Hasta La Ideas

Designworks USA provided engineering and design expertise for the 2014 U.S. Olympic bobsled

This is the fourth post in our Getting Hired series. Yesterday, we talked to the chief design officer for Philips’s healthcare division.

Built by Charles W. Pelly and Ray Carter in the early 1970s, DesignworksUSA has been a creative consultancy for over 40 years. The firm was acquired by BMW Group in 1995, but its portfolio extends far beyond the automotive industry with projects in consumer electronics, medical equipment and transit—including planes, trains and yachts. Lisa Olivia is responsible for global talent management for the firm’s three studios, in Los Angeles, Munich and Shanghai, which together employ about 130 people. Before joining DesignworksUSA, Olivia was the director of global design recruitment at Nike for 12 years.

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

Generically, we identify a designer we’re interested in either through an advertisement or through networking. Then we would request a resume and a portfolio. The portfolio is obviously very important in the review process because there needs to be a certain talent and skill level evidenced through the work, the sketching and the rendering. And the designer’s previous experience needs to be relative and applicable to our current opening. Sometimes it’s hard to articulate—you see a strong portfolio and you just know.

After reviewing resumes and portfolios, we invite viable candidates in for an interview if they’re local. If they’re not local, we might start with a phone interview or a WebEx conference. If they pass that first test, then they’d come in for interviews with our design directors and some other team members who can meet with them, ask questions and make an assessment of their talent and skills. When designers come on-site here with their portfolios, part of the process is walking us verbally through the portfolio to articulate their design process and their design thinking, and how they came up with solutions to different projects. Then, depending on the situation, they could come back a second or even a third time before we make a selection and extend an offer to the best candidate.

What makes good candidates stand out?

The portfolio is the critical piece in the process. We’re looking for designers who can articulate their process well in their portfolio. It also depends on what kind of designer we’re looking for—we have visual interaction designers, graphic designers, industrial designers, transportation designers, et cetera. In the case of industrial designers, we’re looking for strong sketching and rendering skills, fresh thinking—and it can be a plus if someone can also demonstrate strong 3D skills. Ideally, a portfolio demonstrates a lot of different solutions, so we can see that you can think of different ways of solving a problem.

Because designers don’t always have the chance to walk us through their portfolios, they really need to make sure that their work can speak for itself. They need to think of someone paging through or clicking through on their own. Can someone else follow it? Does it make sense? Is their thought process well articulated?

Lisa Olivia, DesignworksUSA’s global director of collaboration and knowledge management. Right: packaging design for hello, a “seriously friendly” oral care brand

(more…)