Hasta La Ideas

Philips’s Ambient Experience electrophysiology lab helps patients relax and staff work more efficiently.

This is the third post in our Getting Hired interview series. Yesterday, we talked to the global head of talent at IDEO.

A 100-year-old multinational company, Philips began quite modestly as a Netherlands-based producer of light bulbs. Now based in 126 countries around the world, the firm continues to make products that improve lives but with a much broader scope: shavers, kettles and coffeemakers in its consumer lifestyle division; ultrasound machines, X-ray equipment, patient monitoring devices and defibrillators for the healthcare industry; and everything from household bulbs to office illumination and street lights in the lighting division. Sean Hughes runs the global healthcare team, overseeing 100 designers across seven studios.

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

It starts with a business need. We may see that there’s increased effort needed in R&D, or that new business has come along and design support is needed. Then we’ll start the recruiting process. We usually start locally, so it’s either the direct manager or the hiring manager (one of my designers) who is responsible for posting the vacancy. They would post it on a number of websites, including Philips.com. We also use our internal network to review any other candidates in the pipeline: candidates we saw in previous interviews, or candidates who sent us work we found interesting. We often get people who are sending us their CVs and portfolios speculatively, and we do look through those.

We have to see a portfolio. For me, the easier it is to digest, the better. Ideally, it’s five or six sheets of paper, not a CD-ROM or a website, but something we can pass around and archive easily. Then we’ll make a shortlist based on the portfolio and CV.

Depending on where the candidate is located, we might start a first interview on the telephone or via Skype. If we’re still interested, we’ll fly people to the location to meet the local team and have a face-to-face. They’ll meet with the hiring manager, one or two colleagues and some people from the business. By the time we’ve arrived at that stage, we’re pretty interested in the candidate. We’ve already established the capabilities of the designer, and it’s more about professional fit. Do they share the same approach that we have? Are they a good fit as a human being for our organization and culture?

What makes good candidates stand out?

Fundamentally, we like to see designers have the ability to draw, communicate and edit information. We love to see nice sketches and hand drawings, as well as designers who can tell a compelling story about how their product or communication came into being. We like to see the process—so, how did you arrive at the end result? If you’re making an MR machine, we like to see the directions that you explored, things you researched, a process of design development. Why it made sense from a business as well as a design perspective.

At the end of the day, I’m running a design team that’s part of a business and we want to make great design, but we want to make great business as well. So we need people who have an understanding of how design can work to make the business more successful. Communication is crucial. You have to be able to hold an audience, tell a story verbally and visually, and communicate what is vitally important in a corporate environment.

Sean Hughes, Philips’s chief design officer for healthcare. Right: the Simply Go portable oxygen system

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