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: 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: Um, hi, my name is Melissa and I've spent the last 25 years, oh my God, of my life. Um, both designing software and then building software design teams, um, 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 yourself.
Kelly Norris: Um, a little bit about myself, right. So I talk a lot, so sorry in advance. Um, I have been in recruiting now for just over 10 years. Um, interestingly I started as a designer more on the print and textile side of things for, um, kind of high-end interior firms.
Um. That's a long story of why that didn't work out. But ultimately I was drawn towards tech. Um, and initially I had a really great opportunity to work at Microsoft. Um, big win for me 'cause it was also looking after Microsoft Studios from a gaming standpoint. Um, so I hired across product design, product management, UX research, um, all the way through to, again, your lion head, rare, and then dynamic CRM.
So it really is kind of the spectrum of, of, of products that I did for around two years. Um, and then I had the, uh, the pleasure of, of moving to what was then Facebook now meta, uh, where I met the wonderful Meg. Um, I worked at Meta for about seven years. Um. Spanning across growth, analytics, data science, and then a full circle moment back to design, um, where I actually help scale the international design recruiting team.
Uh, and that is where, um, I had even more of a pleasure to work with Melissa. Mm-hmm. But on some of the very, very complicated and difficult, uh. Hiring, um, across not just product design, but we also had art animation specialist design, and again, full cycle moment. 'cause I got to, to look into a lot of that specialist design, game designers, animators, character artists.
Um, and then I took a little bit of a stint, um, away from recruiting to find myself. Um, and then ultimately didn't work out, wanted to come back to recruiting and hence, I'm now at, at Good Maven, um, for six months now, I think it is, if not a little bit longer. So,
Meg Rye: hi. Hello. Thank you for that. And just, you know, although I know both of you, when I hear you tell your stories, it's interesting because I see we both sort of started in the arts, although in different ways and, and sort of brought us to that.
So I guess I'm curious for both of you, what, what attracted you to the arts or the creative industries in the first place?
Melissa Hajj: So before we, when we were. Talking about doing this podcast together, we discovered the fact that the two of you are both more trained in design and art than I am. Um, my degree is in theater and back of house, so like set design and painting sets and constructing sets.
Mm-hmm. Um, but um, at the time when I graduated with that degree from the University of Virginia, um, the first.com boom was happening. And there was a stark reality for me on the table, which was that if I wanted to stay in theater, I was looking at probably two to three years of unpaid or barely paid internships, um, and sleeping in my parents' basement.
And, um, you know, I'm not afraid of insects, but my parents' basement has jumping crickets, like the ones that can jump like two or three feet. And you know, I just, the idea of those. Having a roommate jumping crickets as a roommate. Like that just didn't, didn't vibe. And I had also gone to a science and technology high school where I had learned computer science, a bit of coding, c plus plus, also a bunch of HTML.
Um, so when I graduated from UVA, I could not only spell HTML and I could also fog a mirror and operate Photoshop. So I was actually overqualified for a job as a web designer and that got me outta my parents' basement post haste. So, um, it started out as a practical thing, uh, but I discovered that there was a lot about design and web design and software design that was rather similar to what I loved in theatrical design.
'cause you had an audience that you were trying to work for and you had a. Um, a thing that you needed to convey or help them do. And you had all these technical constraints and then there were aesthetics applied on top of it. And those really, um, those aspects when you put them together, really fire my brain cells.
Mm-hmm. Um, and make me wanna get really stuck into a problem, uh, to try to solve it. So it ended up being something that I loved as well as something that was financially feasible.
Meg Rye: I noticed that there's this part of like, you know, you're, you're creating something for someone else that comes into it and the, and the care and thoughtfulness that goes into that.
Um, Kelly, I'm curious, what attracted you to, to go from textiles and print into recruiting?
Kelly Norris: I think the first thing I can say is no one jumps at recruiting. As soon as they, you know, I'm, um. Growing up child. As a child, I wanted to be a recruiter. It doesn't happen that way. Um, I think the first thing I wanted to be was a vet and I soon realized that was gonna work for me.
Um, but I'd always been creative. Um, I, I got my energy out by making things and designing things. Um. So I, I wanted to see that through. That was all, I was very single-minded throughout my entire, um, teenage and then into like early adult years of, of growing up. I wanted to be a designer. Um, but I only saw one avenue of that, and that was that kind of textiles because I was very tactile as a person.
So yeah, I went to university. I studied printed design and media specifically for, um, surface design.
Melissa Hajj: Mm-hmm.
Kelly Norris: Uh, and unfortunately it's an industry that it, it does take a lot from you. Um, it's is an incredibly nuanced market where there's, there's not a lot of really successful textile designers that make it.
Melissa Hajj: Hmm.
Kelly Norris: Um, and I think when you are kind of younger, you, you try and very similar, Melissa, you, you learn that you have to take a hit somewhere. Um, so I spent, uh, once I left university, I, I was from internship to internship for free. Just working and, and. Giving everything that I had to an industry that, um, wasn't really where it should have been at at the time.
I was fortunate enough to, to be taken on from an internship full time, and my role just spanned. It went from being, uh, designing custom pieces for interior design, um, agencies, but that all the way through to production management. Um, going to the, the print houses and actually watching them produce the fabrics.
And then it went to business relations. I was now working with people getting to sell and getting to be more of a, you know, account management, office management. And I started realizing that, you know, I taught myself HTML, CSS and, and JavaScript. I was, I was helping to build out their website. Um, I was doing all of these things that.
Weren't just designing fabrics. Um, and then there was a time where I was even helping them re realign their tech stack. So we, we bought in, um, at the time it was office, um, Office365, and Dynamics and all of these, like building out a CRM system for our clients. Nothing to do with design. Um, and I, I started falling in love with the notion of working for a tech company.
Um. And some of that is down to just cost of living. And the fact that, you know, being in, in, in design was, um, not getting me out of my mom's house. Love her to pieces, but there was only so much I could do to live in the same home. I, I needed my, my own way out. Um, no jumping
Melissa Hajj: crickets though. No, no.
Kelly Norris: We did have, not in London.
No big old spiders were my thing though, it was, it was a very old house, drafty and a, a lot of holes in places that shouldn't have been. Um, so for me it was a change into something where I, I was growing as a person as well. Like, I had all these other interests around tech and, and I, a really, really good friend of mine introduced me to a, uh, recruiting director for EMEA at Microsoft.
And we kicked it off straight away. And she was like, one way or another, I'm gonna find you a role. Hmm. Um, so I went down the account management route at first, like, I like people. I can ha I like people sometimes. Um, recruiting, you learn, um, very, you learn who you are in recruiting and then how you adapt and then speak to other people.
But part of what I love about recruiting is that that management of, of kind of people and clients and, and candidates and that care that, that it takes. Um, so I interviewed a little bit and then this role landed, which was actually in recruiting, uh, looking after initially administrative tasks within recruiting.
Um, and I thought, why not? Mm. It's, it's, it's completely different. It's completely outside of my comfort zone, but sometimes you have to take that leap. And I took the role, found out that not only was that role, um, it changed everything for me.
Melissa Hajj: Mm-hmm.
Kelly Norris: Um. I, I then took the initiative to, to push towards being a saucer, um, a role that I'd never heard of in my life.
I didn't know what a, a talent saucer was. Um, sounds magical. It's it's a sorcery. Sorcery. Yeah. I was, honestly, it does feel like magic sometimes, um, pulling candidates out of thin, well, what feels like thin air, but it's hours and hours of work. Mm-hmm. Um, and it was in an industry that I really liked as well.
I still got to find designers, but for games
Meg Rye: mm-hmm.
Kelly Norris: For me, that was perfect. Um, so I still got to keep part of who I was in that creative element. Um, and yes, I dabbled, I went to engineering. I worked on, um, growth and analytics and marketing and, and, and anything in between. But, but I still kept that creative element.
And I think when you get to work with product and whether it be product management or product design, you are still. Thinking about how does this affect people? Mm-hmm. Um, and within, when you look at design, the biggest part of that is what, how does it affect people? What am I creating? What am I building that is, is for people?
Mm-hmm. Um, so yeah, it's, sorry, long-winded, but would I go back to design? Maybe. Maybe. Okay. Um, but I do also love the, the ability to be creative within recruiting. It's a whole different way of working. Um, and now I get to hire designers, so, and I know what, I know what things mean. Mm-hmm. I think this is wonderful thing coming from that background.
I can have conversations with people where it's, I understand, um, what they're doing. I might not be able to do it to do it anymore, but, but having those conversations and resonating, um, I think also helps candidates. See that, that I am taking an interest.
Melissa Hajj: Mm. Uh,
Kelly Norris: I think that's a big thing from a recruiting standpoint of knowing the role and, and knowing who you're talking to.
Meg Rye: So I hear that you have a level of craft, um, you know, understanding yourself because you've made things. You also love working with people. Um, and I think one of the things that all three of us have in common is, you know, we studied the arts and that sort of inspired us to get into, you know, the very different directions that we've taken, um, before today.
And I guess just to, to, to add my story. So I went to, um, art school for undergrad, and I, I was actually a, a crafts glass major. Um, but I, I, although I did glass blowing, I mostly did, um, kiln casting and ladle casting. And I think when I realized that what I wanted to do was not. Um, was not just be an artist, but to do something more with people is, um, I was part of this global organization called the Glass Arts Society, and we coordinated, um, the annual conference in Amsterdam.
And so my job as a student representative was to coordinate the, um, coming together of glass students from all over the world to blow glass on the barges in the canals of Amsterdam. And I, I distinctly remember this moment of standing on the threshold of a building just outside the barges and looking and just thinking, wow.
Like through, through my ability to be part of this organization, we brought all these people together and I just realized then that. People was really the thing that I loved, um, as and, and art is sort of like a conduit to bring people together. Um, but also I think I realized as the three of us talk that like design is a really broad church, right?
Like, you know, even earlier in my career, like we would be looking for people from anthrop, anthropology backgrounds, sociology backgrounds, um, information architecture, learning graphic design, things like that. Um, so yeah, I think that kind of leads on to talk a little bit about the bringing together that the three of us did of talent when we were at, um, Facebook in the earlier days, um, in London, which may be confusing for some folks who are listening because I have an American accent.
Melissa has an American accent and Kelly has a British accent. Um, so maybe we could talk about how we all sort of came together, um, in those early days of London as a site for.
Melissa Hajj: The Facebook story and the Facebook London story really starts with you. And then Kelly and I kind of appear on the scene as, uh, new characters introduced in the course of the story.
Right? So, okay. How did you land in London, Meg?
Meg Rye: So, flash forward after graduating from art school, and I similarly, um, to the two of you, I, I sort of went through like, well, what am I going to do next moment? And, you know, when you're a glass artist, you have to have access to like, you know, a hundred thousand plus, um, dollar, um, studios to be able to, to just create the art and then sustain yourself.
But by that point, I really realized I love bringing people, um, closer together. So after 10 years of working in the arts and culture, um. Organizations in the states, like the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the New Orleans Ballet Association. I got into tech recruiting and I did that for about, um, 10 or 10 or 15 years.
So I hired for places like Siemens, eBay, um, and also like smaller startups. Facebook tapped me on the shoulder to come to London, and this was back in, um, 2015. So they were building products for the first time outside of the us. And one of the things that was really compelling to me is I think at that time, over 85% of the people that use Facebook's products lived outside of the us And so it was really meaningful to, um, to start building technology in places that reflected more of the diversity of the people who were using the products.
Um, so I came over with two other, um, folks from Facebook hq. I had never worked for a big tech company before, so this was a pretty new adventure. So landed on my first day and um, I remember saying to my manager. Great. So, you know, we're gonna be hiring the first designers outside of the us where, where do we get started?
And she said, no, Meg, you're here to tell us that, like you're here to help build that. And I was like, wow, this is a completely different organization than what I've worked in before, which was more like hierarchical. And, you know, you sort of worked your way up and it was just such, such a breath of fresh air, like exciting, but also a bit terrifying.
Um, and so, yeah, so there were, I think four designers in the London office at that time. And I think three of them were, um, what we call visa orphans. So like they, they were meant to be hired in the US but because of visa issues, they were being held there. So they were working on projects that were rooted in the states.
And the goal was to build out a completely autonomous, um, site where they didn't have to be reliant on the us.
So in the early days, everything was really scrappy. It was myself and a couple other designers and we just brought in the, um, brought in designers, did interviews and sort of rinse and repeat. Um, and so I think that scrappy process got us so far.
Um, 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 um, and things like that. So I think when the two of you came on it, we were at an inflection point, um, and sort of, you know, going from Crucible where we figure everything out to, okay, now how are we gonna grow really quickly?
Um, so I guess what I'm curious then, Kelly, were you, did you join next before Melissa?
Kelly Norris: I can't remember. I believe so. I joined in 20. 2016? I think so, yeah. Not, not too long after yourself. I, the, the funny thing is, I'm remembering now, I actually initially interviewed to work on design. So I was supposed to partner with you, like, as like a, um, for product design.
And I got midway through the interview process, and then they started talking about analytics, and I was like, Hmm, hmm, excuse me. Um, and obviously I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm adaptable. Uh, and I really like the idea of meta, but, so when I joined, I didn't have that, um, understanding or knowledge of, 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, um, how do we, how do we scale product design, but how do we scale product? How do we scale tech in London? Mm-hmm. Uh, and that was very, very new for, for, for meta. Um. Then Facebook, where do you find the talent? How, and, and again, this for, for me, I had worked on some engineering roles, but I'd never touched data.
Um, so I had to learn about an entirely new industry, um, alongside, uh, just a adapting to this whole new environment and of where I would say you were more of an owner than, than perhaps when I was at, at Microsoft, everything was like, here's what you do, here's what, like you are, you are told everything.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, and I think it was great to have at the start that small team where it was yourself, Meg, me, and, and maybe what like five other, less than five people on, on kind of what you would consider product recruiting. Um. You could take a little bit more of a, a, a risk in terms of how you approached, uh, problems.
And I think what I really valued about that was the business partnership as well. Again, I wasn't in design yet, but even from an, um, a tech perspective, you could tell that everyone wanted the same outcome. They wanted to make the London site successful. Um, and they, they were always there to support. Uh, I was very fortunate that Meg and I were on the same team and, and we were able to kind of collaborate quite closely and even partner, um, with one another on some non-design related things.
Melissa Hajj: Yeah.
Kelly Norris: So yeah, I think my story was more how do I take, how do I take this leap into something completely different, um, without necessarily realizing that it was gonna lead back to ultimately where I wanted to to be. Um, back in design, and I knew, uh, when you joined Melissa, I knew of you. Um, I think it was a, uh, that's terrifying.
We were one, again, I was someone who at that point, I think I'd only had a few years of experience in recruiting. Um, I liked to give off the confidence and mm-hmm. Um, experience this. Like I know what I'm doing, but equally, you meet people who have all of this experience around what you are trying to, to hire for.
And it is like, will I impress them? Will I will, will I be able to stand, stand at that level and, and not completely cave in, um, and, and not know what I'm talking about? So it was admiration. Melissa, just to be very clear.
Melissa Hajj: I'm glad you think, I thought I knew what I was doing.
Kelly Norris: what was your story of coming in and then working with us?
Melissa Hajj: So I started working at Meta at the time of Facebook in 2014 in Silicon Valley, um, 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. Um, 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? And we had no machinery, no process, no anything. When I got to Facebook in 2014, hiring wasn't perfect, but they had, they had already hit the point where they needed to hire designers in the tens to twenties to thirties range. Um. Every year. And so they had had to figure out a process and a way of evaluating designers and a way of trying to make things work, um, at scale when you've got a whole, a large pool of interviewers, a large pool of hiring managers, and a large, uh, a large set of roles that needed to be filled in a way that was very efficient.
Um, so stepping into that, one of the first things they do is they get you trained as an interviewer. Um, so there were a set of criteria, um, hard, 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.
And the soft skills are more of the behavioral traits that make you successful in a particular circumstance. Um, so. I had never been exposed to that kind of evaluation methodology. Like 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, I love systems. Like, I love figuring out both why you're getting results that are of a particular flavor with a system and how to, how to modify and or create and build a system that will get you the results that you want to get. Um. For some reason, my little nerd brain just 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 like, 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. Um, uh, the Silicon Valley operation to attract candidates to talk to candidates. Um, 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. Cold, said You wanna have a coffee? I'm in DC next week. Like, um, and managed to get some hires, some of whom I think are actually still there.
Um, so, um, it was a really exciting time to learn about how, how all of this works. So then fast forward to January of 2017, I think. Um, yeah, when, um, for life reasons. Um, my husband and I moved to London and fortunately meta. Was like, well, we could use a design manager in London. That could be fine. Um, and at the time when I arranged to move to London with meta, I mean this is a little bit orthogonal, but it gives you a sense of scaling that was happening at Meta at the time.
Um, 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, uh, by December I get a call from the leader of ads and business platform that says, actually, can you take a second team?
So before I even got mm-hmm. To London on the ground, my team had gone from four to 10.
Um, 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 like a, a, a, a double digit hiring target. Mm-hmm. 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 Yeah. At different points while you were at meta too. So when you said, um, 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 like, okay, this is happening. It's growing, it's growing fast. Um, so yeah. So it sounds like your, 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, it was a little bit nuts, um, but also, um, exhilarating and definitely one of those you are gonna learn really, really fast.
Melissa Hajj: Um, 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
Melissa Hajj: And how different it was from the States. Totally different.
Meg Rye: And how different the market was. The market was so different.
Melissa Hajj: Yes. Yeah. Yes. And I think, um, on the ground when I was in, when I was still in Menlo Park, I thought, you know, a designer is a designer, like hiring is hiring, right? Mm-hmm. And that is definitely not true. Um, between hiring, between the US and EMEA, the, the talent pool is different.
The way that companies tend to arrange themselves is different. So you have different titles, um, and different sets of experiences. You have differently shaped designers to put it in a weird visual way. Yeah.
Meg Rye: And, and I think oftentimes design is not as mature as like the, 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 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, um, almost most of the companies in in EMEA are business to business.
Melissa Hajj: Um, there 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, uh, computer consumer focused mm-hmm.
Consumer and computer focused. We had that too. Yes. Uh, consumer focused product design. Mm-hmm. 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, well, in business to business software, your buyer is almost never your user.
Whereas with consumer software, your buyer is your user if you, if you use that metaphor. So it required a different shift. What did you guys have to do 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, um, that market difference?
What did you have to do?
Kelly Norris: I found transparency was, was, 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, you know, we've had success hiring in in Menlo Park and the u um, just general us how is it that you are struggling?
And I think that, that, when that's, um. Rhetoric began of like, why are we not necessarily hiring as, as quickly or as, um, the, the caliber is not there really using data. And it's something that I know from my, my side of things, I really enjoy finding out the insights of, of, of the why. Um, so for me it was assessing the market, actually looking at where wa where was the talent coming from?
Um, for example, like product design didn't exist in EMEA or or APAC for years after it did in the US You had to look much deeper into what mm-hmm. A UX UI designer was, or if someone called themselves, you know, title soup. Mm-hmm. You're a visual designer, you're an interaction designer, you are a, um, specialist designer.
What does that mean? Um, so really showing that to the business and, 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.
Um, 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 London, we need to start looking at different profile types and how they can, um, how they can actually, uh, impact at, at a large tech company.
Um, so data for me was, 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. Um, and then it might also be my, um, it must be me, um, but being combative when necessary. Um, I'll stand up for a candidate if I believe your opinion of just what they have on paper is, is wrong. Um, so building that trust I think is, is critical.
Um, 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. So that partnership, um, and being able to, not making an assumption that. Because Melissa, you, yourself, you, you are fantastic at what you do. Um, I shouldn't assume that you know what I do.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, and I think that that is, that's the 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, uh, what you need based on that.
Meg Rye: Hmm. I, 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 um, and make informed decisions and also recommendations. And we were all learning together at that point too. Right. 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. Um, and so Melissa, you were asking a little bit about like how did you communicate with some of the folks and like, oh gosh. I remember, you know, 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, I'm meeting the top brass.
And then, you know, you're, you're reporting up to like Julie Zoo and um, and Melissa Stewart and Tom Hobbs, and, and it's just like, wow, okay, I need to be on top of my stuff and I, I need to really like be coming to them with like, information that's helpful for us to together make these decisions. And so, I don't know, I remember this one piece of data that I was doing research and I was just saying, why, you know, why is the market so different, um, over here than in the States?
And one of the things was if you took, um. Some back of the napkin math. But, um, 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. So, you know, likely in, 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 when you look at how candidates understand design and, and the design interview process, you know, in the bay everybody was doing whiteboarding exercises and you know, they were really sharp at like, you know, how we market ourselves.
And that that's maybe also a very American thing is like you're constantly sort of 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, um, on, on the candidate. And so one of the things that we implemented to help that, and I I think Kelly, we probably did this on various different teams, um, but we started doing prep chats for, um, designers before they did their interviews.
And that was not to give them a leg up, it was just to, to give them the opportunity to access some of the knowledge that people in the bay just, they, they just, it was second nature, right? So things like, you know, using data and research to represent your ideas. We're not giving them the answers, but we're saying this is the format in which we would like to see how you evaluate KPIs, how you measure the success of, of the, 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, um, 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.
Well, not training prep chats, that you, I think one of the reasons why, uh, uh, interviewing is a skill. It, it's a skill. And especially Silicon Valley style interviews, they are really hard. Mm-hmm. Um, and there is a way of speaking and a way of behaving in those interviews that's sort of expected. And if you've never, 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 design skills. Um, 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. Mm-hmm. 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.
Melissa Hajj: Um, 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, 14%.
Meg Rye: Yeah. 14% of people who interviewed got an offer.
Melissa Hajj: Yeah, so, 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 that's a problem.
Um, and it's a huge toll on the teams that are doing the interviewing, because I think we don't, uh, 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. So they had to do all the interviews.
Yeah. And it was a huge tax on people.
People would be spending an average of like five to 10 hours a week interviewing. So that's like an, that's like a, a fifth of your time per week. Um, 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.
Um, 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.
Melissa Hajj: Um, and the general blanket assumption was that the problem that we were experiencing was because we had all those new interviewers.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, so clearly these interviewers are passing people through our initial screens that just aren't qualified for the job. Um, but I had been on both sides of the equation, both like I was an interviewer, um, 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.
Mm-hmm. Which, um, 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.
Um, so I had seen lots of interviewers in the way they were assessing candidates, and I had been an interviewer assessing candidates myself. Um, and I just didn't buy that explanation of what was going on. Like, it felt like there was something deeper and more systematic going on. So, um, you and I sat down and we, I I had you grab all of the interview packets mm-hmm.
For all of the candidates that we had interviewed from like 2016 through 2017, which is something like 40 candidates.
Meg Rye: Yep. Um, 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. Um, so I, and the color coding helped me look for trends. Mm-hmm. Um, 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, um, but it was also completely eye-opening. Um, because it wasn't, it wasn't that, it was just a few interviewers who were passing through candidates, but we were passing unqualified candidates through initials. Um, and those people were getting all no hires when they came in for their full, their full interview loop.
Um, but it wasn't because of untrained interviewers. Almost every single one of those. Unqualified candidates 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.
Melissa Hajj: Yeah, I remember that.
Meg Rye: That was frustrating. When you're the recruiter and, 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. Like, I've met this candidate, I've seen their work like that. That just doesn't, doesn't sound quite, you know?
Melissa Hajj: So here's what was going on. Um, in initials, interviewers, even highly qualified interviewers who had done hundreds of interviews were they were, they wanted to give people a chance.
Melissa Hajj: They were willing to see potential. Um, and they were willing to pass through people who weren't quite meeting the hard skill criteria.
Mm-hmm. But then when it came to onsite interviews, those same interviewers were incredibly mm-hmm. Like they were, they were expecting extreme seniority and highly specific domain expertise that mm-hmm. The average inter designer coming on off the street is just not, it's not possible. You're not gonna have that.
Melissa Hajj: Um, 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.
Melissa Hajj: 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.
Meg Rye: And, 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.
Um, 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 don't get the specifics of what the candidate actually did, and they forget to tell you.
Melissa Hajj: Or like what the team around them was. Right. 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?
Um, 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.
Melissa Hajj: 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.
Melissa Hajj: Are they able to build coherent and easy to use and accessible interfaces on different platforms regardless of what the domain was?
Um, 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. Um, and this completely opened my mind to, again, how all these systems get built.
Melissa Hajj: Like the interviewing system and how. Your system is perfectly designed for the results that you're getting.
Melissa Hajj: Um, 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. Like, I wanna see your interview packets. Mm-hmm. Show me what you actually have.
Don't make assumptions about what's going wrong. Let's find out, um, 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 50 or 75 even more. And so crazy. And so, I mean, I think when we all left there, the, the international design team outside of the US was over 700 people across, you know, remotely, throughout emea, onsite in London, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, and Singapore. And even a very, a couple designers in Lagos and, um, and Seoul when, probably when Kelly was, was managing the team.
But I remember one of the things that we did was, you know, sort of 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 so, like doing that titration. It, 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, um, I think it was made, yeah. Two of the design managers that were there at the time helped to, um, sort of, we did a prep with all of the US, 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 site in London who were more senior, like yourself to Melissa, to, to do the final interviews.
And then that really helped turn around, um, 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. Mm-hmm. 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, a background interview where a design manager or someone qualified would sit with the candidate and like 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. Um, and that would assess some of those hard skills, um, and see whether this candidate's work was 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. So, um, where the interviewer and the interviewee would sit down and critique an app together from the interviewee's phone. Um, 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, um, to, uh, 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.
Um, so obviously initials take a lot less time than that full process where there's a lot more people involved and there's a lot more time invested. Um, so, uh, 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, um, conversion rates, I think it was around 40% of the final interview to offer, which was, I mean, glorious.
Um, 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, 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, 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: 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 like 20 16, 20 17. You, we, Melissa, you and I, we start and Meg as well, we started seeing them again, appearing towards that 2021, 2022.
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, we had kind of just before we, we left, it was 25 in, in a, in a single design recruiting team across, um, this was in Singapore, Tel Aviv and, and London. So now you are having to factor in, is it, is it me, is it us?
Are we, are we the problem? Um, or are we, are we seeing actually we've hired so many designers and once again, we are calibrating new, 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 so.
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 kind of doing their job? Um, because again, new people, it takes time to ramp and, and from, from our side, within the recruiting, um, piece, it was looking at how we can upskill.
Um, there's actually a much smaller, uh, proportion of, of design centric recruiters in, 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.
Um, so we had to think about. How do we teach them? Um, and there was a lot, I I, I love a playbook. I love writing. Um, a lot of it came down to just training guides and, and kind of 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, from a targeting perspective to hire.
Hmm. Um, how? Probably nuts. It's crazy. 10 to to 100 over very little years. Um, but I will say it's brilliant that there was that investment. Like they saw the, the, not only the need, but the potential of what we could do. So over those years of, of, um, recruiting designers. It was great to get some of that recognition that, you know, we are capable of hiring these, um, 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, with designers to, to be fundamental. Mm-hmm. Um, we created a, 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. Um, you might help them understand if, you know, um, you've had a really tough recruiter screen and you can't decide if it's it's right or not.
Sit with your designer and run through mm-hmm. 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, it took time, but there was almost a click. They understood a little bit more about what, what we needed to hire for.
Um, and we did other things like business acumen sessions. Mm-hmm. Um, because it's not just about, you know, adding, adding to the complexity. Um, 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, um, nuanced WhatsApp. We're very, very focused on visual. Um, now there's a different, uh, assessment criteria when you are, when you are looking at a profile, but also how do you understand selling of the different teams mm-hmm. When you are hiring across so many different ones, um, at scale.
So helping the recruiting team to, um, get to know the business a little bit more, and even down to the basics of. What do you do? Um, what, what, what is, uh, great. We have Instagram in London. Which part, what is creator monetization?
Meg Rye: What, 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, it was an intense time, and I think being able to, um, skill build mm-hmm. Um, with the help of the, the, the product design team was, was hugely beneficial to, um, to the success and, and being able to kind of edge towards achieving those numbers.
Meg Rye: I 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, 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, just to give like a sense would be, you know, you could do conversion rates by interview type by recruiter.
You could do conversion rates by interview type, by, um, interviewer, so by the designers, by site, by team type, um. Yeah, by, by location, um, by discipline, um, and use all that information to really constantly just like hone and hone and make better and, and, and do learnings from. Um, now I, I recognize that not everyone is going to have the opportunity to have a specialized design recruiter or to have the, the tooling that can give them those metrics.
So I think, you know, 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. You know, we, we've hired for, you know, founding designers for pre-seed, um, startups, a, B and C series, and also larger companies like, um, at t and monday.com and things like that.
So I guess I'm, I'm curious for both of you, like how do you look at this, you know, massive tool set that you have to bring to bear to hiring, and how do you sort of like. Look at each individual situation and assess, okay, how and what is needed here to help.
Melissa Hajj: Um, maybe we should start from the hiring manager side.
Um, since that's where it all starts, right? Mm-hmm. Um, I think there are a couple of things happening right now in the industry, which is, um, one companies are hiring designers. Again, great. Yay, hooray, hooray for everyone. Mm-hmm. Um, but there's still, um, when you get a rep, when you are able to start hiring, usually you've got one, maybe two, right?
Mm-hmm. Um, so, and, 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, we've been talking about this, these scenarios where we had so many designers to hire. Mm-hmm. When you have one or two designers to hire, and those hires really, really, really matter to the trajectory of your company, it really pressurizes the hire.
Um, and unfortunately, I think the natural reaction from a hiring manager is to want a unicorn.
Melissa Hajj: 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 do it at your company. Mm-hmm. Whether that's they've built exactly this type of product, FinTech, mm-hmm.
Whatever, um, uh, to the exact types of design. You wanna see that in their portfolio. So, extreme conservatism, right?
Melissa Hajj: But that's actually not necessarily a pathway to success because it's very outward looking.
Um, 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, um, they need to be able to do independently and quickly?
Melissa Hajj: Right. Um, 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 who can grow into some of the product. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right. That's one, one example. But I think it really, if you're going to hire responsibly in a, in a tight environment as a hiring manager, you have to really think about the profile of designer that you can, that you need.
Mm-hmm. And what you're willing to trade off against. Because unicorns, they don't really exist. They sort of exist, but you know what? They have a choice. They can work wherever they want and they can name their fee.
Um, and so they're really, really hard to attract. Um, 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.
Melissa Hajj: Um, and what you're willing to trade off against. Um.
Meg Rye: Well put. And I think, you know, the, the, 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 mean, 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, 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, a lot more conservatism around that and, and specificity. So they want folks who have solved exactly the same problem, although maybe someone who's solved, uh, a, a, a, 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 sort of 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 a really good question. I think Meg, Meg said it there, there's so many more designers in the market that are looking for work. Um, and, 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, it comes two sides for me. One is that, you know, we are seeing, um, we're being inundated with, with applications, but kind of taking time to, 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. Um, recruiting has to take a stance of what is our bare minimum that we are looking for, for, for a role, and then how do we pull from the applications that we have, the, the minimum viable, um, expectation, um, and then making sure that we're presenting those candidates to, to the hiring teams so that there is that kind of, um.
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, our tails. To be honest, a lot of the time we don't 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 kind of wanting it and, and they're, they're, um, they're hungry for it, but we still have, um, an expectation of of meeting the requirements of the role.
So understanding that we have the, we can have a baseline. Um, 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, um, the role means that, like from a, 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. Um, so giving applications a shot, but knowing, I like personally, I like helping people, but I can't get to everyone.
Kelly Norris: and that's a really hard thing for me to, to have to ad admit to that not everyone is gonna be right for a role.
Um, but, but now trying to narrow down my focus to at least present some, um, applicants that, that, that have, that meet the recommended criteria for the role. I dunno if that's a good answer.
Meg Rye: I agree with you, Kelly. I mean, I think, you know, but all three of us got into the work that we do in part because we love people and we like to, 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, um, DIY info on our blog, right? Or doing this podcast here, right? Like, how do we make, um, 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, um, for something else.
We do also offer. Coaching throughout the life of, of a designer. So we have everyone from like a more junior level designers who work with Melissa or our other coach Timothy, on things like hard skills and you know, 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.
Um, and, and also how do we make the market more accessible for folks coming from underrepresented backgrounds? So we've done, um, we posts on how to find and hire black and um, 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.
Um. But I realize that we, we can easily fill an hour together and at some point we'll need to sort of close our conversation. So I guess I would love to, um, finish up by asking both of you, um, what are you excited about today in terms of the industry? I mean, there's a lot of change happening with ai. The market is a little bit tumultuous, but, but I feel like we're seeing, you know, a lot of hiring happening.
A lot of coaching that we're doing. So, yeah. For, for each of you, what would you say you're most excited about? Kelly, do you wanna go first?
Kelly Norris: Yeah, I can go first. I think it's, it's a couple of things. One, we, we spoke to more people are hiring now. Um, 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, and we see so many in need of, of their next opportunity.
I'm excited to find. Roles for, for them. Um, 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, um, kind of enterprise tech startup, like whatever industry it's sits within the, you're investing in senior leadership in the hope that that team can then scale.
Um, and then you can look at, okay, we're, we're trying to 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, um, after the last few years, um, 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, uh, volume of, of hiring that perhaps we did three, four years ago.
But to see a trend of. Um, people being, uh, aware that they need to, to grow and to hire. Um, that's what I'm looking forward to. It's not specifically about what tech is coming and, and ai, um, but for me it's just the, 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. Um, so I'll take a slightly different tack. I'll, I'll take the, the practice of design, um, and the practice of software design. Um, obviously we're at, um, quite an inflection point with the technology industry today and with, um, what AI is going to be able to do for product design.
And there are a lot of people who are, um, 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, the role of product design that is kind of block and tackle or like a friend of mine used to call it making license plates.
Like you're just stamping out, 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? Um, so there, there's a lot of aspects of the product design role that can be, um, repetitious, not particularly exciting, but need to be done well enough because they really matter to, they're, they're kind of 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 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, um, 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.
Um, 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 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, you know, this is a little bit of new and unchartered territory. So, um, you know, 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, and now that's just a, a very normal part of everyday life for us that, 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, you know, what's the healthiest way to use these technologies and what's the, um. What's the most, uh, yeah, the, the ethical way. And so I think that's where we as folks who hire and coach talent have a huge opportunity and also a responsibility to be aware of and coach in the direction of, of positive impact and positive results.
Right. So I think that's, that's just a natural orientation we have in the values and, 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, about that aspect of things. Well, I think with that, um, I just wanna thank both of you so much.
I mean, 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. I mean, 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 that, Meg. You are welcome.
Meg Rye: Plus one is all I can say. Lovely. Well, thank you so much for listening to our podcast today. We hope you got some valuable information from our conversation and for more career tips and insights, you can subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Substack, or visit us anytime at goodmaven.com.
We look forward to sharing more with you next time.
