal liability, and then re-employing are only a few of the costly issues which need to be faced when you use ineffective hiring practices.

And staff turnover should also be viewed not only from a financial and performance perspective, but also on customer impacts and knowledge migration.

The financial cost of staff turnover – particularly key staff, is enormous. Without any clear audit being taken in our industry, it is difficult to assess the exact cost, however employers in aligned industries have proposed anywhere between 0.5 to 2.5 times the annual salary in question. Inappropriate staff could cost you your business!

So how do you choose good staff? There are several methods to go about this:

• The informal method of finding someone — hiring internally, word of mouth, someone you know through your network or poaching a competitor’s staff.

• A more formal method to go about this involves defining the role, advertising, interviewing, assessing and reference checking. The latter can be performed by the employer directly or a recruitment company who will charge the employer a percentage of the employees’ initial annual salary as the fee.

Ambitious, motivated and innovative designers today are seeking positions that offer them a future – particularly designers who return from working overseas and have become job and succession savvy. These designers in particular are cashed up and ready to wait it out for the best positions. Clever designers today want to know that you are running a viable business, that you have a proper business plan, effective systems and processes, a well considered employee structure, friendly committed creative team, a positive outlook and vision, quality control, and have many varied and satisfied clients.

You have written your business plan, have a vision for your company for the future, written various job briefs, now you must carefully consider the type of person you require for your business and write a clear concise position description. You need to consider the following:

• What is the purpose of this role
• List the main tasks to be performed
• The responsibilities of the position
• Skills required for the role – qualifications, technical ability, specific knowledge required
• Consider previous working experience required
• Who will the new employee be accountable / report to
• Other working relationships
• Communication skills – verbal and written
• Presentation skills
• Organisational, planning abilities, research experience
• What sort of personal attributes are you seeking?
• Consider your company values and culture
• List clients and type of work to be produced

The position description needs to be realistic, along with the remuneration and incentives.

Assess the culture of your company. The “best” people are discerning. They are seeking positions which offer them inviting challenging work with dynamic business savvy design companies with further future opportunities.

There are a variety of opportunities for advertising for creative staff today – online with seek.com.au or mycareer.com.au, newpapers, industry magazines or industry web sites, like AGDA. You will be inundated with inappropriate responses that will require much time and effort to sift through.

Describe your position simply, and realistically state salary expectations. Listing your salary expectations will put the position into perspective for potential candidates, particularly when you state your experience and skills expectations. For example, research from Aquent’s Asia Pacific Salary Monitor indicates that a senior designer could be worth anything from $47K per annum to $80K per annum, depending on the responsibilities of the specific position and which city you are working in.

In your advertisement, it is advisable to ask for a résumé as well as a sample PDF file displaying some folio pieces. This will give you a brief insight to the designer’s creative capablities. Along with these, you should receive a carefully worded letter explaining why the candidate would be suitable for the position advertised. Be sure to read the letters carefully, sometimes they disclose a lot more about the candidate than their resume. And they are also very helpful weeding out those who are totally inappropriate, as you are able to quickly check their true interest in the position, their communication skills, as well as their attention to detail.

After assessing the respondent résumés, whether you do this though a recruitment company or directly, choose 3 – 5 best for interview.

Prepare your INTERVIEW QUESTIONS:

In the past Interview questions were broken down into Procedural and Behavioural based questions.

Procedural or competency based interviewing gives the interviewer previous experiences, education, technical abilities and mainly other learnt skills.

Behavioural based interviewing offers the employer more information about candidates performance in past situations, plus their suitability based on their personality, cultural fit, ambitions and values.

There are many clichéd interview questions you can put forward to candidates at interviews and these will tend to give you prepared responses. Some include:

Tell me about yourself

What motivates you?

Where do you see yourself in 3-4 years time

What are your strengths and weaknesses?

Why are you seeking new employment?

What value can you add to our organisation?

If you are seeking bright intelligent staff, you will need to ask questions which actually relate to the position. Find out about the candidate’s initiative, enthusiasm and ambition. Encourage candidates to do most of the talking.

• Interested candidates will research your business. Ask what they know about your business.
• Ask them to tell you about themselves and present their folio.
• It is important designers are able to articulate their work — relate briefs, present rationales, talk about their successes. Discuss their personal involvement in particular projects from their folio in detail
• Discuss teamwork — listen for collaboration with others. How would this person fit with your team?
• Ask how and by whom they were briefed, written or verbal?
• Discuss processes and systems previously experienced by applicant.
• Discuss production and performance — how long did it take to create jobs, break down into processes.
• Talk about volume of work and deadlines. How do they deal with pressure?
• Discuss the technical skills used in specific folio projects.
• Ask about problems with previous projects and how the problems were resolved.
• Discuss previous successful projects. Describe them.
• Ask about their future aspirations and ambitions, how do they deal with change.
• Discuss what values are important to them.
• Talk about your business, clients, projects and existing team.
• Ask about their outside interests.
• Observe their folio presentation skills — would you like this person presenting to your clients? And check their attention to detail on everything in their folio.

Prepare yourself. Applicant’s possible questions to the employer:

Why has this position become available?

Are there further career opportunities in this company?

What are future company or business plans?

Tell me about the culture of your company.

Do you have a current business plan in place?

Do you have a well considered company staff structure in place?

Can you please tell me more about your existing clients and their future projects.

Are you continuing to prospect for more clients? How are you going about this? If not, why not?

Always try to interview prospective staff — at least twice.

Assessment will depend entirely on each individual employer, your design company and the specific needs at the time. Generally assessment is made on a range of factors which every company gives differing priority or emphasis to: folio, creativity, work ethic, previous experience, skills, personality, passion, ambition, culture fit, technical ability. Set yourself a key performance objective list prior to commencement of all interviews, and allow yourself time to complete this and write a brief report about each candidate and their suitability. When interviewing lots of candidates, it’s easy to confuse them!

Determining whether a candidate is exaggerating their abilities or telling you the truth is often difficult, however the deeper you probe on specific work projects, the more you will hear and be able to ascertain.

Always check references thoroughly. This can be done by speaking directly to each of the offered referees, or by sending them a specific reference check to complete, asking them a variety of questions.

Some companies make a point of commissioning personality tests to ensure the future employee will be the right fit for their team. Myer Briggs is popular although quite expensive. Kolbe is an on-line assessment program — cheap and easy to conduct.

Personality has an enormous bearing on your existing team. Recently we heard of a design studio who employed a senior designer who they felt would lift the quality of their creativity, however the consequences were quite astounding. Almost the entire studio left quite soon after her appointment due to the overbearing nature of this new senior. Certainly things have now resolved themselves, but the initial consequences were extremely costly and created chaos for this studio, the workload and their staff!

And in years gone by, it never ceased to amaze us, the number of creatives who were hired, based on their folio alone — especially in the advertising and marketing areas and with disastrous results. That was in the days when there was lots of money being spent in our industry and awards meant absolutely everything!

There is a certain amount of intuition that comes into play during interviewing and assessment of candidates. Use this innate ability!

If you meet with someone who shows potential, but their folio may limited by briefs, budgets, the style of their previous Creative Director or clients’ guidelines, offer the candidate a project to produce within a deadline. This is not uncommon. Some designers will offer this themselves as an investment in an opportunity for their future and demonstrates initiative. It will give you an opportunity to view the designer’s individual creative approach. Or if they are available, that is, not currently working, put them on freelance for a short while.

Once you have made your decision who to employ, it is important to deploy the following procedures:

• Letter of Offer – written Letter of Offer is essential, particularly for employees accepting a position who are currently employed. It can be in the form of a basic letter to the candidate welcoming them on board, offering them a position within the company, clearly stating date of commencement, and offered salary. Sometimes the position description is also described and comes as the work contract. The Letter of Offer should always be followed with a written response from the potential employee stating acceptance or non-acceptance of the offered position.

• Three month probation period – all positions commence with a probation period which allow both parties – the employer and the employee to assess suitablity for the position. The Probabation Period can be from 1 month to a maximum of three months and the Probationary Period needs to be clearly defined in your Work Contract, and needs also to stipulate that the employees’ position will only continue if the probationary period is “successful”. It is important to review staff at the end of the three month probation period to let them know you are satisfied with their employment to date and set some achievable goals for the next review.

Use the probation period to assess the employee on their performance and general compatibility for your business. Once you have accepted this employee as a staff member, past the three month period, you will be required to follow strict legal guidelines in order to terminate the employee if they are not working out.

• Work Contracts – All staff should be offered a Work Contract which clearly stipulates company policies (such as hours, holidays, sick time, termination and more), accountability, salary, expectations, and a clear position description, stating all responsibilities. Employees must clearly understand what is required of them and how their performance will be assessed. In general most staff respond well to guidelines, clear expectations and performance appraisal.

• Reviews – These should be offered after the first three months and at least annually. They are an opportunity for both parties – the employer and employee to self-assess and review accomplishments over this period. Areas relating to design studios specifically to be discussed are design skills, performance and productivity, successes, hours, salary, responsibilities, presentation skills, teamwork, creative management and computer skills. More general discussion topics which could also be discussed are learning ability, judgement, leadership capacity, adaptability to change, further education and training, negotiating skills, planning and organising, problem solving, attention to detail. More personal characteristics which may require discussion are attitude, initiative, dependability, relationship to team and personal appearance. Other areas which could be discussed are strong points, weaknesses, specific accomplishments. It is important to always be objective, sincere and honest.

A Word of Advice:

Do not offer a position to an applicant straight away or after just one interview. No matter how good they may appear, always sleep on it! Certainly you would not ask someone to marry you after the first date! Although most design studios are short on time, we advise you meet with a candidate as least twice. We have seen too many bad errors of judgement with spontaneous job offers. The first interview should be more formal, followed by one that is much less so, where you can find out a little more about the person and their interests.

Many employers seeking Designers demand very specific previous experiences and skills, therefore discounting potential employees who really could offer a great deal. What one Designer in studio A may learn in 3-4 years, in Studio B they may have learnt in 1-2 years where greater expectations were placed on junior staff members.

Be realistic – do not expect a young designer with a couple of year’s experience to necessarily successfully embrace the responsibilities of someone with much greater experience, especially starting in a new job. We see many situations where seniors have been retrenched only to be replaced by juniors or the less experienced, and employer’s expectations dashed.

If you were to commission a recruitment company to find your suitable Designer, ensure that they can help you with the following: Assist you to prepare your particular position description; research their existing database of candidates; advertise on your behalf through various media; interview selected candidates, and send to you - the employer, only those candidates who are appropriate for the position. After all, your time means money and recruitment companies should select and send to you only those who are appropriate to the brief.

Recruitment agencies that specialise in creative staffing should have a technical creative skills assessment facility to test all appropriate candidates so that you will only be recommended candidates who have the technical ability you require!

As well, they should be able to advise employer and employees alike on appropriate salary expectations, based on previous experience, the type of work produced, opportunities for career advancement. And be sure to choose a recruitment company which offers employers a 110% guarantee on all staff placements!

And why would you not choose a recruitment company to assist you? Why not leave it to those who know how to do recruiting best? Apart from taking you away from your core functions — the clients, the studio, and production of the creative work – the work you do best, in these busy times, few employers can afford the time required to fulfill their staffing recruitment.

Vicki McKay is a Senior Manager in Melbourne for Aquent, (www.aquent.com/mcs), a global firm that specialises in staffing solutions for the creative, marketing and communications industries. Through a network of nearly seventy offices in sixteen countries, Aquent services in the areas of print and Web design and production; advertising and media, marketing, public relations and business support. Vicki also speaks and trains on career and recruitment issues and can be contacted on (03) 9696 3222 or e-mailed via vmckay@aquent.com