Hiring UX Professionals: 3 Critical Mistakes to Avoid

As a UX leader, there’s an easy way to mess up an otherwise solid user experience strategy. All we have to do is hire UX professionals who do not have the skills, knowledge, and experience to do the job we need.

The inverse is also true. The best way to achieve our UX strategy goals is to hire UX professionals who have the right skills, knowledge, and experience that our team needs.

Hiring UX professionals is hard work. More importantly, it isn’t a topic we discuss often enough.

As a profession, we act as if everyone knows how to hire well. At Center Centre — UIE, our research shows many folks don’t.

Many UX leaders make serious mistakes while hiring. Mistakes that may push away the most qualified candidates while flooding our hiring process with people who don’t have the expertise our positions demand.

This increases the risk we’ll hire the wrong person, and take a long time to do so. These mistakes are often easy to avoid with a well-designed hiring process.

A tale of two interviews.

During our research, we met up with a seasoned UX design leader who had recently interviewed with a fast-growing startup. Before her interviews with the startup, she was attracted by the company’s…