The Case For Hiring Junior Designers
Finding an employee to fill an open position within a company can be a daunting task for any hiring manager. Will this employee be able to effectively complete the tasks required of this role? Will they fail at this job, and put my job as a hiring manager on the line? These questions are all top of mind for the person deciding to move you forward to the next round of interviews. What is it that makes hiring a junior designer “risky” and “less than ideal”? To start let's take a moment to define a junior designer.
A junior designer is someone looking to enter the field that has a minimal amount of experience. This person is usually straight out of school and has little to no real-world experience. A juniors portfolio is generally occupied with in-class projects meant to replicate the client and designer relationship. Some juniors are young in age and possess a toxic level of naivety, while others are fully developed academics in hopes of a new career. The rise of “career-changing boot camps” has vastly diversified the field, and people of all ages and backgrounds are entering tech from different chapters of their lives. The problem is we are all classified in the same way and the stereotype of a junior designer is hurting us all.
As a junior designer, you find yourself caught an uphill battle. You can't get hired because you don't have the right amount of experience. You cant get internships because of the high demand and lack of opportunity. You need to begin generating an income to survive your job search. You need to create more content in order to be noticed, but creating content takes time, and time is money. Freelancing seems like a good option at first, but how do you charge for a task you've never had the opportunity to successfully produce on your own, outside of an academic institution? These are all the harsh realities of trying to secure your first job as an entry-level designer.
Why aren't companies willing to hire junior designers? The right question might be to ask what makes senior designers that much more desirable. In an employer’s eyes, a senior designer may be a more expensive choice, but they will be able to hit the ground running from day one. This will mean they don't have to pay extra in training costs to get the junior up to speed. Many employers are also taking into consideration the already established office etiquette of the senior, and know there will not be a learning curve when it comes to their behavior in the workplace. A senior designer also has a portfolio full of impressive projects and can detail the positive outcomes of each one.
The case for hiring junior designers may not be as obvious as it is for senior designers, but juniors are still an important part of the office ecosystem and are not given justice when taken at face value. The right junior designer for your company will be completely competent from the start. If they are applying for this role it means they have the capability to begin when we are hired to do so. It is understood that this is not an extension of college and that it is not solely the employer's responsibility to get juniors up to speed. Also, juniors are much cheaper in salary than senior designers, so even if it took a couple of weeks to effectively train them, it will still be lighter on the pocket then hiring an established designer. New employees are also responsible for bringing fresh new insight into a company. If an employer keeps hiring the same employee, new ideas will cease, and creativity will become stagnant.
Hiring is responsive to the current climate surrounding it, and currently, things are not as stable as they were before COVID took hold of our country. Employers face many more risks at this time and are having to respond to things like budget cuts and layoffs. Unfortunately, this is not a good thing for those of us currently trying to get jobs, but this doesn't mean we should stop trying. For now, we need to create as much content as possible to stand out to those employers that are hiring. Even though it seems like the odds are not in our favor, they are only going to get worse. Right now there are thousands of gig economy workers forced into making career changes due to the virus. Bootcamps are becoming increasingly popular as people realize restaurants arent a sustainable career option anymore. With every boot camp grad, our pool of junior designers becomes bigger and bigger, even when there aren't more jobs being produced. So this is the time to do whatever it takes to get noticed. It won't be easy, but stay hopeful, keep bettering yourself, and eventually, you will fall onto the right person’s radar.