Hiring a design guru for your nerdy startup is usually a painful, frightening ordeal.  This person can wield a seriously disturbing amount of power over how things look and feel, and can hold you hostage in the worst way if they’re just plain bad at what they do.  Which, sadly, happens often enough to justify all that fear swirling around the topic.  Plus, they probably buy their socks at hip-kid stores and listen to TV on the Radio.  You’re hiring the guardian of your startup’s brand.  Frightening to say the very least.

Fear not, weary nerdy startup founder.  The elusive startup design guru can be caught.  You’ll just need to hunt wisely.

First thing’s first.  Find yourself some candidates.  The most common issue here is understanding designer hibernation.  Generally, many designers don’t work full time…and have adapted by learning to go into professional hibernation for weeks or months at a time between contracts.  As such, they may not scour job boards, LinkedIn, and CraigsList like proper, godfearing nerds.  So to roust that perfect designer out of hibernation and into your startup, you may have to go hunting.  Don’t neglect LinkedIn and CraigsList, but don’t stop there.  Ask around - startups are a small community, but good startup designers are an even smaller tribe.  They all tend to know each other, and know who the dodgy ones are.

Then comes vetting your wide-eyed intervewees.  Chances are you’ll run across two breeds of designers in your hunt for that perfect design lady or fella - the schooled designer and the unschooled designer.  Neither are better, but each requires unique handling as to ensure you don’t end up with bite marks.  They’re different breeds of the same creature, but the high order bit is the same across the board - hire on aesthetics, not on a resume.  Hire someone that designs stuff you like, not because the school they graduated from sounds classy and vaguely French.

It’s easy to get distrcted by shiny education.  Education and background can be helpful for context, especially as it relates to that person’s pain threshold.  If they survived a top flight design school, they deserve a gold star for surviving that torture chamber.  And, generally, good schools make good soldiers - that survivor of that school (generally) may be better at taking orders and executing on them.  But (again, generally) undergraduate degrees exist to give wide-eyed would-be professionals context for their industry of choice.  Your BA in Business brings you up to speed on the latest in Japanese manufacturing technique.  And your BA in Computer Science brings you up to speed the last 50 years of algorithms and kernel architecture.  But your success as a manager or a developer still relies on what you and your dna bring to the table. Design isn’t different.  Don’t get stuck in the shiny-education ditch.  You’re hiring an aesthetic, not a diploma.

Then comes smoking out the padded portfolio.  Ask your untrained guru candidate for roughcuts of what he *wanted* his work to look like before the sociopath client went to town on his ideas.  It’s almost guaranteed that they kept those versions squirreled away somewhere (it’s a designer thing) and will probably be ecstatic to show you.  And on the other end, ask your trained guru candidate for some live examples of work someone actually paid him money for.  Not the site he did for his grandma, or someone that felt bad asking for changes.  Someone who opened their wallet for them, and someone who had a fit when he didn’t include a photo of Flanky their childhood cow.  The high order bit here is that both help you feel out where your wide-eyed candidate’s skills start and stop, and how gracefully they deal with soul-crushing compromise.

Be weary of the gal or fella that feels they’re above CSS, or above shwag design, or above a 3am kinkos run for a stack of flyers, or nursing the company goat back to health after it eats all of the CEO’s Adderall.  The worst thing you can do for your startup is hiring a designer that ‘doesn’t do (insert anything here)’.  Fortunately they’ll usually arrogantly tell you exactly that in the first 3 minutes of the interview.  If they don’t, tell them their first job is going to be a shwag run.

If they flinch, show ‘em the door.