Hasta La Ideas

IDEO is very likely the best known and most respected design consultancy on earth. And while hundreds of thousands of words have been penned in attempts to sort out how they got there, we’re putting our money on a simple explanation: they hire astonishing talent.

You can argue about process and brand identity and consumer focus if you like, but a few moments discussion with pretty much any IDEO employee conveys a sense that they are the real reason; that together they comprise a sort of supergroup, radiating competence, skill, enthusiasm and thoughtfulness, and that none of those other strategies would be worth a damn without such talent available to implement them.

Finding and attracting such professionals is an incredibly difficult job, but keeping them engaged and productive even more so. As IDEO’s Head of Talent and Organization, John Foster is responsible for both tasks. We’ve been fortunate enough to secure his presence on the discussion panel at next month’s Creative Employment Confab in San Francisco, and to get a few preliminary minutes of his time to ask some basic creative hiring questions. Whether you’re an employer or aspiring designer, this is worth reading.

1. IDEO’s gained a reputation for putting together extremely diversified teams to solve problems that might otherwise have been handled by a monolithic group: just designers, say, or just engineers or researchers. What sorts of cues do you look for in an applicant’s history or character that indicate they’ll be able to thrive in such a multi-disciplinary environment?

The best cues we know come when someone describes his/her work on a past project. We look for references to collaboration with others and how much energy they exhibit and other non-verbal signs that they value working with others and including different perspectives in their work. An extreme case we would avoid, even if the work examples were compelling, is someone who keeps using the phrase, “I did this… I did that…” and is proud of overcoming the others surrounding the situation. In reality, it’s a lot more subtle, but pretty clear when someone is inclined to work in a collaborative setting versus a more individual mode. “I like to get away by myself so I can focus and get in the zone” might be a caution flag for us to explore.

No single comment or phrase would be an issue, it’s the whole demeanor of a person that we consider. We often do group interviews and explore real client situations together and see how well a person plays along.

2. Your position is a bit different from the typical HR or recruiter job, in that you also put a lot of effort into keeping recent hires engaged and productive. Why is this post-hire period so important? And how exactly do you keep them engaged?

We see coming to IDEO as a journey…it starts long before a hiring decision or an offer and really never ends. IDEO is not structured like most business or creative organizations. There are formal structures, but they are more like eBay’s market environment than a typical company structure. It’s hard to understand (and takes quite a while) if you don’t have somebody to show you what’s going on. So we are constantly working on new ways to help people understand how we work and how to succeed.

We ran a design project on IDEO to deepen our own insights about ourselves and came up with “Five Keys to IDEO.” These keys are now built into our position advertisements, interview process, and a structured on-boarding process. After the initial “arrival” type orientation, we have a dedicated coach help each new person establish a success plan and we meet them to check in at 30-60-90 day intervals to see how it’s going. The plan includes helping them “tell their story” to IDEO, establish a list of people to meet and connect with on work interests, and get hooked up with some client work projects right away.

3. You’ve mentioned that some of IDEO’s best talent are people who’ve been in contact for months or even years before the subject of employment was broached. Where do these relationships form, typically? And are they cultivated with hiring in mind, or simply happy accidents?

We have designers actively participating in all sorts of activities outside of IDEO from teaching classes to speaking at conferences, to working on pro-bono design challenges. We meet lots of cool people along the way and are pretty open about “keeping in touch” for potential or future work with/at IDEO. Sometimes we “test drive” a relationship by having a person do contract work for awhile. We do internships, host dozens of student groups and company tours. We think we need to be as open as possible so we can meet the right people and get to know them over time. That takes a lot of pressure off the interview process itself and helps us get a long term view of a person.

Foster, along with directors and recruiters from LinkedIn, 24 Seven and Aquent, will form the core of the San Francisco Confab, a day-long informational and networking event for designers, creative directors and recruiters from the product, media, branding and interaction design fields. Check out the Confab page for details and registration info.

Coroflot’s Creative Employment Confab
Wednesday, October 21, 2pm – 6pm (workshops: 10am – noon)
The Autodesk Gallery
One Market Street, San Francisco, CA

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Hey CDs and senior designers — how many interviews did you conduct last year? Five? Ten? How about 450?

Kate Gilman’s job at creative staffing agency 24 Seven, Inc. has her scrutinizing graphic and interactive designers, marketers, design directors, and a slew of other creative professionals at the rate of two per day on average. Coupled with her own design background (she holds a Graphic Design degree from RISD), this makes her exceptionally qualified to explain what does and doesn’t work in creative hiring. As the first of our four panelists at the upcoming San Francisco Coroflot Creative Confab, we posed Kate a pair of questions on the topic recently Here’s what she said:

In the months since the economic downturn, how much of shift have you actually seen in the creative hiring patterns of your clients?

I noticed the downturn start in the fall of 08, and everyone was on a freeze until January 09. Little did we know what we were in for…the beginning of the year was not good for recruiting in the advertising industry, to say the least. The market was saturated with top talent, funds were frozen, and jobs just weren’t available. Lucky to have a job, my role at work became much more about consoling and advising people how to get through this, rather than fielding calls from my clients.

But a few months into it, marketing and advertising executives started realizing that they couldn’t keep churning out the same marketing content: billboard designs, websites, catalogs, advertisements, direct mail, etc. had to be updated. So we’ve seen a rise in hiring since then, though it’s definitely shifted towards freelance and temporary work, with direct-hire positions only trickling through. Budgets seem to get approved one project at a time, and people are hesitant to commit long-term. Designers have shifted too, and those who were only considering full-time jobs previously have widened their search.

Your job has you interviewing an enormous number of designers, ranging from seasoned directors to kids fresh out of school. Underneath the answers they give to your questions, is there any kind of underlying tone or attitude you’re looking for?

That’s a simple answer: I am always looking for the basics — eye contact, enthusiasm, and applicable experience — yet they remain elusive in the majority of interviews. It’s not easy to fake those qualities, and you cannot get a job without all of them.

You’d be surprised at the number of people who show up to interviews late, don’t know what position they are interviewing for, forget their portfolio, fail to bring a copy of their resume, keep their cell phone on, sunglasses on their head, etc. If I am interviewing someone who is qualified for the job that conforms to the basic rules of interview conduct, they are truly in the 1% range. Candidate interviews conduct themselves!

Gilman, along with directors and recruiters from IDEO, LinkedIn and Aquent, will form the core of the San Francisco Confab, a day-long informational and networking event for designers, creative directors and recruiters from the product, media, branding and interaction design fields. Check out the Confab page for details and registration info.

Coroflot’s Creative Employment Confab
Wednesday, October 21, 2pm – 6pm (workshops: 10am – noon)
The Autodesk Gallery
One Market Street, San Francisco, CA

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We’ve got a post-script from last week’s Designers Accord Town Hall Meeting at BOLTgroup in Charlotte, North Carolina. Thanks to Karen Smith for her reflections and photographs.

How do you entice a crowd of designers to attend yet another meeting straight after work?

Offer rich content on sustainable design…and free wine.

BOLTgroup hosted the Designer’s Accord Town Hall in Charlotte, NC, the first such event in the Southeast. The Town Hall created a forum for sharing sustainable design practices and was attended by over fifty designers. The Designers Accord is a global coalition of designers, educators, and corporate leaders, working together to create positive environmental and social impact.

Designers from the Charlotte area sipped on beverages in corn-based plastic cups, and ate off plates made from plant-based renewable materials. Industrial designers, graphics designers, architects and interior designers made connections with like-minded colleges committed to sustainability in their practices. Everyone was enjoying the initial “meet and greet” so much it was hard to start the presentations. An emergency run to the store for more wine reminded us how designers love their libation! After an extra 20 minutes of consumption and a tapping of the microphone from our MC, Monty Montague, the crowd settled in.

While brief technical difficulties got the presentations off to a rocky start (momentary microphone reverberations sounded oddly like a crackling radio station) the first presentation finally succeeded by way of a web link with Valerie Casey from San Francisco. Valerie, founder of The Designers Accord, gave us a history of how the Designers Accord came to be and reviewed some of the guidelines: 1. declare participation, 2. educate teams, 3. measure your footprint (be conscious of resources), 4. dialogue – talk to each client, 5. engage/experiment/collaborate – all design starts to tackle issues.

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One of the things I really like about industrial design is that the breadth of the field allows an ID’er to attend a wide range of events, where your peers either wear funky eyeglasses (downtown gallery events) or Coke-bottle spectacles (manufacturing technology geekfests).

One of the events that clearly falls in the latter category is Germany’s FAKUMA trade fair for plastics processing and injection molding, a veritable “Mecca of the European plastics industry.” Attendees won’t be throwing back multicolored martinis; instead they’ll peruse “Theme parks [addressing] energy efficiency through the use of electrically powered injection moulding machines” and check out over 1,700 exhibitors from 35 countries.

Given the current economic climate, FAKUMA sees itself as particularly relevant this year, asserting that “the markets will only be able to regenerate themselves quickly on the basis of new, resource-saving and energy-efficient products.”

Click here for more info.

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A few days ago, Niti Bhan wrote a thought provoking post on Core77 on whether Helsinki should receive the World Design Capital 2012 title.

Niti expressed some scepticism that such a title would provide much added value. Yet, the biennial designation of a World Design Capital (WDC) is not given to cities that are already publicly seen as design centres (she mentions San Francisco and Milan), but instead to cities that use design (and design thinking) as a strategic tool in their urban transformation.

Turin, Italy held the zero edition of the event last year (see my Core77 interview with Turin WDC director Paolo Zini on this site). It grasped the opportunity with both hands, organised a series of cutting edge events, and the city has been able to reposition itself internationally thanks to the global attention those generated.

In 2010 the title will go to Seoul, South Korea, and the organisers are using design to rethink the very make-up of its urban fabric, and strive to promote Seoul as a creative powerhouse in the region.

The 2012 host city has not been designated yet: the choice is now between Eindhoven and Helsinki.

Both cities are actively and strategically engaged in re-positioning their urban futures. In fact, they are much more engaged in these matters than Milan or San Francisco are.

It is therefore my hope that both Eindhoven and Helsinki will eventually become World Design Capitals – they can both use some boost and will use it well.

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