Hiring Designers on LinkedIn.. Yay or Nay?

With over 225 million users, you’d think that LinkedIn will solve all of your hiring needs. Yet if you ask anyone who’s tried to hire creative talent with it, they’ll tell you that it’s the worst place to go. How is it possible that you can’t find designers out of a pool of 225 million people? It’ll make sense if you think about it.

Every creative professional I’ve ever met has their own personal website. For example, Mustafa Demirkent, Adam Rudzki, Michael Heinsen, etc. No matter how professional or amateur, designers always end up building their own online presence. In fact, students who attend design schools will likely have built their own website within the first year of their studies. A personal website is where they upload all of their work, it’s the destination to all of their self promotion, and it’s where they point employers to when looking for work. These personal websites are essentially digital portfolios.

The reason why LinkedIn can never replace digital portfolios is because designers differentiate themselves through unique identities. While a structured format for uploading your resume may work well for accountants or lawyers, such restrictions force all designers to look exactly the same. Imagine walking through the mall and every store looks the same, despite selling different items.

As a designer, imagine you’ve already spent endless hours working on projects with unique flair and vibrance, but would you then put them all into a template cookie-cutter profile on LinkedIn? The answer is… sometimes. Yet, the creative population on LinkedIn remains minuscule (3.3%).

So if not LinkedIn, then where do we go? Is there a “LinkedIn for Creatives” that exists out there? Arguably, you can look at communities like Behance and Dribbble. While there are certainly a ton of creatives interacting on those platforms, they have yet to replace the personal portfolios. Despite having a presence on creative communities, nearly every single user still has their own personal website, and many use these community profiles as a marketing channel to drive traffic back to their personal portfolio.

Perhaps tools like ProSite and Carbonmade are the closest to cracking the puzzle. These are tools that allow you to easily create your own portfolio using simple tools and widgets. However, while some customizations are supported, you’re still more or less stuck within the constraints of the platform. In other words, designers can’t differentiate themselves using these tools. They’re quick and easy, but the showcasing of your life’s work is no place to slack.

At Needle, we’re experimenting with a whole new approach. We’ve seen the creative communities, and we’ve seen the portfolio creation tools. Yet everything seems to point back to the destination: the personal portfolio. It would seem like all the efforts in consolidating this fragmented realm have achieved mediocrity at best. We believe that the key is to stop trying to change the behaviours of designers, to stop suppressing their yearning for self expression, and simply improve the discoverability of their personal portfolio. What we’ve built is essentially a Portfolio Search Engine that works just like Google. We index online portfolios around the world and crawl through the content of all of these websites. Try it out, and let us know what you think of this approach.

 

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Posted by Michael Cheng

Michael is the Cofounder of Needle, a platform for hiring creative talent. Prior to Needle, he spent over a decade in the creative space as a freelancer, worked at agencies, and founded numerous companies providing creative services. Michael is an award-winning entrepreneur who has been featured on news publications around the world. He is a thought leader within the creative hiring space as well as an active blogger on the subject.