None of them had a craft problem.
Seven weeks to October 31. This one is written to the person on the other side of the table.
Consilio News usually speaks to the designer running a search from the candidate’s side. Today it speaks to the person doing the hiring, because most of what decides a design hire happens on your side of the table and almost none of it is visible from theirs.
If you are a designer, forward this to the founder you are talking to. If you are the founder, forward it to the designer you are trying to hire. That is the whole design of this issue.
What we saw when we opened three books in front of the people who made them.
Carl Wheatley and I ran portfolio office hours a few weeks ago. Real portfolios, live, with the designer in the room. Two numbers from that hour have stayed with me.
One designer, eight to ten years in, two companies, one of them acquired. 231 applications over four months. Three intro calls. All 231 went out pointing at a single unchanged version of the same site.
Another designer, same market, same month. Eleven interviews in two to three weeks.
That gap is not talent and it is not the market.
And roughly one in five of the books submitted to us was password-gated, which means the first thing a hiring manager meets is a login screen and a decision about whether that book is worth the friction.
Here is what I said in the room and it is the thing I keep coming back to. It is almost never the craft that is the problem. It is the container.
Strong designers work at companies whose direction they did not choose, on products they never got to shape. That says nothing about whether they can solve your problem. What it removes is the shorthand you were reading for without noticing.
Then Carl named the part founders do not usually admit out loud. A lot of the ones he talks to have never hired a designer before, especially for a founding designer role, and when nobody in the room has hired one, polish is the signal they trust. The beautiful book gets the interview whether or not the thinking underneath earned it.
Both things are true at once, and the gap between them is where your search is leaking. The book that looks resolved gets the call. The book that is resolved does not always look it. It is easy to grade the container and call it craft. I have done it. When that happens, the search is running on the wrong signal.
The read forms earlier than the process suggests.
You land on a view of a candidate fast, often inside the first conversation, and much of what follows is you looking for reasons to confirm it. That is not unfair, and it is not lazy. It is what deciding under uncertainty looks like when the seat matters and the runway is finite.
Once the read settles, you move faster than your own process suggests. The offer appears in days. References get called the same afternoon. A loop that was going to take four weeks collapses into one.
Which is worth knowing about the searches where that has not happened. A company that looks slow is usually a company that has not decided yet.
Reqs do not stall on candidates. They stall on three boring things.
Design roles sit open for months, and the reason is almost never that nobody good applied.
The calendar. Three people who need to be in the same debrief cannot find the same hour, and a week becomes three. Companies rarely lose great candidates to a competitor’s better offer. They lose them to their own scheduling.
The unnamed seat. Nobody decided which job this actually is. Senior is not one job, it is three, and if the seat was never named then every debrief argues a different role. The disagreement looks like a disagreement about the person. It is not. It is a disagreement the team never had with itself.
The stale band. A company with $95 million in the bank offered a senior designer a band thirty thousand below market this year. Not a lowball tactic. The band had been set a while earlier, nobody revisited it after the round closed, and the finance posture never connected the raise to the salary bands.
Funding size feels like it should predict what you pay. It does not. What predicts it is who owns the band and when they last opened it.
One of these is bad luck. Three of them together is usually a process, and a process is something you can fix.
The first ninety days are decided in the offer letter.
By day ninety you will have formed a durable view of this person, and most of it will have formed well before then. That view is rarely written down anywhere, which means the person it is about has been working without it.
They spend their first month solving for a standard they cannot see. You spend it deciding privately whether this is working. You are both running a test that only one of you knows the terms of.
The fix costs twenty minutes and it belongs before the signature. Name the first project. Name who they work with. Name what you will look at in week twelve.
You get a faster ramp, you find out sooner if it is wrong, and you stop losing good hires to a bar that nobody had written down yet.
The arithmetic, because it is September.
Seven weeks to October 31. Four to six weeks from first call to signature when both sides are moving, and that is before anyone takes a week off.
A search that has not started by the third week of September is not closing this year. It is closing in January, against a budget nobody has approved yet.
There is one exception and it is a large one. Warm paths compress. A process that starts with someone who already knows the work can close in two weeks, because the trust step is already done.
September is not early. It is the last month that is still on time.
None of this is a criticism of how you are running it. Most of it only looks obvious from the outside, which is the only reason I can see it at all.
So here is the offer. Take five minutes and write down five things about the req you are about to open, or the one already sitting there. Which of the three seats it is. Who owns the band and when they last opened it. Who is in the debrief and when they are free. The first project. What you will look at in week twelve.
Whichever ones come back blank, send them to me. I will tell you which single one is costing you the search. No pitch attached, and it takes about fifteen minutes.
In two weeks, Issue 9: the last mile. Deciding on schedule, negotiating the role rather than the rate, and the two honest paths if you started late.
Jeremy