Inside Meta’s Design Hiring: Lessons from Design and Talent Leaders
Founder Meg Rye sits down with design leader Melissa Hajj and recruiter Kelly Norris to reminisce over their decades hiring top talent at Meta in the UK.
Full transcript below.
Hot takes:Top 5 Insights on Hiring Senior Designers at Meta
Extracted from our interview, these are some of the most surprising and useful lessons from building one of the world’s most rigorous design hiring processes.
1. Great Hiring Starts with Consistent Interviewing
When Meta London’s offer rate dipped to 14%, it wasn’t a talent problem — it was a calibration problem. Even experienced interviewers had different interpretations of “strong.” Some were generous early on, others raised the bar sky-high later. Once Meta aligned interviewers around clear, shared criteria, the process became both fairer and more effective — and the offer rate climbed to nearly 40%.
Takeaway: The key to better hiring isn’t more filters — it’s more consistency.
2. Focus on What Really Matters
Many senior interviewers naturally leaned on behavioral assessments, assuming others would evaluate hard skills. But Meta learned that truly effective interviews look for core design capabilities, not years of experience in a specific domain.
Great interviewers ask:
Can they identify what makes a product valuable?
Can they build coherent, accessible interfaces across platforms?
Can they design visual systems that scale?
Takeaway: Strong fundamentals travel across products, markets, and disciplines.
3. Adapt for Global Talent, Don’t Just Compare It
Meta discovered that designers outside the US often had world-class craft and execution skills but less exposure to Silicon Valley’s product strategy mindset or interview style. Instead of lowering the bar, they leveled the field with structured prep chats — giving candidates the same context Bay Area designers often learn by osmosis.
Takeaway: Global talent is extraordinary when given the right context to shine.
4. Hire for Teams, Not Unicorns
When hiring just one or two pivotal roles, it’s easy to overreach for a “perfect” hire — someone who’s done it all before. But Meta found that teams grow faster and stronger when they hire for complementary strengths, not mythical all-rounders.
Better approach:
Know your team’s superpowers.
Define what’s essential from day one.
Identify what can be learned or coached.
Takeaway: The best hires expand your team’s range, not just mirror it.
5. Design the Hiring Process Like a Product
At peak hiring, some designers spent up to 20% of their week interviewing. Instead of slowing down, Meta made the system smarter: they analyzed conversion data, rebalanced interviewer loads, and paired recruiters with “design buddies” to improve portfolio understanding.
Takeaway: A well-designed hiring process is scalable, data-informed, and human-centered — just like great products.
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Full transcript
Meg Rye: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Meg Rye, founder of Good Maven, where we hire and coach the world's designers. One of our goals is to make the design industry more transparent through giving you behind the scenes looks at aspects of our work. Our podcast aims to bring to light what designers, coaches and recruiters have learned and share it with you.
Today we're exploring the process of hiring a designer with two of my favorite people to work with, Melissa Hajj and Kelly Norris. Melissa, why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself.
Melissa Hajj: Hi, my name is Melissa and I've spent the last 25 years, oh my God, of my life. Both designing software and then building software design teams at places like Apple and Meta, and also some really small and obscure startups that you'll never have heard of and a medical software company and kind of all over the map.
Meg Rye: Lovely. And Kelly, tell us a little bit about [00:01:00] yourself.
Kelly Norris: I had a really great opportunity to work at Microsoft. Big win for me 'cause it was also looking after Microsoft Studios from a gaming standpoint. So I hired across product design, product management, UX research all the way through to, again, your lion head, rare, and then dynamic CRM.
So it really is the spectrum of products that I did for around two years. And then I had the the pleasure of moving to what was then Facebook now meta where I met the wonderful Meg. I worked at Meta for about seven years. Spanning across growth, analytics, data science, and then a full circle moment back to design where I actually help scale the international design recruiting team.
Meg Rye: I think one of the things that all three of us have in common is, we studied the arts and that sort of inspired us to get into, the very different directions that we've taken before today.
So in the early [00:02:00] days, everything was really scrappy. It was myself and a couple other designers and we just brought in the brought in designers, did interviews and rinse and repeat. And so I think that scrappy process got us so far.
But it was slow, right? It was slow moving and each individual person, we had to like really just take so much time to sort through what the interview process was gonna look like and and things like that. So I think when the two of you came on it, we were at an inflection point and going from Crucible where we figure everything out to, okay, now how are we gonna grow really quickly?
Kelly Norris: So when I joined, I didn't have that understanding or knowledge of what was happening in product design, because my focus had to be building out data engineering from scratch as well.
So it wasn't just around how do we scale product design, but how do we scale product? How do we scale tech in London? And that was very new for meta. Then Facebook, where do you find the talent? [00:03:00] How and again, this for me, I had worked on some engineering roles, but I'd never touched data.
And I think it was great to have at the start that small team where it was yourself, Meg, me and maybe what like five other, less than five people on what you would consider product recruiting. You could take a little bit more of a risk in terms of how you approached problems.
Melissa Hajj: So I started working at Meta at the time of Facebook in 2014 in Silicon Valley out of the Menlo Park office. And I started as a product design manager there. And it was really my first exposure to hiring at scale. My previous exposures to hiring were as an interviewer at Apple and then at the startup that I was at in between Apple and Meta as the hiring manager.
But we had one person to hire, right? [00:04:00] And we had no machinery, no process, no anything. When I got to Facebook in 2014, hiring wasn't perfect, but they had already hit the point where they needed to hire designers in the tens to twenties to thirties range. Every year. And so they had to figure out a process and a way of evaluating designers and a way of trying to make things work at scale when you've got a whole, a large pool of interviewers, a large pool of hiring managers, and a large a large set of roles that needed to be filled in a way that was very efficient.
So stepping into that, one of the first things they do is they get you trained as an interviewer. So there were a set of criteria hard and soft skills, and those terms are imperfect, but let's use them for the moment. If we think about hard skills as like the technical aspects that you need to be successful as a designer.
[00:05:00] And the soft skills are more of the behavioral traits that make you successful in a particular circumstance. I had never been exposed to that kind of evaluation methodology. Let's look at six specific criteria that we're thinking of and evaluate every candidate against the same things. And then getting exposed to structured interviewing where every candidate on an interview loop would come in, give a presentation, do a critique, do a background interview where we're talking through their, like we're one-to-one, talking through their experience and their portfolio, and then do a problem solving exercise on the whiteboard.
So that was all wonderful and new. And I love systems. I love figuring out both why you're getting results that are of a particular flavor with a system and how to modify and or create and build a system that will get you the results that you want to get. For some reason, my little nerd brain just [00:06:00] really loves that type of optimization problem and understanding that it requires to do that.
And by golly, this was a system, but it was a system that was still very focused on people. And that was exciting too, because I am not a robot. I love people and I love interacting with people, and I love helping people in various ways. And one of them is I want a hiring manager to have a great person to work with.
I want a great person to work with, to find a great hiring manager and to get excited about their career. And so very quickly I found that aspect exciting and I started to volunteer to do more at. The Silicon Valley operation to attract candidates to talk to candidates. I actually went on a couple of trips to try to meet candidates in different markets that we hadn't really tapped into.
So I grew up outside of Washington, dc I went on a trip to, we, I worked with a recruiter to pick out candidates off of LinkedIn that seemed like they might be potential fits. Reached out to them. [00:07:00] Cold, said You wanna have a coffee? I'm in DC next week. And managed to get some hires, some of whom I think are actually still there.
It was a really exciting time to learn about how all of this works. So then fast forward to January of 2017, I think. Yeah, when for life reasons. My husband and I moved to London and fortunately meta. Was like we could use a design manager in London. That could be fine. And at the time when I arranged to move to London with meta, this is a little bit orthogonal, but it gives you a sense of scaling that was happening at Meta at the time.
The, I was moving to, I was moving teams. I was moving from community growth to ads and business platform, and there was one team of four designers that needed a design manager in London. And this is all arranged in November. We're arranging my Visa and everything. And then by December I get a call [00:08:00] from the leader of ads and business platform that says, actually, can you take a second team?
So before I even got to London on the ground, my team had gone from four to 10. So this is the kind of scale problem that we were operating with and. I believe that 2017 also was the first year that we had a double digit hiring target. Meg to hire more designers into London too.
Meg Rye: Yes. And at that point we were also hiring in Tel Aviv, and I know you had managed that team at . At different points while you were at meta too. So when you said about the fact that your team grew significantly before you even joined, it reminded me when I landed in London that first week, they said, oh yes, and you're also going to be hiring for our Tel Aviv office where I had never been, and you're going there in three weeks and you're gonna be building out that team as well.
And I was like, no big deal. Okay. No big deal. But just the level of trust and just the level of okay, this is happening. It's growing [00:09:00] fast. So yeah. So it sounds like your role was evolving even as you were moving internationally.
Melissa Hajj: Yeah. And within six months I had a third team reporting to me in London.
Like it was a little bit nuts but also exhilarating and definitely one of those you are gonna learn really fast.
And then I think it was 2017 where we first got to work together really closely, not just on hiring, but also figuring out the hiring system in London
Meg Rye: and how different it was from the States.
Melissa Hajj: Totally different. And how different the market was. The market was so different.
Yes. Yeah. Yes. And I think on the ground when I was in, when I was still in Menlo Park, I thought, a designer is a designer, like hiring is hiring, right? And that is definitely not true. Between hiring, between the US and EMEA the talent pool is different.
The way that companies tend to arrange themselves is different. So you have [00:10:00] different titles and different sets of experiences. You have differently shaped designers to put it in a weird visual way. Yeah.
Meg Rye: And I think oftentimes design is not as mature as like the design discipline is not often as mature in companies.
And so it's like, how do you separate out the fact that designers may have a lot of aptitude, but they have not had a lot of opportunity to exercise that because product management or engineering is more dominant in those spaces. And so like, how do we measure that appropriately in the structures that we use to assess talent
Melissa Hajj: And the combination of less exposure.
To more exposure to the executional aspects of design, like interaction design and visual design, less exposure to that product, strategic product thinking and identifying the problems that could potentially be solved to create a valuable product. That was one piece. The second piece is that [00:11:00] almost most of the companies in EMEA are business to business.
There's not a whole lot of consumer business to consumer companies building consumer focused software. And of course, big chunks of meta are consumer focused. And a lot of the design ethos and interviewing process came with an assumption of computer focused computer consumer focused consumer and computer focused. We had that too. Yes. Consumer focused product design. And so that required a mental shift because you're not seeing the same type of. Books the same type of portfolio. You're not actually seeing the same types of product thinking because you have to think about that balance of in business to business software, your buyer is almost never your user.
Whereas with consumer software, your buyer is your user if you use that metaphor. So it required a different shift. What did you guys have to do [00:12:00] to, when you're working, a lot of times you were probably working with groups in the US to try to hire for their London outposts. How did you try to get around that that market difference?
What did you have to do?
Kelly Norris: I found transparency was what helped from my perspective, never putting a. This is hard. This is difficult spin on it, but more like just making everyone aware because I think when you first start going into it, there's this big picture of we, we've had success hiring in Menlo Park and the u just general us how is it that you are struggling?
And I think that, when that's, rhetoric began of like, why are we not necessarily hiring as, as quickly or as the caliber is not there really using data. And it's something that I know from my side of things, I really enjoy finding out the insights of the why. [00:13:00] So for me it was assessing the market, actually looking at where wa where was the talent coming from?
For example, like product design didn't exist in EMEA or APAC for years after it did in the US You had to look much deeper into what a UX UI designer was, or if someone called themselves, title soup. You're a visual designer, you're an interaction designer, you are a specialist designer.
What does that mean? So really showing that to the business and giving a clear representation of this is the market that you have, these are the skill sets that we are seeing. This is how we're actually going to need to adapt, not change the process. Because what we didn't wanna do is say we are hiring.
And again, this, you hear it a lot in tech, we are lowering the bar. We never wanted to lower any bar, but we needed to be able to show here is what the representation is and if you truly want this team to be in [00:14:00] London, we need to start looking at different profile types and how they can how they can actually impact at a large tech company.
So data for me was the biggest thing. And it's. Showing up, I think is another thing. And again, when I was an individual contributor, working on roles, showing my working, showing who I was, reaching out to, working directly with the business to say, what do you think of this profile? Tell me why they're good.
Tell me why they're not, tell me why you wouldn't have picked this person so that I know what I'm assessing. And then it might also be my it must be me but being combative when necessary. I'll stand up for a candidate if I believe your opinion of just what they have on paper is wrong. So building that trust I think is critical.
How you hire designers is not just based on the designer themselves, but how you are as a recruiter and how you are as a recruiting team. [00:15:00] So that partnership and being able to, not making an assumption that. Because Melissa, you, yourself you are fantastic at what you do. I shouldn't assume that you know what I do.
And I think that is, that's the critical thing for me showing here's what I'm doing, here's what I'm working on. Here's the data you will now formulate what you need based on that.
Meg Rye: I agree with that so much. And it reminds me of just that mentality shift, I think especially as recruiters from service providers to true partners.
And part of that is being able to articulate that data and and make informed decisions and also recommendations. And we were all learning together at that point too. So it was like, even though everything was a well-oiled machine in a lot of ways in the States, it was still very much, we were like learning and.
Iterating. And so Melissa, you were asking a little bit about like how did you communicate with some of the folks and oh gosh. I [00:16:00] remember, when we flew to Tel Aviv, like in the, after the first three weeks I was there and I met Luke Woods and I was like, oh my gosh. Like I'm meeting the top brass.
And then, you're reporting up to Julie Zhu and and Melissa Stewart and Tom Hobbs and it's just wow, okay, I need to be on top of my stuff and I need to really be coming to them with information that's helpful for us to together make these decisions. And I don't know, I remember this one piece of data that I was doing research and I was just saying, why, why is the market so different over here than in the States?
And one of the things was if you took, some back of the napkin math. But if you took the number of designers per capita in the bay and compared it to the number of designers per capita in London, if you walked into a coffee shop in the bay, one in 40 people would be a designer. Likely in the course of your day, you're going to encounter some designers.
It would take one in I think 2,500 people in London to have that same encounter. So it just was a very different market. And then [00:17:00] when you look at how candidates understand design and the design interview process, in the bay everybody was doing whiteboarding exercises and they were really sharp at how we market ourselves.
And that's maybe also a very American thing is like you're constantly in a selling mode. So understanding that it's okay that it's not that way here, and how do we help people to show up as their best selves in a way that the hiring manager can get the signal on the candidate. And so one of the things that we implemented to help that, and I think Kelly, we probably did this on various different teams but we started doing prep chats for designers before they did their interviews.
And that was not to give them a leg up, it was just to give them the opportunity to access some of the knowledge that people in the bay just they just, it was second nature, right? So things like, using data and research to represent your ideas. We're not giving them the answers, but we're saying this is the [00:18:00] format in which we would like to see how you evaluate KPIs, how you measure the success of the design work that you're doing and things like that.
So those are some of the things that come to my mind. But as we evolved, we definitely got super sharp on the metrics and that was something that I think Melissa, you helped us with pretty significantly mi might you talk a little bit about that?
Melissa Hajj: Yeah. I would love to add one more point to what you were just saying about that training program.
Not training prep chats, that you, I think one of the reasons why interviewing is a skill. It's a skill. And especially Silicon Valley style interviews, they are really hard. And there is a way of speaking and a way of behaving in those interviews that's expected. And if you've never been exposed to that
Of course you don't know how to do it. So I think the process of being able to help educate people on what they're going into really matters, and it doesn't change their [00:19:00] design skills. But it gives them a sense of the type of environment they're about to encounter in those onsite interviews, which is, it makes a big difference.
Okay. So you were asking about data. And Kelly, you were saying about it as well. And what I remember was in that, my first year in London in 2017 when we had to hire, I think we had to hire something like 12 or 15 designers, which doesn't sound like that much, but it was like the biggest number we'd ever had to hire in London.
And I think by the middle of the summer, we knew we were in trouble because we, I think the stats were something like, I'm sorry, I'm dredging these things up from my brain. It was like 14,
Meg Rye: 14%. Yeah. 14% of people who interviewed got an offer.
Melissa Hajj: Yeah so roughly like that means for, you're gonna conduct 10 interviews and you're gonna hire 1.4 people and you can't actually hire 0.4 of a person, so [00:20:00] that's a problem.
And it's a huge toll on the teams that are doing the interviewing, because I think we don't interviewing is its own job and if you're trying to do it at volume, and we didn't have that many designers around. Yeah.
Meg Rye: So they had to do all the interviews.
Melissa Hajj: Yeah. And it was a huge tax on people.
People would be spending an average of five to 10 hours a week interviewing. So that's like an, that's like a fifth of your time per week. So we really needed to solve that efficiency problem, both to hire the people that we needed to hire and also to reduce the tax on the interviewing teams.
And I remember being in conversations with loads of people, and I. Most of the designers in London were relatively new, and so they had been relatively recently trained as interviewers.
And the general blanket assumption was that the problem that we were experiencing was because we had all those new interviewers.
So clearly these interviewers are passing people through our initial screens that just aren't qualified for the [00:21:00] job. But I had been on both sides of the equation, both like I was an interviewer and I had done a ton of interviewing in Menlo Park and also in London. But also I had this unique role in meta called the debrief lead role.
Which is someone who, for every candidate that we talk to, we sit down with the interviewers and we do it around the room to discuss the feedback for the candidate. And the debrief lead, not the interviewers, is responsible for deciding whether this candidate meets the hiring criteria and should be made, should have an offer extended to them.
So I had seen lots of interviewers in the way they were assessing candidates, and I had been an interviewer assessing candidates myself. And I just didn't buy that explanation of what was going on. It felt like there was something deeper and more systematic going on. You and I sat down and we, I had you grab all of the interview packets for all of the candidates that we had interviewed from like 2016 through 2017, which is [00:22:00] something like 40 candidates.
Meg Rye: Yep. Yeah, we did an audit.
Melissa Hajj: Yeah. It was a big spreadsheet.
And because I am who I am, I color coded it and it wasn't the only way I could make any sense of it. So I, and the color coding helped me look for trends. And it helped me look for trends by candidate, by interviewer. And also I started taking notes as I, I went through and read every single one of those packets, every single interviewer's, feedback for every single candidate.
And it was tedious but it was also completely eye-opening. Because it wasn't that, it was just a few interviewers who were passing through candidates, but we were passing unqualified candidates through initials. And those people were getting all no hires when they came in for their full interview loop.
But it wasn't because of untrained interviewers. Almost every single one of those. Unqualified candidates [00:23:00] had a highly trained person on the initials. And then the second thing that was happening was that we were landing on no hire decisions for people who were probably actually qualified to do the job.
Meg Rye: Yeah, I remember that.
That was frustrating. When you're the recruiter and you have your own, you have your own metrics and goals to hit
Melissa Hajj: well, and you're watching these interviewers and probably being like, that doesn't sound right. I've met this candidate, I've seen their work like that. That just doesn't sound quite,
so here's what was going on. In initials, interviewers, even highly qualified interviewers who had done hundreds of interviews were they were, they wanted to give people a chance.
Yeah.
They were willing to see potential. And they were willing to pass through people who weren't quite meeting the hard skill criteria.
But then when it came to onsite interviews, those same interviewers were incredibly like they were expecting extreme [00:24:00] seniority and highly specific domain expertise that the average inter designer coming on off the street is just not, it's not possible. You're not gonna have that.
And then there were other pieces where interviewers were really focusing on, we talked about the technical skills that you need and the behavioral skills that you need to be able to be successful in a role. There were interviewers who were focusing solely on behavioral skills.
In, for example, the portfolio review phase of a candidate because they thought that somebody else had already decided that this person's portfolio was good enough.
Yeah.
Meg Rye: And maybe to demystify or to just a footnote there that I still have it emblazoned in my mind that the hard skills at the time were product thinking, interaction design, and visual design. And the soft skills were intentionality, self-awareness and productivity and drive.
Melissa Hajj: That's right. Yeah.
And then there were other instances of just like bad, what I would call bad interview hygiene, where if you're reviewing a project with a candidate, you [00:25:00] don't get the specifics of what the candidate actually did, and they forget to tell you.
Or like what the team around them was. So you don't actually, you can't disambiguate whether these visuals in this project, did this candidate actually do that, or were they working with a visual designer?
And then the worst part was that we had these pretty senior people interviewing candidate candidates, and they were using themselves as the hiring bar.
So this person who has 15 years of experience designing consumer software and is deep in the understanding of how messaging, social media, ad technology, you name it, deep in the domain understanding they're expecting the exact same qualifications from the candidate that they're meeting and they're not doing a good job of like really assessing those skills. Can do they know what a valuable product is regardless of what the domain is.
Are they able to build coherent and easy to use and accessible interfaces on different platforms regardless [00:26:00] of what the domain was?
And can they design a visually coherent interface? Like they weren't focusing on those things. They were instead expecting skills that were on par with their own. And this completely opened my mind to, again, how all these systems get built.
Like the interviewing system and how. Your system is perfectly designed for the results that you're getting.
So I, now I, whenever I'm talking to clients, like I, I work with a lot of startups or like scale ups who are trying to hire designers. And whenever they're saying that they can't hire, I am always, I wanna see the data. I wanna see your interview packets. Show me what you actually have.
Don't make assumptions about what's going wrong. Let's find out yeah.
Meg Rye: I remember one of the things that we tried, I can't remember if this was the first iteration or if this was a later iteration because that year it, it seemed like, how are we possibly going to hire 12 or 20 designers or whatever it was.
And then in subsequent years we had to hire like [00:27:00] 50 or 75 even more. And so crazy. And I think when we all left there the international design team outside of the US was over 700 people across, remotely, throughout emea, onsite in London, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, and Singapore. And even a very, a couple designers in Lagos and and Seoul when, probably when Kelly was managing the team.
But I remember one of the things that we did was, counterintuitively, we said actually we need to be stricter on the initial interviews because that will yield a higher conversion rate on the final interviews. And like doing that titration. It felt like this is going to be so much harder, but it actually ended up being much more efficient use of everyone's time.
And so we ended up I think it was made, yeah. Two of the design managers that were there at the time helped to we did a prep with all of the US-based interviewers, and then we brought them in and had them start to do the initial interviews so then we could really use the folks on [00:28:00] site in London who were more senior, like yourself to Melissa to do the final interviews.
And then that really helped turn around our conversion rates, didn't it?
Melissa Hajj: Yeah. We should probably mention like what the interview process was that we were dealing with here. Because we're talking about like initials and onsite, and you and I know like we lived and breathed that, but not everybody else has so initials.
So there were two interviews aside from a recruiter screen that candidates needed to. Pass in order to get to a full, proper interview loop. So there was a background interview where a design manager or someone qualified would sit with the candidate and talk through some of the projects from their portfolio.
And it didn't need to be as polished, like a polished portfolio presentation necessarily, although sometimes it was. And that would assess some of those hard skills and see whether this candidate's work was [00:29:00] really relevant. And then the second was a critique, an app critique where, and this was all done remotely.
It was all done on video calls. Where the interviewer and the interviewee would sit down and critique an app together from the interviewee's phone. And in order to pass that, then you get into that big loop where you have a formal portfolio presentation where you're presenting to all of your interviewers and probably a couple of hiring managers.
And then. A background interview where you're going in more depth on some of the design decisions you made on your portfolio projects, another critique, and then the problem solving exercise where you're working together on a whiteboard or a MI board or something like that to talk through a product problem that is, that gives us insight into the way that you think about products and the way that you reason and the way that you make assumptions and ba build designs on top of them.
So obviously initials take a lot less time than that full process where there's a lot more people involved and there's [00:30:00] a lot more time invested. Saving time upfront by being tighter on the initials makes a huge difference in the long run. Yeah,
Meg Rye: absolutely. And I think our. At our peak, the conversion rates, I think it was around 40% of the final interview to offer, which was, glorious.
But then I think it settled around more of the industry standard, which was maybe 25 to 20, 30, 25. Yeah. To 30%. And then I think Kelly, when you were leading a team, there's so many recruiters and so at any given time you're training new recruiters, but you also have senior recruiters. So how do you think about numbers when you have so many disparate factors that are going into how you manage your team and also then the numbers of the larger design org and how they're coming into the interview process?
Kelly Norris: I think This is where it was quite interesting to hear. 'cause again, at the time when I first joined Meta, I wasn't working on design. So hearing some of these issues that were happening back in 20 16, 20 17. You, we, [00:31:00] Melissa, you and I, we start and Meg as well, we started seeing them again, appearing towards that 20 21, 20 22.
But you had this other factor suddenly come in, which was the recruiting team scaled. We went from six people in design to, I think by the time we had just before we, we left, it was 25 in, in a single design recruiting team across this was in Singapore, Tel Aviv and London. So now you are having to factor in, is it me, is it us?
Are we the problem? Or are we seeing actually we've hired so many designers and once again, we are calibrating new designers to interview. Are we seeing a trend and a repeat of exactly what happened before our conversions are dropping, but is it the fact that we're not putting the right profiles in some of the things that, that I had to look into was, again, separating that out. And Melissa, you were fantastic at helping us to look again at that process. And are the interviewers doing their [00:32:00] job? Because again, new people, it takes time to ramp and from our side, within the recruiting piece, it was looking at how we can upskill.
There's actually a much smaller proportion of design centric recruiters in an industry. So as much as we were trying to find people who had a background in, in product design or design of any kind, we started to have to look at hiring people that, that were more of a creative, like they wanted to get into design or they'd had a little bit of experience, but nothing to the scale that, that we had at meta.
So we had to think about. How do we teach them? And there was a lot, I love a playbook. I love writing. A lot of it came down to just training guides and getting thoughts on paper and getting process on paper. But you can't anti you, you can't expect. Again, I think just before we left, it was over a hundred designers that we were given from a targeting perspective to hire.
How? Probably nuts. It's crazy. [00:33:00] 10 to 100 over very little years. But I will say it's brilliant that there was that investment. Like they saw the, not only the need, but the potential of what we could do. So over those years of recruiting designers. It was great to get some of that recognition that, we are capable of hiring these these people.
But with that, you can't stop a recruiting team from recruiting by also trying to train them at the same time. Like there, there's a clear balance. So this is where we found like partnership with designers to, to be fundamental. We created a system. So for every sourcer or recruiter you had a designer that you could sit with and the expectation was relatively low.
We didn't wanna add any more complexity to designers time when we're also asking them to interview. But a simple maybe hour a week where you might just review portfolios together. You might help them understand if, you've [00:34:00] had a really tough recruiter screen and you can't decide if it's right or not.
Sit with your designer and run through why you like them, why you didn't, where your hesitations are. And we started to see that. The more people were interacting with designers it took time, but there was almost a click. They understood a little bit more about what we needed to hire for.
And we did other things like business acumen sessions. Because it's not just about, adding to the complexity. We're not just hiring great designers, but we might actually need a designer with a specific skillset. Oh, you have to have ads experience, or, we're hiring for Instagram or WhatsApp.
So let's look at nuanced WhatsApp. We're very focused on visual. Now there's a different assessment criteria when you are looking at a profile, but also how do you understand selling of the different teams when you are hiring across so many different ones at scale.
So helping the recruiting team to get to know the business a little bit more, [00:35:00] and even down to the basics of. What do you do? What is great. We have Instagram in London. Which part,
Meg Rye: what is creator monetization? What is, what are NFTs,
Melissa Hajj: what do those words even mean?
Meg Rye: Yeah. What is a metaverse and how do we hire a designer to make one?
Kelly Norris: It was an intense time, and I think being able to skill build with the help of the product design team was hugely beneficial to to the success and being able to edge towards achieving those numbers.
Meg Rye: I think it was like, as you say that Kelly, it, I really think is like PhD level design recruiting, right?
Like we were able to sit down with folks like Melissa and just like some of the best designers in the world and critique our own work, right? And get better at it. And I guess just for the audience, some of the things that we would, some of the data points that we would track just to give like a sense would be, you could do conversion rates by interview type by [00:36:00] recruiter.
You could do conversion rates by interview type, by interviewer, so by the designers, by site, by team type, yeah by location by discipline and use all that information to really constantly just like hone and make better and do learnings from. Now I recognize that not everyone is going to have the opportunity to have a specialized design recruiter or to have the tooling that can give them those metrics.
So I think, part of what we do as we work together now as part of good Maven is how do we bring this kind of world class expertise to inform startup teams. We've hired for, founding designers for pre-seed startups, a, B and C series, and also larger companies like at t and monday.com and things like that.
So I guess I'm curious for both of you, like how do you look at this, massive tool set that you have to bring to bear to hiring, and how do you like. Look at each individual situation and assess, okay, how and what is [00:37:00] needed here to help.
Melissa Hajj: Maybe we should start from the hiring manager side. Since that's where it all starts, right? I think there are a couple of things happening right now in the industry, which is one companies are hiring designers. Again, great. Yay hooray for everyone. But there's still when you get a rep, when you are able to start hiring, usually you've got one, maybe two, right?
And you may not, maybe don't have the kind of money that you actually wanna spend for that rec, maybe you do more often you don't. So that really. We've been talking about this, these scenarios where we had so many designers to hire. When you have one or two designers to hire, and those hires really matter to the trajectory of your company, it really pressurizes the hire.
And unfortunately, I think the natural reaction from a hiring manager is to want a unicorn.
You want somebody who does it all soup to nuts and has done it before many times. Exactly the way you need. They need, you need them to [00:38:00] do it at your company. Whether that's they've built exactly this type of product, FinTech, whatever to the exact types of design. You wanna see that in their portfolio. Extreme conservatism, right?
But that's actually not necessarily a pathway to success because it's very outward looking. It's not actually looking at what you have. At your company, in your team, what resources do you actually have and what do you, what gaps do you really need to fill?
What can you coach and what is it absolutely essential that when that person lands on the ground they need to be able to do independently and quickly?
And often in these situations, we've got, that team usually does have somebody who's thinking about the product and who has at least some understanding of what makes a valuable product.
But what they don't have is somebody who can actually do really strong interaction design, visual design, execution for the product. And so it's essential that they hire someone with that, those executional skills [00:39:00] who can grow into some of the product. That's one, one example. But I think it really, if you're going to hire responsibly in a tight environment as a hiring manager, you have to really think about the profile of designer that you can, that you need.
And what you're willing to trade off against. Because unicorns, they don't really exist. They exist, but you know what? They have a choice. They can work wherever they want and they can name their fee. And so they're really hard to attract. And if you wanna be hiring for a year before you find that unicorn, he's willing to come work for you, fine.
But chances are you probably need someone sooner. So you have to have, in order to make a good hire, you have to have a grip on what you actually already have on the team.
And what you're willing to trade off against.
Meg Rye: And I think, the strange thing about the market is you'd think it would be easier to hire now because there are so many more designers.
I remember back in the early two thousands when I was first hiring designers and they weren't even called product designers. And it was like, [00:40:00] if you could find anyone who knew, who like knew their way around an interface, that was it. They were hired. It's so different now. There's, so there, there are thousands of designers who are looking for work and who want to find that good match.
But to your point, Melissa, we're seeing a lot more conservatism around that and specificity. So they want folks who have solved exactly the same problem, although maybe someone who's solved a similar problem that is much more complex but in a different domain might actually be able to apply that knowledge to differentiate or to innovate in a way that could be even more useful to your company than like doing it the same way as it's done before.
Melissa Hajj: I wanted to ask the two of you though, one of the things that I know that's happening right now in this hiring environment is that for every job posting, recruiters and managers are getting inundated by applications. So how is that changing both what you're doing and how you're working with the hiring managers that you, that are your clients?
Kelly Norris: That's [00:41:00] a really good question. I think Meg said it there, there's so many more designers in the market that are looking for work. And it is, it's unfortunate that we can't always help everyone. We don't have enough roles for everyone. I think being really it comes two sides for me. One is that, we are seeing we're being inundated with applications, but taking time to.
It takes a lot of time to look through those applications. When we are getting 2, 3, 400 people applying for a single role. Recruiting has to take a stance of what is our bare minimum that we are looking for a role, and then how do we pull from the applications that we have the minimum viable expectation and then making sure that we're presenting those candidates to the hiring teams so that there is that kind of, because there's two aspects of recruiting, right? There's the passive outreach, the ones who we go after, those unicorns that we are gonna be chasing our tails. To be honest, a lot of the time we don't [00:42:00] get responses when we do great, but they're normally not interested. So having that balance between active, so people who are coming to us and really wanting it and they're they're hungry for it, but we still have an expectation of meeting the requirements of the role.
So understanding that we have the, we can have a baseline. So these are the hard skills that we can't not lose, but maybe we can grow into some of those behaviorals, or maybe it's vice versa. You don't have to be as strong visually, but the role means that, like from a UX kind of in or an interaction perspective.
You there, there's no way around that, that, that piece, as long as you are self-aware and you have proactivity, you can grow and learn. So giving applications a shot, but knowing, I like personally, I like helping people, but I can't get to everyone.
And that's a really hard thing for me to have to ad admit [00:43:00] to that not everyone is gonna be right for a role.
But now trying to narrow down my focus to at least present some applicants that, that have, that meet the. The recommended criteria for the role. I dunno if that's a good answer.
Meg Rye: I agree with you, Kelly. I think, but all three of us got into the work that we do in part because we love people and we like to help people get where they're going, right? And to support them through that.
So I think some of the things that, that the three of us have evolved together to offer to candidates may be like DIY info on our blog, right? Or doing this podcast here, right? Like, how do we make how do we demystify some of the secrets behind hiring and make it more easily accessible to folks so that they can use that in their own searches, whether it's through a client that we're hiring or whether it's through for some for something else.
We do also offer. [00:44:00] Coaching throughout the life of a designer. So we have everyone from a more junior level designers who work with Melissa or our other coach Timothy, on things like hard skills and how to get better at design through to like senior leaders who want to get better at cross-functional influence or how do they grow their career, how do they get better at communicating, how do they develop their product thinking and things like that.
And also how do we make the market more accessible for folks coming from underrepresented backgrounds? So we've done we posts on how to find and hire black and brown designers, lgbtqia plus designers and things like that. So that work is just getting started and I think we'll be there for the rest of our careers.
But I realize that we can easily fill an hour together and at some point we'll need to close our conversation. So I guess I would love to finish up by asking both of you what are you excited about today in [00:45:00] terms of the industry? There's a lot of change happening with ai. The market is a little bit tumultuous but I feel like we're seeing, a lot of hiring happening.
A lot of coaching that we're doing. Yeah. For each of you, what would you say you're most excited about?
Kelly Norris: I think it's a couple of things. One we spoke to more people are hiring now. There is, and again, whether that be good from a good Maven standpoint or just personally, it means that we actually get to help people and we see so many in need of their next opportunity.
I'm excited to find. Roles for them. But equally I'm also working on kind of leadership and exec hiring at the moment. So when you have someone who's investing in senior leadership at some of these kind of smaller and larger kind of enterprise tech startup, like whatever industry it's sits within the, you're investing in senior leadership in the hope that team can then scale.
And then you can look at, okay we're trying to [00:46:00] grow our products and ultimately that does mean we're going to need to scale our teams and we're gonna need to bring in more talent. And after the last few years I think seeing that change, and it's not a, I'm not here to say that it's gonna get back on track and suddenly we're gonna see the same volume of hiring that perhaps we did three, four years ago.
But to see a trend of. People being aware that they need to grow and to hire. That's what I'm looking forward to. It's not specifically about what tech is coming and ai but for me it's just the growth opportunities that, that we're starting to see.
Melissa Hajj: Kelly covered the hiring market and the team growth market really well, and I would agree that I'm quite excited about that too. So I'll take a slightly different tack. I'll take the practice of design and the practice of software design. Obviously we're at quite an inflection point with the technology industry today and with what [00:47:00] AI is going to be able to do for product design.
And there are a lot of people who are frightened of it. Because they think it's going to eliminate some jobs. And that may well be true, but I'm quite excited about it because there's a lot of the role of product design that is block and tackle or like a friend of mine used to call it making license plates.
Like you're just stamping out another registration flow. Guys, here we go. Ah, some more error messages for this particular really annoying edge case that I've seen 16 times before, but it's a different product, so I need to make those dialogue boxes and write all those strings, right? So there, there's a lot of aspects of the product design role that can be repetitious, not particularly exciting, but need to be done well enough because they really matter to they're the glue or the way products work today.
And I think that AI is going to help us do those better, faster so that we can focus on the things that actually make products good. So your registration, like [00:48:00] your signup flow or login flow. Is not the thing that is going to make or break your product, although it does have an influence. Don't get me wrong, I spent time in the growth team.
But what really matters is the value exchange that your product brings between the business and the person who's using it, right? And if a lot of people can make products easily, good registration flow, fine, that's all done. Now we have more time to focus on what actually makes a great product great.
And to really hone in on that what makes a great product differentiated from other products in the market, and to spend our time where it really matters, as opposed to on all these other things that have to get done, like doing laundry. So I see AI as a labor saving device for design, and I am excited to.
See designers grow in new ways when they can spend their time less [00:49:00] on doing the laundry and more on the stuff that really matters for product. So that's what I'm really excited about.
Meg Rye: I guess what I'm excited about is that, this is a little bit of new and unchartered territory. I feel a little bit like granny recruiter, Meg, when I talk about when I started hiring in the early two thousands, right?
And it was like, I remember hiring for Comcast and it was like, what would it be like to have TV on the internet, right? And now that's just a very normal part of everyday life for us that we would have access to these wonderful services. And so I think there will be new questions that we'll need to confront as technology changes how we interact with products.
And some of those questions will be around ethics and, what's the healthiest way to use these technologies and what's the, what's the most yeah the ethical way. And so I think that's where we as folks who hire and coach talent have a huge [00:50:00] opportunity and also a responsibility to be aware of and coach in the direction of positive impact and positive results.
So I think that's just a natural orientation we have in the values and the way that we work. And it's something that there's not a guidebook for, right? So it's something that we'll be all figuring out together. So I'm excited And also curious about that aspect of things. I think with that I just wanna thank both of you so much.
It's a joy to work with you, but it's also even more of a joy to, to talk with you and hear a little bit about your journeys and your wisdom. So thank you for bringing that today.
Melissa Hajj: It's such a treat to be able to continue to work with both of you. When I left Meta, I didn't, I was going off and taking a big leap off into the big wide open.
But here it's like being able to work with people that I know and trust and that we're friends and it makes every day when we get to work together really great. So thanks for [00:51:00] that, Meg.
Meg Rye: You are welcome.
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