Hire a UX Designer: The 2024 Recruitment Guide

• 1

  Hire a freelance UX designer

When it comes to hiring a freelance UX designer,there is no dearth of options. As of 2020, about 36% of the U.S. workforce was freelancing, and this figure is expected to rise to 50% by the next decade.

Thus, hiring a freelance UX designer could prove to be an ideal option if you are looking for skills that are not limited to a certain region.

Let’s have a look at a few positive and negative aspects of hiring a freelance UX designer.

• Pro: Cost

• When compared to full-time employees, hiring a freelance UX designer or UX Strategist is definitely a cost-effective option. If you go by an hourly rate, you only need to pay them for the number of hours that they work.

  The latter means that if an hour not worked is an hour not paid. You only pay for the time the freelancer is actually working. This is definitely a better option compared to hiring an agency or full-time employee if the workload isn't consistent.

• Pro: Easy-to-access remote skills

• Hiring a freelance UX designer doesn’t limit you to a certain area or region. You could be running a startup in Australia and still be able to hire a UX designer from India, or the other way around. This exposes you to a wider pool of talent and ensures that you get nothing short of the best.

• Pro: Specialized skills

• You might already have an in-house designer, but you are now looking for a particular skill set, like data visualization or user onboarding. This is when a freelance UX designer can fill the gap and work with your in-house team to add value.

• Pro: Deadline

• If you have a time-sensitive project and you want a UX designer to get started on it ASAP, a freelance UI UX designer is your best bet. This is because they tend to start working on short notice. The quicker they get started, the more they earn! Secondly, since they are experts in transitioning from one project to another and toggling between various projects, they are good at delivering quality work at the maximum speed.

• Con: Reliability

• Although most freelancers are quick to get started and quick to deliver, you can still have sour experiences working with freelancers. They might go unresponsive, delay your work, and/or submit substandard quality. The stakes aren't that high for them. One bad review will not undo a decent track record. Additionally, you can't expect a freelancer to have access to the same equipment and other facilities than aproduct design agencyemployee would have.

• Con: Communication

• Since a freelancer might not necessarily be in your city, communication could become tough, especially if they are in a different time zone. Tools like Slack, Skype, Trello, Basecamp, and the like could make things easier, but you would still need to analyze things well. Additionally, freelancers, especially the ones overseas, are notorious for poor English. Therefore, you should be on the lookout for a decent level of written and spoken English.

• 2

  Hire a UX agency

If you are ready to invest more of your budget into your company’s success, meaning the best quality work and utmost professionalism, you should hire a UX agency. Let’s see why (or why not).

• Pro: Professionalism

• A UX UI design agency is professional. These agencies are often run by people who themselves have years of experience as a UX designer. This makes them familiar with the industry inside and out. There are very few problems these guys haven't dealt with.

  Because top UX design agencies care about their reputation, they tend to be professional in their approach. Unlike freelancers, agencies carry a heavier burden when it comes to receiving a bad review.

• Pro: Access To a Diverse Range of Talents

• Agencies are generally smart to have a range of talents diverse enough to execute all kinds of projects flawlessly. In more practical terms, agencies usually have UX researchers, UX architects, interaction designers, etc.

• Pro: Timeliness and Reliability

• If you are looking for timely submissions with proper communication, a UX design will fit the bill. Generally, a dedicated project manager is assigned to you and takes care of your needs and serves as your ultimate point of contact.

  Therefore, you no longer have to fill your head with all the aspects related to UX — the  design agency will take care of everything.

• Pro: Quality and Handling Complexity

• The best UX design agencies are known for delivering quality work. This is because each project goes through a rigorous quality check before it is delivered to you. Furthermore, a UX research firm is backed by experienced professionals who know how to meet clients’ expectations flawlessly.

  On top of that, among all other engagement types, agencies can handle the most complex projects due to access to a diverse range of designers and researchers. We’ve also created a chart to help you compare the reliability and complexity you should expect for each type of engagement.

  

• Con: Cost

• Although hiring an agency sounds like the best choice, be prepared that they will cost you more. This is because most agencies follow a systematic approach that includes research, planning, analysis, goal setting, validation with users and creation of developers handoff.

  Learn more about our in-depth and data-driven UX process

  All this requires extensive knowledge, experience, and understanding that a freelancer or an in-house designer might not have. 

• 3

  Hire an In-House UX Designer

The third option that you could choose is the conventional path: hiring an in-house UX designer. This option has its benefits but it also comes with many hassles: From documentation to training and insurance, so much needs to be taken care of.

• Pro: Product Experience

• When you hire a UI UX designer in-house, they will only work on your product and application day-in and day-out. This will make them intimately familiar with your product, audience, and end users.

  Although this is what a freelancer and agency can also achieve, if an in-house designer is working at your setup, they are more likely to get accustomed to your requirements.

• Pro: Long-Term Value

• Since designing UX is a long-term process, you need to make changes and introduce upgrades quite frequently. Hiring an in-house designer equips you with the long-term expertise that will work on your UX as and when needed.

• Con: Limited Skills

• One of the drawbacks of hiring an in-house UX designer is their limited skills. They might be the best at user research, but landing page creation is not in their wheelhouse. Alternatively, they might be good at designing interactive design and prototyping, but not doing content strategy.

  In situations like these, you are left with a gap in your team, which puts you in a tough spot.

• Con: Cost

• Hiring a UX designer is never easy on the pocket. According to Glassdoor, the average salary of a UX designer working at a company is $81,906. According to Payscale, it is $72,504. Either way, this is a hefty sum, even if you opt for junior to mid-level designers only.

  Needless to say, these figures will go toward the higher end as the designer’s experience increases.

  For a more extensive cost breakup, read this post by HuffPost.

• Con: Commitment

• Hiring an in-house employee always entails a certain level of responsibility. At the very least, employees rely on their companies as a stable source of income. Therefore, you should only consider hiring a dedicated designer if you're sure there's a stable workload.

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  An Integrated Approach: The New Landscape of Work

When it comes to product design, at Adam Fard Studio, we've developed our own approach that maximizes the pros and minimizes the cons of the different ways to get UX services. No longer teams are bound by the same geography or timezones. Going remote has become a new normal for a plethora of companies, especially given COVID's impact. The integrated approach is characterized as follows:

• Pro: Leveraging Global Teams

• The stability of an agency, without impact on the cost. We pride ourselves on the fact that we've been remote since day one. This allowed us to eliminate such expenses as rent, utilities, and other facilities.

  The fact that we're remote also opens out an opportunity to hire anyone in the world. That's why we never struggle with finding the right talent. Additionally, a range of designers diverse enough allows for almost universal time-zone compatibility with our clients.

• Pro: Direct Communication

• Another aspect of our approach is that we minimize the barrier between our designer and the client. The talents we hire are competent enough in terms of business, design, and communication to have direct access to the client. Therefore, there's no need for complex layers of middlemen.

  Need to hire a design team?
  We can get a design project with world-class product designers in less than 72h: Get in touch!

Hire a UX Agency

When it comes to searching for a right agency, there are multiple ways you can find the one that fits your needs. The first thing we would suggest is doing a google search. It is likely, that you will find websites like Clutch, GoodFirms or Manifest.

Agency-ranking websites like these are a good way to see what UX agencies specialize in and what reviews they have.

Here’s how these rankings look:

And here’s how the reviews look:

Then, you should identify agencies that fit your budget and specialize in the things you need designed. Having done that, we would suggest that you do additional research into these companies’ digital footprints. While agency-ranking websites are for the most part reliable, they only tell you half of the story.

Hire an in-house UX designer

Targeted Outreach

Targeted outreach is one of the most effective ways to find a great UX designer, especially if you have a team that has worked with — or knows someone who has worked with — designers in the past. As the name suggests, targeted outreach means you need to make the first move and contact prospective designers.

In 2024, the primary source for this kind of outreach is LinkedIn. You can easily target the UX designer demographic in a certain area and contact them using LinkedIn automation software like Dripify. Additionally, you can ask for referrals from both your own team and the designers you're contacting..

Online UX Design Communities

There are plenty of online communities where UX designers can show off their designs and share portfolios. Here, you can find skilled UX designers for your startups from all around the world, browse endless designs, and even post a job with your specific requirements.

Keep in mind that while these online communities are an awesome place to screen visual designs, they’re not particularly useful when it comes to understanding the strategy, vision, interaction, or architecture used by the designers to build the final product. Namely, you get a glimpse of the surface but not what is beneath it.

A beautiful product that doesn’t work very well is ugly.
— Jonathan Ive

For this reason, it’s important that you know exactly what you want and need from your UX designer. Otherwise, you might hire a UX designer who excels in creativity but is lacking in the strategic department.

Prominent online UX and digital design communities include Dribbble, Behance, Coroflot, and Awwwards. Additionally, a simple search in LinkedIn and Facebook groups will help you find a good number of job-seekers.

UX Job Boards

Even though you can post your UX design job post on any job search engine, it’s best to post on job boards that specialize in UX design. This way, you can be certain that your post will target and reach the right audience: UX designers.

Here are a few job boards for UI UX Designer Jobs where you can find your ideal designer:

• UX Jobs Board
• Just UX Job
• Designer Hangout
• Authentic Jobs

Hire a freelance UX designer

Among all of the types of design help, freelancers are the easiest to hire. Unlike, agencies or in-house designers, freelancers normally don’t require things like contracts, extensive on boarding, team integration, etc. This, of course, comes at the cost of expertise and reliability.

The freelancer platforms that are the most popular right not are:

• Toptal* features the most experienced mid-to-senior level freelancers, most of which would prefer mid-term project. As such, it might be one of the most expensive options.

  *designer referral bonus: you will earn $500 after successful trial period

• Upwork offers a good range of expertise and prices when it comes to freelancers. You can find design help for both short- and long-term projects there.
• Fiverr is the kind of platform that works best for short-term projects, such as creating an illustration or editing a video.

One thing you should note: one way or another all of these platforms charge commission, with Toptal being the highest.

As such, if you’re tight on budget, you can try to leverage your own network to establish a direct cooperation with a freelancers without the need for a middleman.

Design Skills

What do you want to find out? Can this UX designer do the job efficiently?

How can you find out? Review portfolio, ask questions, and give design exercises.

• Experience. Do they have sufficient experience in UX design?
• Problem setting. Can they identify, question, and prioritize problems?
• User-centered process. Do they base their design decisions on user insights?
• Idea generation. Are they able to quickly generate high-quality solutions?
• Systems thinking. Do they understand how their solution will fit into users’ lives?
• Visual appeal. Is their design appropriate for the audience?
• Innovation. Does their design feel new and original?

People Skills

What do you want to find out? Do I want to work with this designer?

How can you find out? One-on-one interviews, cover letters, and back-and-forth emails.

• Communication. Are they a good listener and a persuasive speaker?
• Collaboration. Can they work efficiently as part of a team?
• Cultural contribution. Do they represent your company’s values?
• Leadership. Do they take proud ownership of their work and decisions
• Mission. Did they read up on your company prior to the interview?

UX designers that possess these skills are definitely worth considering for the job. 

If you’re stuck on finding the right questions to ask UX designers during interviews, here are a few that will give you the information you need to make the final decision:

• Describe your design process and methods.
• Describe the challenges you faced on a recent project.
• How did you approach the problem?
• Provide examples of how you deal with user research and usability testing.
• How do you handle criticism from clients?
• What does it mean to be a great UX designer?
• What analytical tools do you use to evaluate your designs?

Hiring a designer: Red Flags

🚩 Giving an estimate without fully understanding the scope

So you’ve found a seemingly good candidate. You’re ready to get started as soon as possible. However, before you do, you need to have an idea of how much things are going to cost.

Any designer knows that this isn’t an easy question to answer. In order to do that, you need a clear image of what’s been done and what needs to be done. On top of that, design is an iterative process.

There’s no way to tell in advance how many iterations this or that project is going to require.

If a candidate gives you a time/budget estimate without diving deep into your business and product needs, beware. What you’re getting into is likely a designer who designs just for the sake of it. That’s a recipe for mediocrity, that you will eventually have to redo.

🚩 Being a jack of all trades

Sometimes, it is very tempting to look for a designer who can do it all: research, stunning UI, motion design, video editing, you name it. True, you may stumble upon a professional who is genuinely skilled in all of these things.

However, more often than not, the breadth of skills are balanced by the lack of expertise in either of them.

Conversely, you should be wary of candidates who claim to be an expert in all subfields within design. Again, for a specific task, specialists are more likely to do a great job than a generalist.

Lastly, we would add that a good solution for a project that requires a variety of skills is agencies. Most design companies have a wide range or design talent that’s capable of multiple skills.

🚩 Skipping discovery phase

If a designer you’ve hired starts producing UI immediately, beware. Design for the sake of design is a horrible idea. Design, just like marketing, sales, product management, and other fields is there to serve the business.

How can you produce user interface elements without understanding the larger picture and business goals? You can’t.

🚩 Starting from scratch

Every once in a while your product needs a makeover. There’s nothing negative about it. Facebook, for instance, has had more redesigns since its launch than we care to count.

However, you don’t always need to start from scratch. Quite to the contrary, more often than not, gradual changes are more productive.

As such, few honest designers will insist upon scrapping everything you’ve designed without a close and thorough observation. There aren’t many products designed so badly that there isn’t anything worth saving.

There’s isn’t a straightforward answer to this. The factors at play include the geography, specific area of expertise, and the type of engagement you want to have. However, we’ll try to give you some data to get you an idea of the price ranges you’re looking at.

Freelancers

Freelancers might charge from $10 to $100 per hour or more. According to Upwork, the median UX Designers charge about $25–$39/hr. on their platform. However, you can find designers with all sorts of hourly rates there.

Another freelance platform Toptal doesn’t publicly share their designers’ rates, but you would definitely expect them to be more expensive than Upwork. We would estimate the hourly rates to reach $120 per hour and above.

Fiverr, among the other platforms, might offer the cheapest per-project prices out there.

In-house designers

For an in-house designer, salaries might range from $50 to $175 k. a year, in the US. According to a survey conducted by abdz.do, Switzerland has highest average salary for UX designers ($102,614 per year), while Morocco the lowest ($1,006 per year).

Agencies

Just like with freelancers and in-house designers, it depends on a great number of things.

In Western countries, agencies typically charge for a month of work ($8000 per full-time junior designer and above; $10.000-$16.000 – for a senior one) or an hourly rate (typically $50 and above). However, prices range drastically across the globe.

• 1

  Merging Several Roles

A common mistake that many companies make is merging several job roles into one. Though it can be super tempting to hire one person to handle a wide range of tasks, like UX, UI, development, marketing, and QA, onboarding a technical “rockstar” can be counter-productive. In fact, it can even be detrimental to your product.

Sure, you can get lucky and strike gold with a multi-talented designer who can juggle several roles. However, most of the time, you’ll end up with an amateur, namely, someone who only dabbles in UX design.

Avoid hiring a second-rate UX designer, and opt to hire a bona fide expert instead. This move will save you a great deal of time and money in the long run.

• 2

  Prioritizing Specific Skills

Constant changes in technology means the demand for specific skills are also changing. This is why hiring a UX designer based on a single skill can be dangerous.

So, avoid it.

Hiring should always be part of your long-term strategy, not a quick fix to an immediate problem.

― Steven J. Bowen

You need to keep an open mind and take a more holistic approach when hiring. For instance, rather than base your hiring decision on a specific skill set, assess the designer’s critical thinking.

How do they go about solving complex problems? Are they able to translate intricate business requirements into great UX design? What about their design process?

These are the skills you should be assessing when hiring a UX designer. Critical thinking, intuition, and problem-solving skills never go out of fashion. This, you can be sure of.

• 3

  Overestimating a UX Portfolio

When going through a UX designer’s portfolio, it’s important that you know what to look for. A frequent mistake that many companies and recruiters make is judging a UX portfolio on quantity, specifically, the number of UX case studies and samples that the designer has included.

This is a costly mistake when hiring a UX designer. Why? The number of samples has nothing to do with the UX design process nor does it accurately reflect the designer’s skills and experience.

Don’t assume a UX designer with 3 to 5 work samples in their portfolio is any less experienced or qualified than someone with 10 to 20 samples.

Because they’re not.

A great UX designer is aware that several case studies are more than enough to showcase their skills and experience.

Ditch the assumptions and focus on what’s inside the portfolio. A UX portfolio should be presented in a way that clearly shows how and why the designer contributed to the project and the end result. Here’s what you should be judging when looking at a UX portfolio:

• Clearly defined problems
• Initial user research findings
• Wireframes
• User testing insights
• Final designs and solutions
• Skills used in the project
• Key metrics

When screening a UX portfolio, put an emphasis on quality and depth, not quantity.

• 4

  Expecting a Quick Turnaround Time

Just because a UX designer has 10 years of experience doesn’t mean that they can magically finish a project overnight. It’s not going to happen and you shouldn’t expect it to.

The whole point of a great UX design is to improve user experience and amplify conversions. Unless you want to sabotage your own product, then rushing a project and the UX designer isn’t going to do you any good. You must allow enough time for the designer to perform their job accordingly.

Speak to the designer about expected deadlines to avoid any misunderstandings and disappointment later on.

• 5

  Posting a Boring Job Ad

In order to attract top talent, you need to create a job description that will stand out from the crowd. Don’t use a stock template you copied from somewhere on the internet. Take your time to create a job post that will give designers a glimpse into your company. Share your company story, promote your work culture, and present your vision.

If you’re at that stage of getting your business off the ground and can’t offer a huge salary, don’t stress. High salaries don’t always guarantee finding a great UX designer.

When people are financially invested, they want a return. When people are emotionally invested, they want to contribute.

— Simon Sinek

Focus on other ways to spark interest. Offer career growth, learning opportunities, and a stable work-life balance. Explain how your opportunity is unique, and suggest the ways designers can make an impact. Making a good first impression is a crucial part of the hiring process, so make yours count.

• 6

  Ignoring the Fiercely Competitive UX Market

UX is an extremely competitive market. Companies, agencies, and consultancies are all vying for the attention of UX designers. For this reason, it’s important that you learn how to retain talent — even before you acquire it. Here are effective ways to motivate and retain top UX design talent:

• Opportunity. Let the UX designer work on projects they are passionate about.
• Self-actualization. Help them achieve their personal goals and ambitions.
• Autonomy. Encourage them to share ideas and take initiative.
• Professional development. Offer training and benefit packages that inspire growth.
• Breathing space. Ensure a positive and stress-free working environment.

Whatever you do, do not underestimate your competitors when it comes to hiring a UX designer. The competitive market makes it difficult to find and then retain UX designers. Fine-tune your employee retention strategy prior to hiring.

So now that you have done your homework, it is the time to fix an interview with your shortlisted candidates.

• 1

  Did you solve any problem area that was invisible but enhanced the overall user experience of the application?

• Your candidate could provide a range of answers here. And believe us, there is no right or wrong. However, to judge your candidate, look for any indication in their answer that demonstrates their skills to handle complexity in a product. This will prove to be a testimony of their understanding of what UX is composed of.

  Some possible answers could be removing a redundant step from the process, reducing the amount of data inputted, or developing a data-rich dashboard.

• 2

  How do you understand the vision of the product and display it appropriately on the screen?

• Needless to say, there are a lot of appropriate answers to this question. To understand the feasibility of this answer properly, it is important that you understand your vision properly.

  Analyze how the answer of your candidate aligns with your overall vision. Although they won’t necessarily be the same, they should resemble a large extent.

• 3

  What do you consider an ideal working environment?

• This an important question both for you and your candidate. It is essential that both the parties involved work in harmony with each other, and prove to be a great fit.

  For instance, if your candidate answers the questions with, “working in a team with vibrant and dynamic atmosphere”, and your company is a bunch of tech-geeks with everyone focusing on their tasks and no one speaking to each other, you can sense the incompatibility out there.

  Similarly, if you prefer your employees to work remotely, and if this is not something that doesn’t go well with your candidate, you might need to reconsider.
  
  Other important factors that you must bring into consideration include – how joyful will they be when working with you, do you have projects that are the right fit for their skills and interests, is the person in question trustworthy, and do their mission and vision statement aligns with the mission and vision of your company?

  Are they comfortable with the business goals of your company and will leave no stone unturned in achieving that goal?

• 4

  What UX tools do you commonly use?

• This question is asked just for informational purposes and you should not base your decision solely on the answer to this question. Although tools play an important role, the tool match is not that important.

  If your candidate knows one tool and not another, the chances are high that they will easily be able to pick up the different tools too. However, there are a few exceptions here.

  If you are hiring a UI/UX designer for an urgent project and want them to work on a tool right from day one, do not expect a quick turnaround time here. Your designer will take their own time, depending on the learning curve of the tool, and their grasping power.

  Thus, the know-how of your designer on the UX tools should not be a subject of concern if you are hiring them for long term product development.

  However, if it is an urgent need, you should choose to hire someone who is already familiar with your preferred tools.

• 5

  What factors do you keep in mind while designing for varied types of users?

• This is an important question of the entire UX designer hiring process. Most User Experience designers answer this question with demographic data.

  However, an even more important factor here is triggers. What will trigger your potential user to use or choose your products and services? It is important that your product not only flaunts a user-friendly user experience but also compels your users to take the desired action.

  While asking these questions is important, what is critical is to understand that there is no best designer in this world. There is only the BEST designer that suits your team well, fits any gap in between, and enhances the overall user experience of your product, thus helping your company move forward.

  Also, the next important question that you should ask includes the expected UX designer salary.

  Don’t forget to ask for a UX design portfolio.