If you can read this, You’re hired!

How do you separate the wheat from the chaff, the men from the boys? The design market is flooded and anyone with a mac now considers themselves a designer of sorts. It is easy to tell the difference between a good designer and a bad designer. However it is much harder to tell the difference between a good designer and a great designer.

That is always the challenge you face when hiring, it's only time that tells how good or great an individual is. There are few tests you can give at interview stage which truly gage the knowledge and experience of an interviewee.

When I was approached to review some current recruitment campaigns recently, I was shocked at how banal and similar they were to each other. The ads were offering very diverse positions yet all looked the same seeming very dull and lacked any real passion for the role they wanted to fill. These ads were generic and broad and would have left the position open to hundreds, sometimes thousands of applicants, who quite honestly will be a huge waste of your time.

How do you focus your search? How do you refine it to attract only the people you want?

I want to bring to your attention an ad placed earlier this year. In particular a series of Print Ads created by London's Lunar BBDO. Placed earlier this year to appeal to graphic designers, especially those with excellent typographic skills, people with immense attention to detail and a love of their craft, an “Alphabetic Ace”. The ads were presented in a truly stylish manner, written using dingbats – ‘dingbats’ aiming to attract type aficionados and cut through the clutter of mediocre designers. The applicants were presented with an almost abstract graphic to the untrained eye. However, detailed typographers would notice it was a paragraph made entirely of Dingbats, which was for them to decode. No clues were given, as this required a certain amount of knowledge and initiative, which were also part of the job requirement.

Needless to say they got their designers, with a self-filtering ad, which saved them enormous amounts of time.

Think about how you can focus the search with your ads for openings, chances are it will save you lots of time, and be proud of producing something as hard working as the person you want to attract.

Steve Lawler,

Interactive Artist and Creative Director

The Works Asia, Singapore