Hasta La Ideas

Teague Labs’ 13:30 printable headphones

This is the ninth and final interview in our Getting Hired series. Previously, we talked to LUNAR, IDEO, Philips, BMW Group Designworks USA, Smart Design, frog, Google X and Ziba. Tomorrow, we’ll conclude the series with our list of key strategies for the I.D. job-seeker.

Started by the industrial design pioneer Walter Dorwin Teague in 1926, Teague is not exaggerating when it calls itself “the original design consultancy.” And it continues to innovate today, with offices in Munich and Seattle, a staff of 200 designers and clients like Kodak, Boeing and Microsoft. Alysha Naples, Teague’s interaction design manager, describes the firm’s work as looking five to ten years into the future of technology. For Teague’s designers, it’s not enough to ask what hovercrafts will look like in seven years, but also to anticipate the kinds of problems such technology might create. Naples is in charge of hiring, team-building and staffing projects for her team; when working for clients, she also acts as creative director.

Can you walk us through your process for hiring a new industrial designer?

There are two ways that we do new hires. One is through business planning. At the end of the year, we plan ahead in terms of what we’re going to need to keep doing the kind of work that we want to do. We ask ourselves, “Given the work we did last year, were we regularly short in a particular area?” During that process, we also decide if we want to grow a particular area or introduce a new one. And then the other way we hire is when people leave the company or get promoted into another role, and there is an opening that needs to be filled.

Once we decide we’re going to hire for a new job, we write the job description and turn it over to the recruiting department. Then the job is posted on our website and on all of the usual design places, like Core77. Then I review each application myself and will either reject candidates if they’re not qualified, or put them in a pile of people I’m interested in. From there, I do phone interviews, starting with the applicants who are the best fit or the most interesting. Before I do a phone interview, I ask our recruiters to do a phone screen. They’ll screen for things like your ability to work in U.S. We get a lot of really wonderful and qualified candidates from outside the United States, but we’ve had a hard time with visas; often, if it’s a position we need to fill right away, we can’t move forward if the candidate doesn’t have U.S. work clearance.

Phone interviews are a one-on-one between the candidate and myself. We talk a little bit about Teague, what it’s like to work here, who we are and what we do. Then I ask candidates about their interests and why they’re interested in working here, and I ask them to walk me through a project in their portfolio that they’re most proud of, or that came out closest to how they intended. After that I ask them to tell me about a project—often these aren’t in their portfolio—that did not go how they intended.

If I’m excited about the candidate at this point, the recruiting team will set up a group interview in person, and we’ll fly them out to Seattle if needed. They’ll interview with the entire team, plus a couple other members of the studio that I will pick specifically based on the position. I like to get a balanced set of feedback. Each of the different disciplines in the studio really brings its own lens, so it’s really nice to see someone through all of those.

Alysha Naples, Teague’s interaction design manager

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