Taste, talent, and how 37signals hires designers

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And in fact, it just makes everyone more efficient in a sense. So you can get more out of a junior programmer. You can get a more return on a junior programmer than you could have before. That's a great thing. What's your take on a players? I mean, you're now reviewing applications. Like when you say cream de la crop, like what is that to you? Yeah. Well, it depends on the job. So I I've typically hire designer. I'm on the design side of things. So I don't hire programmers, but I'll hire designers. To me, ultimately, what we're looking for, first of all, you have to have the basic skills, of course, like you have to be, let's just say, you have to have a good aesthetic. You have to be able to work within the the tools. tools. You have to write your own HTML and CSS. You've got to do all that stuff. Okay, let's assume that you're there's lots and lots and lots of people who are good at that. We're looking for taste. We're looking for for the ability to communicate. We're looking for the ability to riff and come up with new ideas on the fly.

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We're looking for someone who's an organized thinker um who can present things and knows what matters and what doesn't. So, it's a lot of nuance stuff. So, what we do in the end is we give the last few candidates a project to do for us for a week and we pay them for that week and they all do the same project. they do it independently and then we look at the work and the work reveals everything. It reveals like what was did this person think was important? What did this person think mattered and didn't matter? Um how much energy they spent on certain areas of the screen that they're designing. For example, the latest assignment was kind of rework the base camp home screen in the app, not on the marketing site, but in the app where we currently just have a grid of products or grid of projects. like what what else could this be if it wasn't just a destination to bounce off from but a place to come back to? What else could it be? And and so we have this

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very broad, you know, brief essentially. And I just like to see what people can do with their own instincts and and what instincts do they have and where do they go? What do they think is important? And then when we riff, we we review this project with them. We riff on it with them together. I'm always pushing back even if I like it. Like, ah, I don't know about this or what if you had three more days to do that or what if you had to lose three things. What would you lose? And I want to see someone who's like able to answer that cuz there are always people who are like, you know, like I don't know. I haven't thought about that. Um, and that's okay to think that, but then also you should be able to just riff. That this this ability to riff on the fly is very important to me when it comes to product design. And so I'm

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looking for someone who can do that as well. What it's actually very obvious. It's just so obvious when you get into the final stages who can do this and who can't. What is taste and how do you cultivate it? I don't know how to define it. It's something that um if I had to define it, it basically it's it's coming back to another thing that doesn't really help the definition, but it's basically like paying attention to the details that matter, like the essence of something and understanding what the essence of something is and figuring out how to make that bit of it really, really, really good. Um, so it could be like a really good eye for proportion. It could be a really good eye for materiality. It could be really good eye for for quality. Like for example, if you're looking at a piece of furniture and there's joinery, like you can look at the way that the furniture is joined

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and you can go, "This person put in extra effort. They have good taste here. The proportions are right. The way it comes together is just right. It's a feeling that you get. It's actually a feeling that you get from someone's work. I that's the best way I know how to define it. It's just like it's also I would also say a series of another way to look at it. something I so like how do you how do you maybe a followup would be like how do you how do you discern if someone has good taste um the way I've always done it is just to ask them about other things they like you know um because sometimes you can see it in someone's work and sometimes you can't because they only have a few days to do this project and they're under the gun and like what what else who else do you think is doing good work and why what other things have you maybe seen purchased used recently that you