How to Hire a Graphic Designer For Your Business And What to Look For?

Hire Graphic Designers Who Can Give You The Best Value From Designs

Graphic designing is a business need. All key business growth functions like marketing, business development, advertising, brand identity creation and brand positioning, website and SEO, sales and corporate presentations require graphic designs for making it successful. The question is what kind of designs give more results and what does not work. The search for creative, innovative, intuitive and inspiring graphic designers is ongoing for millions of organizations. Finding the right talent, however, has always been a challenge. This blog helps you make the right decisions when it comes to hiring a graphic designer for your business.

Introduction

The most impactful presentations, the most impressive advertising, the most influential social media business marketing content, a key element behind their being successful was their design. The design was crafted to create visual communication that generated amazing results.

Graphic design is both an art and science, is what many successful designers have said at one time or another. Not everyone who gets a certificate in advanced graphic design will have learned the art and science to its depths. On the other hand, there are hundreds of individuals who created superlative designs even without a commendable degree or advanced training.

Design is a practice area where training and skills are not highly correlative. That is why companies are always on the lookout for a graphic designer who gives them the perfect results. The search volume of “graphic designer agency, “hire a graphic designer online,” or “hire freelance graphic designer” are increasing in volume day after day.

Are you also looking for a competent, brilliant graphic designer for one or more projects? How many times have you been satisfied with your previous hiring decisions? If you have often paid a huge price in one way or another when you hired a freelance graphic designer online, it is time now to sit back and take out a few minutes to understand how to choose the right talent.

Decide Your Specific Graphic Design Needs

The best designers are the ones who get the job done, on time, and with little to no supervision. Poor designers are the ones who need constant micromanaging to do anything productive. You may end up hiring the worst-match candidates unless you set up an intelligent process.

The first step is to sit down and make a note of all the different graphic design needs of your organization and categorize them properly.

Long-Term Needs – Hire Permanent or Dedicated Graphic Designers

For your long-term needs, make an estimate of the volume of work, the type and nature of graphic design work, and see whether it would be ideal to hire a graphic designer who could assure you 20-35 hours of work every week.

Hiring for a permanent position needs a long, drawn-out hiring process. It would be a good idea to select graphic designers after you have allotted them paid, freelance jobs for a while.

If you are not having the time and resources for an in-house position, you can always hire a remote graphic designer from an established graphic design firm. That way, you would not have to frequently invest in orientation, learning and training sessions for different projects. You will get to work with ideal remote graphic designers who render great results. The agency will assure that.

Recurring But Short-Term Needs – Hire Contractual or Freelance Graphic Designers

You might be a graphic designer agency that is planning to expand project volume and frequently needs to hire designers as temporary staff. Well, different projects need different combinations of experience and skill sets, and hiring the same individuals for all temporary work requirements might not be giving you the right results.

You could partner with a graphic designer agency that could offer you the services of contractual or freelance graphic designers who are best suited for a specific project. Your graphic designer agency partner will have better capacities to understand your company and project needs and get you the designer that would do wonders for your projects.

Highly Specialized Needs – Hire Experts As and When Required

An established and competent graphic design agency will also offer you the services of expert and highly specialized graphic designers whenever the need arises.

Working with different kinds of freelancers, explaining to them your company’s process, approach, working methods, responsibilities, etc., time and again is often tedious. Partnering with an agency helps you overcome most talent challenges.

How To Hire The Right Graphic Designers

Frame Your Long-Term and Immediate Requirements

Framing requirements involves a proper documentation process. You could use a Spreadsheet and make a list of design requirements.

You might be carrying marketing campaigns every quarter and boosting product promotions and offers at fixed intervals. Your company might need to keep reviving social content or content marketing material.

Some requirements are repetitive and long-term; some are immediate and short-term but require designers with expertise and experience. The specific skills, software, type of work and volume of work should be some other columns for detailing each requirement. Your Spreadsheet documentation should be detailed and accurate.

Prepare a Detailed Description of Skills and Experience Per Functional Requirements

Often, companies are unable to identify skills in a precise manner. Graphic design is a wide area that encompasses everything from logo design to product packaging design, web design to mobile app design, designs for online marketing surveys, to advertising campaigns. There are hundreds of styles used and a wide range of software and techniques used. Also, design perceptions change across market segments.

The best way to identify the right graphic designer talent or to hire a graphic design agency is to first find out yourself what is the best combination of skills, experience, knowledge, and software that works the best for you. You can then identify the professionals who have exactly the abilities that you seek. Whether you hire a graphic designer online or through an agency, the procedure ensures brilliant results.

Search From DIfferent Sources and Platforms

Many companies are dependent on only one or more sources to hire freelance graphic designers. It would be a website that provides access to thousands of freelance designers. You could post your project and then choose one or a few among the many who responded. It is definitely one way of getting access to brilliant talent. It works well when you are able to attract the right talent.

Another way is to search for a graphic design agency that assures you the services of graphic designers with the exact abilities you have described. Here, there is scope for more relevant interaction, and less time is needed.

The agency does all the work for you. The design project manager would study your requirements and use insights drawn from long years of experience to identify the freelancers. They have their own methods of creating checklists and experience evaluation. You will get the names of shortlisted candidates within a few days.

Go Through Portfolios of Selected Candidates

After selecting the list of candidates, go for an in-depth screening of their portfolios which may be time-consuming but is sure to render results. A client’s perception of a graphic designer is often based on the portfolio. Therefore, it is crucial for a graphic designer also to showcase his or her best work in a portfolio.

A graphic design agency is competent in portfolio analysis of designers, a task that may be confusing or a daunting task for those who have no relevant technical knowledge of the designing tools and techniques.

Put in Place Practical Job-Specific Assessments

Practical job-specific assessments are used to evaluate the skills and abilities required for achieving specific design goals. The term “job-specific” implies that these assessments measure what people need to know in order to be successful at the work you need to get done.

If you want to hire freelance graphic designers, include tests to assess specific skills that are relevant to you. If your work involves creating product packaging designs of electronic products for specially-abled individuals, you need to assess the understanding of such designs in the graphic designers you hire.

Test Situational Judgement and Ability to Innovate

Some graphic designers are followers and perfectionists; they do what they are told to do and do it perfectly right. Some are genius at framing design layouts and visual elements in an outcome-oriented manner. Some have the ability to understand a scenario and offer brilliant ideas and design options.

Depending on the type of work you have, you need to assess skills other than just the design work and software knowledge. If you want to hire freelance graphic designers with the ability to frame design concepts, make changes as per feedback, and innovatively solve challenges, you would need to assess their situational judgement and problem-solving skills. There are many such assessments available online.

Prepare the Right Interview Format for Each Interview Rounds

Interviews are the only screening method that helps you to analyze an individual’s immediate reactions and responses. You might want graphic design illustrators who need to be extraordinarily patient because you have difficult clients, or you need senior graphic designers who are good listeners, proactive, and people-friendly.

Interviews are also among the most convenient methods of careful questioning to find out what are the strengths and weaknesses of an individual beyond what is visible through the resume and portfolio. Frame interview sessions with a goal and a scoring system to make unbiased, objective judgments when you hire graphic designers online.

Get a Paid Sample Done From Final Shortlisted Candidates

Graphic designers are artists who are expected to have an eye for aesthetics, beauty, balance, and composition with a sense of visual hierarchy. Sometimes portfolios could cheat when it is the work of multiple graphic designers.

Provide a detailed specification-based sample work with a deadline and find out how much your chosen graphic designers can achieve in the ways of composition, visual hierarchy, appeal and ingenuity.

Get Professional Reference Checks Done

Detailed professional references from various clients is a great validation of a graphic designer’s abilities. If you are looking for a graphic designer agency for designing your product marketing and advertising campaigns, find out what their clients say about their abilities.

Conclusion

Hiring a graphic designer is not a generic process. Graphic designing covers thousands of different requirements. No one individual can fulfil all these, although many would have a general sense of design and some common skills.

Designing for the social media pages of a CEO who heads an entertainment company will need insights, knowledge and experience that differs widely from designing for children’s toys and bookstores. Hire a graphic designer using methods that are relevant to the achievement of goals

We hope this blog helps you in hiring talent that proves highly beneficial to you.

Sprak Design

Sprak Design helps organizations create more value through graphic designs and present a strong brand personality. We have a team of 35+ designers and a network of freelance graphic designers to serve clients from a wide range of business segments.

Our customers are inspired by our creativity, strategic approach, and service delivery standards and repeatedly seek over services over any other agencies they come across. We are always open to experimenting with techniques, trends, and software and offer design solutions for web, mobile, print and digital publishing.

If you are searching “graphic designer agency” or “hire graphic designers online,” find at our company the solutions you seek. We offer different hiring models, helping you hire freelance graphic designers, project-based graphic designers, and dedicated graphic designer resources. Have a graphic design project to discuss? Let’s connect!