This document is a definitive guide on hiring quality designers that last with the organisation…with humanity. It was made to align all our teams on how job postings are created, the interview process, what we interview for, and how offers are extended. The team had been leaderless for some time when I came in. I was tasked with leading the org, creating processes, and, most importantly, scaling the team by 4x over 3 departments and 6 teams. The entire company was growing very quickly, and setting a solid foundation was essential.

Veriff’s values were very established already, but I am a strong believer that teams should also define values related to their craft. We did a collaborative exercise to define our teams values, strengths, and gaps, so that we could build out both a career ladder and a framework for what it meant to join our team. I built this exercise at Cloudbees and have brought it to every company since then.

Everyone on my team was VERY excited to have a process written down, but this doc also ended up being used as the basis for many other team's hiring practices. The recruitment team, who was understandably overwhelmed, was especially happy to have some processes to follow and to send to candidates.

We saved job listings as templates each time we created one so that we never needed to start from scratch. They were adapted based on our career ladder, with responsibilities and expectations and a few bullet points swapped out depending on the specific product focus.

I believe you should hire junior roles or interns as soon as you have any senior roles. When a team is made up exclusively of senior roles, you’re left with a lot of work that they are overqualified to do and erodes morale over time. You also end up with a bunch of people looking to move to the next level who simply all cannot move up the structure simultaneously. It makes for a tense environment and a poor distribution of work. A team that is balanced in roles is ideal.

I really try to run my interviews in a more fluid manner. These questions are meant to guide and prompt the interview, but if someone answers with something interesting I like to dig in there. Many times, interviewees have answered something so great that they’ve had me taking notes. Those are the real treasures. I usually schedule interviews for an hour and only plan on going for 30 minutes so that there is a ton of time for those explorations, and for them to ask questions at the end. Interviews still rarely take an hour.

Designers who simply take directions for executing and have no experience with or desire to do user research don’t fulfill the very basic responsibilities of a designer: advocating for and representing the users, creating the best experience for the user, and curiosity. If a designer has never taken a project on and immediately needed to ask questions, then they aren’t really doing UX or good design, they are just doing UI. I’m almost never just looking for a UI designer. Research and discovery are foundational, basic skillsets and values.

I think getting the stakeholders all to define what they were looking for with each of these interview parts was a bit of a challenge. It is tricky to define what you are looking for but it is SO important. If you define it ahead of time then nothing is missed, you aren't interviewing based on gut feel, and the interviewees don't feel like they're doing the same interview over and over and can be prepared.

The founders made a real point to interview every candidate up until the company was 300-400 people. When that became unfeasible, it was still important to them to have an executive or someone at the top interview them. It was less for the candidate and more for the executives to hear from and meet these new employees.

Angela González Fernández

Amber Rucker

This document is a definitive, scalable guide on hiring quality designers that last with your organization…with humanity.

How do we measure that? Let’s get into how to measure culture fit and designer skills.

(Values that Match, Experience that Differs, Spirit that Bolsters)

Everyone is looking for a teammate that’s going to work well with the team, but in order to remove bias from hiring for culture fit, it’s good to define what “culture” fit means to your team ahead of time.

It helps if before you ever start interviewing you’ve defined your team's values. In order to get a complete picture you should define:

Your team's values [ex: inclusive, flexible, data-driven, efficient, curious, empathetic and not afraid to speak truth to power]

The differences each member of the team has, but primarily your similarities, and areas where your experiences might not represent all of your users

Define the Traits that Exemplify Our Values

After we’ve defined our teams values, we need to identify what traits (that related to our values) we want to continue to bolster in the team and what traits and experiences we might be lacking. Think of traits as the behaviours we do that align with or contribute to our values. If we value innovation, how do we show that in the way we behave each day?

What are you Looking for in your Culture?

Now that we know what we value, the traits that show those values and the experience gaps we have; we need to define what we’re looking for around those. Take a look at your defined traits and decide what, as a team, you are high in or low in representing those.

If several of your team members are very high in out-of-the-box-thinking you could decide you want to continue to add members that exemplify that trait, or you could decide what you’re looking for is someone to help balance that with an analytical mind and strength in execution. These don’t have to be entirely soft-skill focused. If your entire team only communicates in memes and that’s really important to you then that’s your culture fit. Ask meme specific interview questions. border-radius: 6px!important for example.

Incorporating Culture Fit into the Interview Process

Now that you have defined the team’s values, similarities and differences, you should look for candidates who exemplify those values and fill gaps in experiences. How can we do that? We have to craft interview questions or stages around those values and differences.

Make sure all the members of the team had input in deciding what you’re looking for in culture fit

Make a list of core principles and important traits and add them to the interview materials

Draft example questions to gauge a potential new hire on these traits and divvy them up to the interviewers.

We’ve defined the things that are important to us in a designer and how we measure ourselves against those things in our career ladder exercise. From what we defined as important to us we developed our Design Career Ladder. This is how we measure the level we are at and it should also offer us a way to gauge the skill level and important skills of the designers we are interviewing.

We divide up our skills into these categories:

When we’re interviewing we should try to gauge the level of these skills. Each interview tries to understand these skills in different ways. Please refer to the career ladder framework in order to gauge skill level against defined criteria.

We’ve spoken about all the things we’re looking for and how we measure them but how does the sausage get made so to speak?

How new designers are requested, budgeted for and planned

The headcount budget file is completed annually between the Division Head, Finance and People teams. Before this budgeting session, the division head will discuss needs with Team Leads.

For ad-hoc requests away from this - the team lead must get approval from their Division Head. The Division Head is then responsible for aligning with Finance and the People team and ensuring the headcount budget file is updated.

We use these sites/tools/methods for sourcing candidates:

University/Business Schools Partnerships (

Other Partnerships (Bootcamps, Non profit organizations, etc) - 

Please note that these are all our sourcing resources for all roles, not only designers. For designers, the main ones are LinkedIn, 

, active applications coming to Greenhouse, and our future parnterships with WomenHack and Women in tech.

These are the standard and agreed-upon job templates and descriptions for our various types and levels of designers

How do we reach out to people, how do they reach out to us, is there anything we do uniquely at Veriff or for the design team?

Recruiter reaches out actively to people on LinkedIn/other platforms with a personalized message, giving a brief overview about the unique selling points of the role, providing the link to the job description and closing the message with a call to action - a link to recruiter’s calendly, so candidates can book an slot directly if they would like to hear more. Candidates sometimes reach out to recruiters on LinkedIn about a specific position.

Referrals - we have a great referral program at Veriff (1k for each hired candidate) so we should encourage the product team to refer people - this is a win-win situation, since they already know their way of working, they could potentially work with a friend in the future and also get some compensation for their efforts). Referrals work incredibly well.

Cross-training or Design School Partner Pipeline

We’re working on this. We have begun to establish a partner design school that we sponsor events for or use for internal cross training and that would result in a pipeline of interns and junior designers for Veriff. The hiring process would operate a bit differently but has yet to be established.

Below are the stages of our design interview process, what they entail and what they are measuring for.

Purpose of Interview (what are we interviewing for?)

What is the purpose of this interview, what are we looking for, what can we weed out?

How can they “ace” it or “bomb” it?

Talk about the role, what it entails, the Veriff story and future, asking them about what they know about Veriff and why they applied. Also, discussing candidate’s location and potential relocation package, salary expectations and notice period.

Asking questions directly related to the listed criteria of skills above. We aren’t trying to gauge the exact skill level at this stage, just they have experience in all the spaces ie: research, systems design etc.

How did you find out about Veriff? Why did you decide to apply?

Can you walk me through your experience as a product designer?

Could you walk me through a typical project start to finish?

Have you used a design system previously?

How much user research have you done in the past, and what types? 

(looking for more than just validation research. If only usability and a/b testing is mentioned that is a no)

Have you ever had to work closely with clients before? How do you build relationships with them?

Have you had any exposure to, or are you interested in, AI, machine learning, or computer vision? 

(for Fintech/I change it depending on the role.)

What is the project you are most proud of? 

(optional, if the interview is not getting very long)

What would motivate you to make a move from your current role?

My interview is really about gauging their process, understanding their skills by asking situational questions. The list of questions are things that I will cover all of but it is 

. Hopefully they will answer a lot of these things while talking about other things. I will jump around if it’s topical. For example, when walking me through a project they mention “I speak with a researcher” then I would say “I know you mentioned speaking with the researchers, how are used to working with them throughout the design process?” or perhaps “you didn’t mention engineering in your process, are they typically not involved until delivery?” etc. Keeping things conversational helps me understand culture fit and also doesn’t lead them to answer overly specific questions with what they think I want to hear. I will describe the purpose of each of the questions below.

Could you tell me a little bit about what you're currently working on or your most recent position?

this is just getting into it, setting the stage.

How are you used to working with .... (engineers, PMs etc)

I will ideally work in as many of these as possible conversationally. I want to understand their process, if they collaborate with other teams well, include engineering, know the purpose of each of these functions and to make sure they don’t say something like “ugh. PM. hate them.”

Have you worked with external agencies as well?

This is mainly for marketing designers in order to make sure they’ve worked with external agencies or freelancers and are able to collaborate externally and have a process and delivery that is organized enough to support bringing in agency and freelancers quickly and easily.

In a perfect world how what would you do for a project/goal start to finish? Assume you have all the resources, time and buy-in you need. How would it go?

This is really getting into the meat of the interview. Most of the remaining questions are answered while they are answering this question. I will ask some more specific questions as they go through it. I don’t want to limit them to the positions they are currently in but see how their mind would work given ownership of the end-to-end process.

Have you done much research or discovery on your own projects before and can you tell me about that? I want to make sure they can talk about research and they don’t only mention validation and usability testing. Immediate no at that point.

I want to know that they understand business needs, product strategy and they are used to tying their work to company goals. I also want to know if they can look at research and insights and draft problem statements that they can surface to product as well. If they are bringing problems to the table then I’m a big fan.

When those goals come from the design team how are they surfaced or decided upon?

This is really only pertinent is they said they bring goals forward or the design team as a whole does. Then I want to know that it’s based in user research. It isnt something like “Sometimes I think we should change an accordion cuz it looks bad.”

Have you been at a colocated or remote company before?

Most people have obviously been remote now but working in one office with some people and having others in a different office has unique challenges. I might take this out going forward.

Hiring Designers at Veriff

Hiring Designers at Veriff

Hiring the Right People 🙌

Measuring Culture Fit

(Values that Match, Experience that Differs, Spirit that Bolsters)

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