Table of Contents

#1. Before the advert for the role
#2. Creating the advert
#3. Dealing with respondents
#4. Final tip

Hiring a great graphic designer can be of immense value to your business. The visual communication of your site with the audience you are targeting can grow a very significant amount, making the perfect graphic designer a middle-person that will make your outreach the best it can be. They build your brand’s reputation and better how well your brand’s key messages are portrayed to the public.

The hiring process itself may seem daunting when you have very little experience actually in the graphic designing field, though once you have the basics covered it will show itself for how simple it really is. Knowing exactly what you’re looking for is the most important golden rule to hiring any professional. Not following it will end you up with the wrong person.

Before the advert for the role

First, you must get ready to hire a professional graphic designer. Otherwise, you could find the perfect person and they will turn you down. It’s their choice to work with your brand. Visualizing your expectations will aid the way you advertise yourself as a potential employer and will help attract the person you require. Knowing the needs of your business will set the goals for what else needs to be done, helping you lay out clearly exactly what is needed.

Next, plan what a sensible budget is before you start looking. If you hire the best graphic designer you can find, the brand’s financial health could suffer and you will regret it. On the other hand, if you undershoot your budget, you risk having all the goals for hiring your graphic designer not met to the standard you envisioned.

From both the vision laid out and the appropriate budget planned, synthesize a creative brief that you and any potential graphic designer employees can easily refer to. You can specify if you require qualifications and objectives up-front. This is how you execute the hiring process: a rather simple document with your budget and expectations, the target audience of your company and other details that you feel will be required to know. Transparency is a buzzword here: without it, you will not attract a graphic designer that you actually need and the person you employ will lose trust in the brand. If there are strict deadlines and alternative roles you want in a graphic designer, such as options for being remote or in-house, this can and should be specified in the brief. Potential obstacles should be outlined.

Creating the advert

The next step is to advertise the role. The brand is well-prepared to hire a graphic designer and you have the materials to show it. Include the main details from your design brief, be succinct and be specific. This needs to be both honest and attractive. Many platforms that you can advertise on, especially crowdsourcing ones, have their own ad layouts for you to follow. However, feel able to use social media accounts to increase the reach your ad has. Instagram and Facebook are very popular and easy to use.

Whatever platform you use, the value of your ad must remain level to ensure you reach someone perfectly suited for the role,” says Catherine Johnson, technology writer at Draft Beyond and Last Minute Writing.

Dealing with respondents

After you receive responses from different designers who take an interest in the role, the next stage is to make a choice of who is actually best for the brand’s requirements. Take a look at their portfolios and filter out who impresses the most. You will find almost a third of applications can be turned down simply from an educated glance at portfolios. Safely take a lack of a portfolio as a lack of internet capability and professionalism, especially in a field that uses the internet and online collaboration so much.

Creativity is another major indicator of how valuable a graphic designer can be to you. As a creative field, you should be able to notice the designer’s style and preferences from the content they have available for you to see. There will also likely be client testimonials present on the designers’ portfolios, though some designers may not be as reliable as the internet makes out. Cross-check testimonials and use them with a pinch of salt when evaluating how good a designer really is. A great way to assess a graphic designer’s competency is to ask for an example of their work. This could be a minor task you set, or a piece they composed for a previous client.

“If you have a specific type of work you want done, ask to see that format of work when requesting examples. For example, if you require a graphic designer to work with Adobe Illustrator, you can request work where they used that software.” Says Sharon Robinson, graphic designer from Writinity and Research Papers UK.

Key skills you must look out for to hire a great graphic designer encompass:

• Experience with designing software

• Experience with typography

• Knowledge about colour and light in graphics

• Creativity

• Technical knowledge of layout

Alternatively, hire designers that you have narrowed down on a paid trial project. This will give you information on their reliability, creativity and overall designing skills. If it is within your company’s budget, this is one of the best methods to hiring the best graphic designer for your business. On the flipped side, it is crucial you actually pay these candidates; if you don’t, you will be seen as lacking professionalism and reliability and you will lost the potential graphic designers that you just narrowed down on.

Final tip

See how potential employees think on their feet. During the interview, ask something unexpected to get a feel of how they function as critical-minded artists. You could present them with another piece of work and ask how they would improve it and why.

Following this article as a manual will land you with a graphic designer who is suitable, reliable and adequate for your brand. Ensure the both of you are comfortable with expectations and budgeting and moving forward will be a piece of cake!

Kenneth Campbell is a writer and a business coach at Gum Essays and Lucky Assignments. He is fond of writing about many different sides of entrepreneurship, especially management and marketing. Kenneth is always on the lookout for rapid changes of modern market and he always helps his clients make their brands successful. In his spare time he writes about business and content promotion on the Internet.