Getting Hired: To Work at Smart Design, Be Organized, Show Your Passion—and Check Out These Four Illustrations
Posted in: Getting Hired
Editor’s note: For our ongoing Getting Hired series, we asked design firms to send us a few images of their recent work—but Smart Design volunteered to instead create a series of illustrations about its hiring process, which you’ll find here.
Smart Design is about people. This mantra applies as equally to the end user of a vegetable peeler as to one of the company’s 120 employees. Sarah Szeflinski, Smart’s “HR team of one,” makes sure of that by keeping in touch with everyone who comes through the front door, including the firm’s former employees. Since 1980, Smart Design has cultivated a focused, human-centered approach, most evident in its 20-year relationship with OXO, a partnership that has resulted in more than 750 products that exemplify the principles of universal design. Szeflinski divides her time between support and HR for the company’s three studios, in New York, San Francisco and Barcelona.
Can you walk us through your process for hiring a new designer?
Logistically, recruiting is centralized through me. I’ll write and post job ads to Twitter, LinkedIn, Core77, et cetera. The designers, engineers and researchers then submit their portfolios online. I’ll review everything and do a gut check on whether its Smart quality, and make sure they meet all the minimum qualifications. I’ll then forward those candidates’ materials to the hiring manager to make sure there is interest.
If candidates are local, we generally bring them on-site to meet with a small group of people. If they’re not local, we’ll usually do a Skype interview first. If that first interview goes well, we’ll do an on-site follow-up to meet with a more multidisciplinary team, and they’ll get a tour of the studio.
For us, even interviewing is a collaborative process. We like to do small group interviews for a couple of reasons. Everyone hears the candidate answer at the same time, which is a similar approach to how we do design research. Everybody in the interview might hear or interpret the candidate’s response a little bit differently, and all of those interpretations are helpful in making our final decision. We also want to give the candidates exposure to a lot of different “Smarties,” to really give them a taste of the people and the disciplines that they would work with. It also helps us determine their comfort level in group settings with different backgrounds. We need to make sure that designers can speak to non-designers.
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