Hasta La Ideas

In 2001, Ziba redesigned the Heinz ketchup packaging.

Editor’s note: We interviewed Paul Backett late last year, and since then he has moved on from Ziba. We decided to still include his thoughts in this Getting Hired series, as they reflect more than eight years of working at Ziba, and are generally applicable to interviewing at any design firm.

Ziba, which means “beautiful” in Farsi, was founded 29 years ago by the Iranian Sohrab Vossoughi as an industrial design firm. One of the first consultancies to create an in-house consumer insights and trends group, Ziba prides itself on understanding people first and foremost. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, the company has evolved to offer product, communication, environment and packaging design, plus brand strategy and consumer research. Paul Backett, who until recently led Ziba’s industrial design team, was responsible for assembling, leading and driving the I.D. team to create. Though Backett is no longer at Ziba, his opinions reflect working at the company for over eight years.

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

This is probably pretty common, but we get a lot of applications. What we like to do is split our applications across teams. The principal industrial designer and I will look at all the senior portfolios that come in. Then a few of our senior designers look at all of the junior and intern applications. Every few weeks we get together and ask if there’s anything interesting that’s come though. If there’s something that’s really wonderful, we forward it on to each other and have a look pretty quickly. It really is a team effort. If we see someone that we like, even if we don’t have an opening, we like to talk to that person. One of the important things about finding talent is building relationships. It’s getting to know people and starting a conversation for when the right working opportunity comes along.

We like to talk to candidates over Skype (unless they’re local), because so much of what we do is about having a personality, caring about what you do and being able to talk passionately about your work. And if there are people we are considering for a position, then we absolutely bring them to our “house.” It’s important for us to get to know them, but also for them to get to know us in a lot more detail.

At that point, we also make sure that the whole team meets the person who’s applying for the position. It’s a bit of a rite of passage. Everyone that has a job here has come to visit Ziba for a day-long interview. It can be quite daunting, but I think it’s a great thing to do. A little bit of pressure is sometimes good. It’s very important the whole team meets the candidate. That’s everyone that we have from juniors through seniors, principals, and myself.

What makes good candidates stand out?

I also teach at the University of Oregon, and I’m always giving my students advice on how to get into good design firms. My number one thing is, it’s all about your body of work. I don’t, in a way, care where you’re from, where you studied, or what grades you got. Your work really speaks for you. Having great ideas is just a base; everyone can come up with great ideas. What we love to see in a portfolio is really that you can showcase your skills. We’re a very visually based company and we’re immersed in making as much as possible. So we love to see great sketching and modeling skills. We’re less excited by glossy renderings and CAD work. It’s old-fashioned in a sense, but I love to see the core skills of an industrial designer.

In a portfolio, it’s really important to think about pace. This goes for anyone, not just recent graduates. Don’t take a cookie-cutter approach to sharing your work, like “Here’s my research, here’s my inspiration, here’s my refinement, here’s my solution.” Use different projects to showcase different skills. Some projects might be focused on killer sketching; some might be more about visualization. Process is really important at Ziba. It’s not about the final solution, but how you got there. We love to hear about the challenges that people come across as part of that story. Failures even. Things that pushed you to the next level are key. That’s really what we do here. We’re approaching difficult problems, and we don’t always get it right the first time. We have to go down lots of paths and make difficult decisions along the way.

Ziba did the design and engineering of Wacom’s Cintiq 24HD graphics tablet.

(more…)