“The level of specificity on job ads now is insane,” says designer and founder of Never Dull Studio, Ben Mottershead.
He reflects a growing sentiment among designers that job listings have become too rigid in their criteria, particularly when it comes to asking for sector or industry experience.
The first thing to acknowledge is that this is not a new phenomenon. Designer Graham Wood remembers an illustrator friend losing out on a commission to draw bananas in the 1980s, “because they hadn’t previously illustrated bananas.”
More common, or more visible?
Some recruiters we spoke to explained that as frustration in a difficult job market boils over, we just hear more about these frustrations than we used to.
Dan Poole, the founder of Path design recruitment, subscribes to that view.
“I’ve been recruiting in this space for nearly 20 years, and I don’t see this as anything new,” he says. “It’s just more visible, as it’s shared on social media.
“Design is a fast-paced industry, and clients and agencies are time poor. Clients are always specific on their needs and rarely bend them.”
But others in the industry do think things have changed. Craig Ward admits that asking designers for industry-specific experience “has always been a thing to an extent.” But, he says, “It has definitely become more pronounced over the last few years.”
And Daisy Crowder, the brand and marketing director at design recruitment specialists Craft, agrees.
“We’re definitely seeing more clients asking for specific sector experience, especially in brand and strategy briefs,” she says.
Crowder says this requirement is most commonly used for freelance roles, which seemingly makes sense. “It’s usually about minimising risk; they want someone who’s done it before and can hit the ground running.”
A tough job market
It’s hard to find reliable and up-to-date information about the state of the design job market. And clearly it’s not a homogenous whole – the state of UX hiring is different to graphic, industrial and interior design.
In June, Fast Company published its second annual design jobs report. Its team analysed data from 176,000 US job listings between October 2023 and February this year.
“The clearest and perhaps most reassuring takeaway this year? Designers are still needed,” Fast Company’s data editor Andrew Thompson wrote. It was a mixed picture across different disciplines – while game and urban design jobs were up, graphic and UX jobs were stable, but product design listings were down 24%.
One of Fast Co’s main takeaways was that even though the design industry is under pressure from the rise of generative AI, it’s not currently affecting job listings. “If an AI-driven design industry apocalypse is coming, it hasn’t arrived yet,” Thompson wrote.
But even if the number of job listings are relatively stable, it feels like the market is more competitive than ever. Several high-profile agencies have laid people off, as have brands like Bumble, which recently cut its in-house design team.
Leapers, an organisation that promotes freelancers’ mental health estimates that between 25 and 30% of current freelancers didn’t choose this way of working, but were forced into it. Some of them clearly take to freelance life well, but for others it’s a precarious necessity.
A broken system
Against this backdrop, we hear from a lot of designers about the mental toll of navigating the current job market. From ghosted applications to overly onerous design interview tasks, there is a sense that things are broken.
It’s not just industry- or sector-specific experience that designers say they’re seeing on job roles.
London-based design director Harry Thornbory, who was previously brand and design lead at ITV, says job listings increasingly stipulate the names of agencies they expect applicants to have worked with.
“While I get sector and type of work experience as a criteria, the requirements to have worked at certain agencies or studios comes across as a ‘closed shop’ mentality,” Thornbory says. “Surely it’s a smaller pool of talent?”
As different stringent requirements are added to job roles, this creates a matrix effect, says US-based creative director Prescott Perez-Fox.
“Lately you see 2×2 levels of specificity,” he explains. “So not just a branding designer with experience in real estate, but an icon designer with deep sector expertise in commercial office leasing. Construction and residential experts need not apply!”
Many designers are similarly quick to poke fun at what they see as the ludicrous specificity of current job listings
“We get requirements like ‘must have no less than three portfolio projects for diet cannabis CPG brands that included motion principles, print campaign, and cross-platform social strategy’,” says freelance design director Brooks Heintzelman.
“Every employer seems to want a proven commodity,” he adds. “No-one wants to be the one who takes a chance on a hire and it not work out.”
Fresh eyes vs a safe pair of hands
Daniel Swann, creative director of Swann-Studios agrees. “Client-side it’s risk aversion, and confirmation the candidate already gets the sector and all the nuances that come with that,” he says. “Risk aversion is always higher in economic downturns.”
But is it that simple? Some believe that because there are too many designers going for too few jobs, adding specifications to job listings – freelance or permanent – is a way of managing the deluge of applications that can feel overwhelming.
Others think that there are specific nuances in some sectors and industries that require some direct previous experience. When we polled our LinkedIn community about these types of requirements, 69% said it was valid in certain sectors.
“If you work in the drinks sector, specifically spirits for example, it has its own language,” says D8 Studio creative director, Adrian Carroll.
“If you don’t understand that, it can take a while to get to grips with, and the client doesn’t always have the time to make that investment.
“I’m not saying it’s always right, and good designers can definitely learn and switch sectors, but I can understand why certain roles look for sector experience,” Carroll adds.
But for some designers, it’s a cautious approach that compromises the creative thinking.
“It’s a misplaced risk reduction strategy,” says How&How strategy director Jack Wimmer. “In reality it just increases the odds of the work looking like other brands in that category.”
And interestingly Craft’s Daisy Crowder says their team is starting to see push-back against the desire to hire someone with familiar experience.
“Where the studio manager might lean on known contacts with sector knowledge to get somebody in quick, we’re hearing directly from the creative directors who ask us for adjacency over exactness,” she says.
“Fortunately the more creative-led thinkers are still after a fresh pair of eyes, over a safe pair of hands.”