Hiring Senior People Is a Craft Too

The strangest talent market of my career is happening right now. Tech layoffs have put genuinely brilliant people on the market for the first time in a decade, while every studio that over-hired in 2021 is quietly shrinking. For a twelve-person shop like ours, this is the rare season when we can hire people who would not have returned our emails two years ago. Which makes it exactly the moment to be disciplined, because hiring mistakes at the senior level are the most expensive mistakes a small studio can make. A mediocre project costs you a quarter. A mis-hired lead costs you a year and sometimes a client.

Here is how we approach it, learned the expensive way.

Portfolios show outcomes, not contributions

A senior portfolio is a highlight reel with the context removed. The work is real; the question is what this specific person did to it. Was the strategy theirs or inherited? Did they lead the team or attend it? Great work has many parents after it wins awards.

So we spend most of the portfolio conversation on one project, chosen by them, excavated in detail: what the brief actually said, what the first failed direction was, what the client pushed back on, what they would change now. Seniors who did the work can descend into specifics indefinitely and get more animated as they go. Seniors who orbited the work run out of details in about ten minutes and retreat to outcomes. This single interview format has saved us from more bad hires than every other filter combined.

What senior actually means here

We had to write this down, because "senior" often gets defined as years served. At Slipway it means three things:

• Judgment under ambiguity. They can act well on an incomplete brief, and they know which questions to ask before starting rather than after failing.
• They raise the people around them. The work of everyone near them gets better. This is observable in references if you ask for it directly: "Tell me about someone junior who got better because of this person."
• They can disagree without wreckage. Senior people have strong opinions and clients have final say; the ability to hold both is the job.

Notice what is absent: awards, follower counts, and the ability to present charismatically, which correlates with exactly nothing we have ever needed on a Tuesday.

The working session, paid, replaces the take-home test

We do not assign spec work, and take-home assignments at the senior level mostly measure available free time, which discriminates against exactly the experienced people we want. Instead: a paid half-day working session on a real internal problem, with the actual team they would join. We watch how they think out loud, how they treat a junior designer's idea, what they do when Kate disagrees with them. Three hours of real collaboration outperforms five rounds of interviews, and paying for it signals what kind of shop this is before day one.

References are for questions, not validation

Everyone's references say nice things; that is why they were chosen. The information is in the specifics you force. We ask: "What is the project you would not have staffed them on?" and "When they left, what got harder?" A reference who cannot name what got harder is describing someone who did not matter. That is data too.

The market will stay strange for a while, and the temptation in a downturn is to hire opportunistically: great person, unclear need, figure it out later. Resist it. A studio is just its people and its standards, and at twelve people, every hire is eight percent of who we are. That math deserves the same craft we sell.