Talent vs Skill : A UX Hiring Nightmare

Hiring user experience (UX) professionals can be a massively time-consuming endeavour that requires the recruiter to navigate through a highly competitive talent market. For the moment, there’s no set process as yet that one can follow to know without a shadow of doubt that the talent or the skills matches the role that needs to be filled from the hiring process itself. Hiring the wrong candidate can have a serious long-term impact on your users and your products.

And since the standard practice of hiring in the UX field is still being in its infancy, it begs the question...

Do I look for talent in a UX professional or skill?

While there are many in the industry who argue not to hire for talent, but rather hire someone for their work ethic and ability to learn to do the tasks that are needed, the two are not mutually exclusive!

Hiring managers in the current environment focus largely on visual design portfolios when they should in fact, focus on assessing how the candidate tackled the project and what design processes they followed. It’s these aspects that would help gauge the candidate’s strength in

• Design Empathy – Understanding that people have different beliefs, needs, views and approaches which help design products and interfaces that are more user-centric.

• Problem Solving Skills – Strong reasoning and deduction and a touch of creativity to find effective solutions.

• Foresight – Ability to imagine both positive and negative outcomes to identify flaw in the design and devise solutions to problems before they happen.

• Building Predictive Architecture - Formulating the structures, organization, paths, flows and layouts to predict what will work best for customers followed by thorough testing to validate hypotheses.

• User Behaviour – Designing that keeps in mind the customers natural behaviours make the interface more appealing to customers.

At UX Fairy, we understand that talent and skill cannot work without one another. Natural talent but no skills just about as useful as excellent skills and no talent. What we look for in our hiring processes is a co-existence of the two. We believe that talent exists in all of us. All it takes is a little training, studying, and experience and there’s no telling how much you can enhance these talents.