Who knew hiring could be so tiring?

My design collective is hiring a marketer to position our brand to clients.

The original plan was to reach out to people in our circle, see if they had experience positioning tech products or services with a sprinkle of design/dev knowledge.

After days of outreach, no candidates (I am still surprised I don’t have any marketers in my circle 😳).

We knew the search would slow other projects down (our portfolio design would have to take a halt), so I volunteered to continue the recruitment while the rest of the team focused on our portfolio design.

Back to the drawing board for me.

Since I wanted to hire design-focused marketers, design-focused companies became my search ground.
Figma, Linear and Rive were good fits. I would search among marketing team members or marketers who follow these companies at least.

I quickly drew up a three step framework for recruitment:

1. Find marketers who follow these companies’ marketing team members on X.
2. Score each candidate on their
   • Audience quality (are their audience our target clients).
   • Design/dev content understanding.
   • Clarity expressed in their bio and posts they make.
   • Lastly engagement quality.
3. Reach out to them via DM and offer for them to join if they passed the test (scored 90 or higher)

I went through a good number of candidate’s X profiles.

Every one of them failed the test.

I saw profiles whose audience were simply not our target clients, showing no substantial design/dev content understanding.

On the flip side, profiles with design/dev content understanding (the ones at Figma, Linear e.t.c) don’t get clients—they support an existing product that already has demand. Like product marketers 🤦‍♂️.

Seeing all this, I made small changes to the framework:

Firstly, re-defined the marketing role. The potential hire would generate inbound leads and build our collective’s presence on X and LinkedIn, so the role changed from Product Marketing to Growth Marketing.

I joined a few Design/Agency communities such as Design Buddies, to reach out and connect with said Growth Marketer.

Then offer for them to join if their portfolio was convincing.

I’ve met promising candidates using this new strategy and after I take the next steps, I’ll tell you guys all about it.

If you want to ask any questions or just have a talk with me, do reach out to me on X @mich_thedev.