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Created on
April 23, 2026
After launching The Norm brand, we were genuinely excited about the opportunity to begin adding fresh blood to the team. But reality hit us hard.
In five months, we went through 600+ applications for an experienced designer position. Our exhausted recruiters came to us asking what was wrong. We sent four offers in total, and one person joined the team. The gap between what we were looking for and what we encountered in the talent market was striking enough to warrant having an honest conversation about it.
What follows is not simple hiring advice for a LinkedIn carousel, or a recruiting pitch, but what five months of saying "no" taught us about what we were really looking for all along.
We expected to find experienced designers who could step into client-facing work, lead presales, and take ownership of messy, poorly scoped problems. What we found instead was confusing.
The portfolios were often beautiful — genuinely well-crafted work. But when we tried to go deeper, the story behind the screens frequently wasn't there. Candidates would present impressive visuals and then struggle to explain why anything looked the way it did, or what problem it was solving. Some opened their portfolio website during the call and read it to us aloud — the same text we'd already reviewed, with no added context. We didn't need the repeat; we needed to hear how they think.
"Sometimes the first impression is just that good. Visually, everything is in place. But if there's nothing deeper behind it, no story, no process, just beautiful images, it's disappointing and that's a clear 'no' for me."
— Denis, Design Lead
Other candidates led with where they'd worked rather than what they'd done. Some candidates built their entire presentation around proximity to a brand — every anecdote circled back to the company rather than their personal contributions. It wasn't that the experience was bad, but we couldn't find the person in it — just a mysterious "we" that had done impressive things.
In big companies with separate departments for research, strategy, and visual design, the actual scope of an individual's work can be surprisingly narrow. What we wanted to hear about was their part in the process — their input, their decisions, their impact. Their story.
And then there were the candidates who played it safe: senior designers presenting their tidiest, smallest project, everything polished and smooth. When we asked for something messier — something that went wrong, something that required difficult trade-offs — the response was usually hesitation. But that's exactly where the real signal lives.
"These extra-senior candidates would come in and present something safe, neat, polished. Thank you, but let's also discuss something difficult."
— Valeria, Strategy Lead
This was disorienting. These were experienced people with real careers, and something kept not connecting.
After a while, we started wondering whether the problem was partly on our side — whether our expectations were unrealistic, or whether we were failing to communicate what we actually wanted. Valeria put it bluntly during one of our reflections: "I honestly thought that if I were the interviewee, I wouldn't have passed either. We're really demanding."
We know the market is brutal for designers right now — more competition, more pressure, more burnout from applying to dozens of roles. We are not here to judge anyone's career. And after seventeen interviews, certain patterns became clear enough that we could finally articulate what we were actually looking for — something that, honestly, we understood better at the end of this process than at the beginning.
Somewhere along the way, through all the interviews that didn't work out, what we were looking for came into sharper focus — a pattern we kept recognizing in the candidates who made it through.
What we want to see is how a person moves from chaos to clarity; from a vague brief, contradictory inputs, and incomplete information toward a direction they can articulate and defend. Not the right answer, but the visible trail of reasoning that led to this answer.
"My favorite question became: 'You say you love solving complex problems — how does this leap from chaos into meaning actually happen for you? What's your process?' Most people cannot answer that."
— Valeria, Strategy Lead
In our recruiting process, we validate this through a whiteboarding task. It may not be a perfect method, but it's the closest we can get to watching someone think in real time. It illuminates how they deconstruct a problem, what questions they ask, and how they prioritize when time runs short.
We know it's stressful — in a more relaxed setting, over coffee, the same person might respond very differently. We try to account for that. But the whiteboarding is where we see the process, and for us, the process matters more than the output.
Showing your thinking also means being honest about where it broke down. We're not looking for a textbook process — we're looking for someone who knows the ideal and can explain exactly how and why reality diverged from it. That tolerance for imperfection demonstrates maturity and adaptability more than any polished case study ever could.
We've seen it go both ways. One candidate insisted they'd invented their own methodology, presenting a standard technique under a made-up name as their "original framework." Another admitted upfront that there were gaps in their experience, walked us through where their process had broken down on a real project, and explained what they did about it. Everything they said held together. Honesty about what didn't work tells us far more than a flawless walkthrough.
"The more perfectly everything is described, the less experienced the designer tends to be. That's been my observation."
— Katya, Managing Director
We don't care about tools — they change fast, and if a candidate we hire doesn't know Figma, so be it. What we can't teach is caring about the job. The candidates who stood out were genuinely engaged with their problems, curious about unfamiliar challenges, and honest about their limitations. In an agency context where projects change constantly, we need someone who can define the right process for each situation — and speak up when something is outside their experience.
"We need people who see themselves in this profession. Who wants to figure things out — not because someone pushed them, but because they're interested. The profession is alive, it changes, and people who think they can settle into a comfortable spot and stay there are not the people we're looking for."
— Katya, Managing Director
But curiosity alone isn't enough. The people we're looking for also take responsibility for the end result — not to control it, but because they can't not care. They're a little anxious all the time about whether the outcome is good enough, and we think that's fine. Indifference is much worse.
"Design stops being hard labor for someone like that. It becomes something they can't turn off."
— Roman, Design Lead
Roman once adapted a Stanislavsky quote that became something of an internal litmus test for us:
"Love design in yourself, not yourself in design."
When a candidate is more invested in their own status than in the problem in front of them, we can tell. And when they're not, we can tell that too.
The candidate pool has grown, but the median quality has not grown with it. AI-written portfolios have made the screening stage significantly harder, because the text is now flawless, the structure impeccable, and it has become much more difficult to distinguish between someone who thinks clearly and someone who prompts clearly.
We used to be able to spot unevenness in writing that hinted at unevenness in thinking. That signal has largely disappeared, which means more weight falls on the interview itself, and more candidates reach a stage they're not ready for.
"It's gotten harder because everyone writes their portfolio with AI now. Before, you'd read it and see rough spots — but at least you knew a person had written it by themselves. Now the text is perfect and you can't find a mistake. But during a whiteboarding exercise, there's no AI safety net. If you can't think, it comes out."
— Katya, Managing Director
And there is, of course, the emotional difficulty of saying no. Watching a candidate gradually lose their footing during a whiteboarding session — knowing it's not going to work out, and finding that you care about the outcome anyway — turns out to be one of the harder parts of the job.
"I was surprised by my own empathy. At some point you start rooting for the candidate. You see them take a wrong step and you think, 'No, don't go there.' It becomes genuinely stressful to watch."
— Denis, Design Lead
At the end of every whiteboarding session, we offer feedback. We tell candidates honestly what worked and what didn't. Some people say "thank you for taking the time." It matters to them, and it matters to us. If nothing else, we want the process to leave people with something useful, even when the answer is no.
Here is a single piece of advice from each of our interviewers to a designer looking for a job right now:
1. Don't sugarcoat it. Tell us honestly what happened on your projects — what you influenced, what you achieved, where things didn't go as planned. If you give a generic story, you get generic feedback in return. We're not a generic agency.
Katya, Managing Director
2. Think about what you do before you open Figma, and try to describe it — even just for yourself, as a form of reflection. What is your sense-making and problem-solving process? That's the part we're actually evaluating.
Valeria, Strategy Lead
3. Get prepared. Doing a little more than the minimum makes you stand out enormously against everyone else who is burned out and applying to everything on autopilot.
Denis, Design Lead
4. May the force be with you. Because even if you're great, there are a lot of other great people out there right now. But what's missing in most candidates isn't skill. It's motivation. It's love for the job.
Roman, Design Lead
We are still hiring, and we are still looking for the same thing: people who think, who care, and who can walk us through the space between a problem and a solution without pretending the mess was never there.
If that sounds like you, we'd like to meet.
