What Growing Agencies Get Wrong About Hiring Designers and Developers
Do you know why most growing agencies have problems building a great team?
It's not because good talent doesn't exist. Far from it. It's because the process is broken. Most agencies hire designers and developers the same way they've always hired them. Scan some resumes. Schedule an interview. Throw someone on a team and hope for the best.
Unfortunately, that doesn't work anymore. If you hire that way, you end up wasting money on bad hires and watch great talent come and go. That friction burns momentum and kills growth. Some research from the U.S. Department of Labor found that a bad hire could cost you up to 30% of their first year earnings. (Source) For small agencies, this just isn’t acceptable.
Fortunately, there's a better way. Agencies that have built rock-solid teams think of hiring like a system. One system that's worked very well is the Topgrading hiring methodology.
What is the Topgrading hiring method? It's an interview framework that uses in-depth chronological interviews and scorecards to identify the strongest candidates -- "A Players."
Let’s look at four different pieces of this method:
Why Agencies Keep Making Bad Hires
The Biggest Mistakes Growing Agencies Make When Hiring
How To Overhaul Your Hiring Process In 4 Steps
How to build a team that sticks around
Why Agencies Keep Making Bad Hires
Agency owners don't start businesses because they love the hiring process. They start businesses because they're great designers or developers or marketers. Unfortunately as agencies grow, hiring great talent becomes one of the most critical things you'll need to do to keep growing.
And most agencies get it completely wrong. One of the reasons most growing agencies make bad hires is because they hire reactively.
Work comes in. The team is slammed. "We need to hire someone yesterday." Suddenly priorities shift from quality to quantity, your hiring process goes out the window, and your team is stuck playing a cycle of feast or famine.
It might look something like this…
Clients come rolling in.
Your team is overwhelmed.
You hire whoever is readily available.
That person isn't a culture fit. They quit or get fired.
Clients stop rolling in.
Research from CareerBuilder discovered that a massive 74% of employers have hired the wrong person for a job. Yep, almost three out of every four employers have hired the wrong person.
The Biggest Mistakes Growing Agencies Make When Hiring
The same hiring mistakes come up time and time again with growing agencies. Let's walk through them so you know what to avoid.
Hiring Based On Skills Alone
If you said yes to "sound great on paper" earlier, you fall into this trap. Skills are important, of course. But they aren't everything. There are candidates out there who are coding ninjas, but can't speak to clients or work in a team. That's a problem.
There are also lots of great designers who can't code, and designers who rock at frontend development, but can't write HTML to save their life. You get the idea.
Skills are important but culture fit, communication skills and work ethic play a huge role too. Hire designers and developers for skills and you'll constantly be searching for your next rockstar. Hire for attitude and character instead.
Unstructured Interviews
Many agencies think informal interviews are best. Meet for coffee and see if you vibe with the person. Interviewing that way might set candidates at ease, but it will turn out to be problematic down the road.
You’ll get to know the person, but without a standardized process it will prove difficult to know if that person is an “A Player” or not. In unstructured interviews, some interviewers will be better than others. Interviewers will ask different questions and come to different conclusions.
Instead, apply a standardized process for all interviews. The Topgrading chronological interview process and candidate scorecards allow you to fairly rank every candidate against the same criteria.
Hiring Quickly To Fill A Position
Hiring too quickly happens more often than you'd think.
Clients just gave you 80 hours worth of work. Your team is about to burst at the seams. You put an opening on Linkedin, five people apply, you interview them, and one of them "kinda" seems like a culture fit. So you hire them.
Then two weeks in, you realize they're not the person you thought they were.
Bad hires are always rushed hires. When you need to hire quickly, you sacrifice important parts of the interview process, then wonder why bad hires keep happening.
If you want to fix your hiring process, STOP hiring just to fill positions. Wait to hire until you've found the right person.
Poor Onboarding Processes
A lackluster or poor onboarding process is a tough mistake to watch.
You find the right person. They come on excited to start working, but instead of guiding them on day one, you throw them into the trenches. If you’re thinking, we don't have time to sit them down and explain how we do things,” that might come back to haunt you. You may be expecting to them to have the skills to adapt quickly, but they’re likely to be frustrated because nobody told them what to do. They may start making questionable decisions that slow your team down. Then you start blaming them for not hitting deadlines.
It starts a tough cycle of blaming and not quite learning from experience.
How To Overhaul Your Hiring Process In 4 Steps
You don't need to flip your business upside down to fix the hiring process. Here are four tips to get you started.
Start with a bulletproof job description. Stop describing the role with just technical skills. Candidates should know the behaviors you want to see, the values you embrace and the outcomes you expect. Be crystal clear about what you want the ideal candidate to be.
Use a consistent interview process. Prepare a list of standard questions to ask every candidate. Score their answers and use those scores to compare candidates against one another.
Test real world skills. Bring designers in to do a quick design test or request developers to create a small project. Paying candidates for a couple days of trial work is the best way to see how someone actually works.
Don't forget about onboarding. When that perfect candidate does come along, onboard them properly. Map out a 30-60-90 plan on their first day, set expectations and critical milestones. Then, connect them with a peer who can answer any questions.
How To Build A Team That Actually Sticks Around
A lot of talented designers or developers leave agencies because the agency only focuses on hiring. They don't think about retention.
But designers and developers care about learning and developing their skills. Some might be interested in becoming a better writer; others might be focused on learning how to use AI ethically. Ultimately, they want to build meaningful work they can be proud of and have a consistent workflow that allows for a healthy work-life balance.
This doesn’t take winning a national award of the Best Place To Work, but you should have basics covered.
Defined career paths
Regular feedback
Competitive market salary
Culture around work-life balance
Agencies that focus on the people as well as the process attract great talent month after month.
Key Takeaways
Finding great designers and developers can be tough, but that doesn't mean you should approach hiring like a game of luck.
The best marketing agencies approach hiring methodically. They have clearly defined roles they're looking to fill, implement a structured interview process, and test candidate skills with real world exercises. And, they focus on both the hiring process and the employee retention process.
Don't keep replacing warm bodies on your team whenever someone leaves. Build a rock solid system that finds and keeps A Players.
