Hiring a UX or UI designer
A hundred and fifty applications where the CV is close to irrelevant and the portfolio — the thing that actually matters — is curated to show only what worked.
A portfolio is a highlights reel with the reasoning removed. Design is the one discipline here where everybody agrees the CV is not the evidence, and then screens on portfolios that are systematically misleading: they show the final screens, beautifully presented, with a short narrative written after the fact. What they cannot show is how many versions came before, which constraints were real, what the engineering team pushed back on, or whether the designer changed their mind when the research disagreed with them. A striking portfolio distinguishes a good visual designer from a poor one and tells you almost nothing about whether someone can work inside a small team with limited budget and an opinionated founder — which is usually the actual job.
Research, visuals, or both — and who says no
Selene splits the role before anything else, because “designer” bundles two skills that rarely arrive in the same person at the same level.
Where this designer sits between research and pixels
UX research and UI craft are different disciplines under one job title. Small teams usually need both and get one, so establishing which half is non-negotiable prevents a shortlist of beautiful portfolios with no research depth, or the reverse.
One sentence changes the guide
It is the sharpest possible question for this discipline because it asks for exactly the material that curation removes. A designer who has genuinely worked through a problem has three abandoned directions and an opinion about each; a designer who has decorated someone else’s decisions has a very clean case study and nothing behind it.
Exceptional, not just good —
“Someone who shows me the version that didn’t work, and why they abandoned it.”
→ A discarded direction became a must-have; portfolio polish stopped being the ranking signal.
What the guide ends up measuring
Six criteria for a team that has a design system and needs thinking. Note that visual craft sits at important rather than must — an unusual call, and the direct consequence of one sentence in the conversation above.
No gates, and the portfolio is not one either
Nothing here is a yes-or-no fact. It is worth saying that the portfolio should not be used as a gate either: requiring one before an application will be read excludes career-changers and people whose best work sits behind an NDA, both of which are common in this discipline and neither of which correlates with being poor at the job.
Scored on the reasoning, not the render
Selene never receives the candidate’s name or the raw CV. She scores a blind, structured profile, with any stated age, sex, nationality and religion stripped out before scoring runs.
She reads how someone describes the problem and the route they took through it — which is present in written case-study text even when the portfolio images only show the destination.
How the blind scoring works →What stays with you
Selene's half
- Splitting research from visual craft before any criterion is written
- Reading all 150 against the same guide, blind, with the evidence attached
- A ranked shortlist that is not ordered by presentation quality
- An interview brief that asks each candidate for the version they threw away
Yours
- Getting designers to apply — Selene doesn’t post to job boards or source candidates
- Opening the portfolios; she reads what candidates wrote about their work, not their images
- Any design exercise or portfolio walkthrough, with her brief in hand
- The offer, and every call that matters
Nearby roles
Say which half you are missing
Research or craft — pick one and the shortlist changes completely.