Insight into hiring or looking for roles in design systems in 2022

It feels like design systems are starting to reach maturity. Having been apart of the zeitgeist for around 10 years, and being a part of most major organizations in the past 5, it feels like we’re sliding on the hype cycle from ‘peak of inflated expectations’ down into the ‘trough of disillusionment’. With this comes some challenges: How do we scale what we do well; How do we prove value of what we do over time; and very pertinently, how do we resource our team so we can effectively do both the previous questions?

However, it’s not all gloom and doom. Design systems are also flourishing as a topic. Design systems, documentation, and topics like Tokens are continuing to rise in search volume on Google. Design systems companies are going from strength to strength. All of this suggests that teams are growing, organizations are experimenting, and everyone is trying to find what works for them.

All of this, stacked with the current economic climate, and the major change in ways of working brought on by the pandemic, mean that how we hire and resource or teams needs to change. We conducted a survey to try and gauge where the industry is in terms of the experience of hiring managers and those looking for design systems roles this year. We’re interested in spotting if there are any major discrepancies, and how much alignment there is from the two perspectives. We also spoke to a number of people in the industry to get their views on the topic.

You can sign up for the full report at the bottom of this post, but here’s a snapshot of some of the findings

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“Candidate must have 100+ years of design system experience”

With an area such as design systems that in many ways is still in its formative years across the industry, it might be fair to assume that there will be a limited pool of experienced practitioners in this niche. That certainly rings true with the hiring managers who responded to our survey: 45% of participants say that finding candidates with enough design system experience is their biggest challenge; The second largest problem (28% of hiring managers) is that candidates don’t have enough overall experience, not just design system specific experience.. That’s a significant hurdle to overcome!

It feels for many that there’s somewhat of a catch-22 scenario here: there aren’t enough candidates with design systems experience, but unless you have the opportunity to gain experience where you are, it’s difficult to gain and demonstrate to employers. Is it that a skim of someone’s CV/resumé doesn’t explicitly express design systems experience despite transferable skills?

Perhaps the need for many organizations is to want those more senior, experienced heads to move on their design systems efforts to join a mature existing team that could fill in any gaps in experience. When asked on the survey, hiring managers pegged having experience in a design system as the most important thing they’d look for in a candidate, with systems thinking not far behind. One quote stood out, “A minimum of exposure to the development of a true design system (not a pattern library) with a preference toward designers who participated in the planning, build, and rollout of the system.” Clearly, very desirable experience, but how many people out there would qualify and be looking for work? Another quote about looking for “System experience, ability to work on a fresh system, ability to self organize and communicate” seems to give scope to people with other skills that are very relevant.

Thoughts for hiring managers:

• Aside from experience working on a design system, look at the skills that might enable someone to succeed in this role
• How might your recruitment process give people the opportunity to demonstrate systems thinking and the skills that enable design systems? This could be experience in forming cross-team relationships and collaboration along with some evidence of different kinds of communications skills or coaching

Thoughts for candidates:

• It can feel demoralizing when you know you don’t have direct experience on a design system when it’s something you’re passionate about. Try and draw out the experiences you have around those qualities of collaboration and communication. Many of the roles in design systems mean not just great working relationships with peers in your team but likely many other teams or departments
• If you’re unsure if you understand systems thinking, challenge yourself with some reading and document your learning journey through a blog or similar. Ask yourself questions about your existing work like how you might abstract an existing component, understand its purpose, and make it more generic for reuse and work on how you might document that

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“You must be on-site 6 days a week, 12 hours a day”

It might not be surprising, but the vast majority of people looking for roles in the design system space are either looking for fully remote (50%) or hybrid working (37%) with only 7% of participants looking for a job that is office-based. In the tech sector, having some flexibility or some kind has been available to many of us for a while to varying degrees but this eclipses my initial assumptions!

When looking at the main challenges in hiring, alongside other challenges location or ways of working was a factor below experience and salary. There’s a mismatch here. Finding candidates with enough experience or relevant experience is the biggest challenge, so are companies doing enough in regard to location or ways of working to attract candidates with relevant experience to ameliorate that?

We found that 25% of our respondents turned down a role because the expectations of location or ways of working didn’t align, which is significant for that late stage in the process. Is this a miscommunication of expectations? Did some candidates assume that every company was more flexible these days?

Thoughts for hiring managers:

• Clarity over the rationale for your way of working, and explaining constraints clearly can help from the job advert onwards. If something is currently vague to a candidate such as “flexible working”, it may be worth giving some examples of what people currently do to contextualize what you mean
• Hybrid working can have many connotations from a very fluid, optional use of office space to a mandated amount of time or specific days in an office. If that’s not negotiable, it’s worth explaining why that works so well for you and why that flavor of hybrid working resonated for your company. Are there exceptions and flexibility within that? Is remote working totally off the table?

Thoughts for candidates:

• Reflect on what works best for you and why, if you haven’t already
• Work out how much are you realistically willing to compromise for the right role
• If you have a clear position then have that conversation clearly upfront with the recruiting party to avoid any potential mismatch

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Feeling the friction in the process

Looking at the feedback around challenges people face when applying for design system roles, most revolve around three main points: the interview process itself (44%), companies not appearing to have a solid awareness of design systems (24%) and a lack of clarity in the role they’re applying for (18%). That also relates to a pain point that many respondents found with not feeling able to communicate their experience to the hiring managers.

When we look over at how the hiring managers found the process, 24% of them reported that their interview process was no different for DS roles than it was for non-DS roles. Those that had made changes either added in some questions or challenges for the applicants more specifically around design systems but for either, this was less than half of respondents.

There’s something here about this recruitment process that is worth looking into further. Should the interviewing process for common roles like designers and developers be different for design systems? Some of this may relate to the maturity of the hiring team. If the design system you’re building is new and you’re looking to put a team around it, you may not have the expertise internally to build a bespoke hiring process, as you don’t know what to look for. Conversely, having a mature team around a system likely points to recruiting for roles that require a certain level or type of experience, which reduces the potential pool of applicants.

Thoughts for hiring managers:

• Spell out clearly how your design system role differs from the non-DS role
• Be clear about your level of design system maturity as an organisation and how the advertised role would work within that
• If you don’t have the in-house expertise to hire a design system team, consider engaging a consultant who can help you build out the right process, questions and challenges
• For a more mature team, consider if you have capacity to take someone that has the raw skills but may lack direct experience

Thoughts for candidates:

• Prepare some questions for the recruiter/hiring manager in advance of an interview to better understand the structure around their design system and get a feel for the level of maturity
• Be clear on how you feel you can add value given the set-up that they have even if you don’t feel you have direct experience on your CV

There’s a lot more that we’ll go into in the full report including interviews with people in the industry providing insight from their own experiences.