With outsourcing designs becoming a norm across most industries, everyone ranging from small scale local businesses to large scale professional corporations seem to be in the favor of hiring a virtual designer for they ensure the utmost convenience and comfort by all means.
With this new trend, the large-scale organizations are capable of hiring a diversified talent in the form of virtual designers without any need to spend excess costs and liabilities over full-time employees. Similar to that, small scale organizations are also at the ease of finding out highly qualified and professional designers for their timely needs such as to design a custom logo, compelling website design, or experts in social media designs. By hiring a virtual designer for each specific task, they don’t have to spend a lot of budgets nor they need to bear their costs and liabilities after the task is completed.
Put aside all these benefits, do you know the right recipe for hiring a virtual designer or maybe a full design team?
Well, to help you understand, I’ve put together all the right tips for hiring a virtual designer or a design team in this blog post.
Dive in to burst your curiosity and get started.
Hire A Designer for Each Specific Project
Just like for every department in your organization, you aim to hire a specialized person. With the design, you should also look out for hiring a virtual designer separately for each different kind of a project. You cannot excel by hiring a generic designer and get all your logos, websites, and social media posts designed. It would only make the situation worse. However, if you hire a different designer for each different project be it for a smaller period of time, it will not only help you get high-end professional designs but also save your cost and keep expanding your brand in all the multiple niches.
Check Portfolio. Also, Make Sure Their Designs Are Still in Use
We all ask for the portfolio when hiring a virtual designer, we surely do. But can we go the extra mile and cross-check whether their designs are still in use of their clients or not? It only takes a while and can save your fortunes in the future.
If you find their designs still in use, that’s a go-ahead. But if they’re not, you shall take it as a red flag and consider dropping out the candidate. Because the only reason why clients don’t use a design anymore is that it wasn’t capable of attaining good results.
A lot of us seem to neglect this point and go ahead by just being flattered by the designers’ portfolio. However, their performance matters a lot and plays a significant role in your brand’s success and achievements.
Always Go for A Trial Before Final Project
You cannot get away with hiring a virtual designer by looking at their portfolio and exchanging a few messages. You must go for a trial before you hand them over the final project. This can help you determine their work speed, communication skills, turn up timings, and commitment to work.
Once you are convinced of their skills and efficiency with work, you surely hire them for the final project.
Explain Your Project in Detail and Provide Them with A Clear Strategy
In case you are hiring a virtual designer without clearly outlining your project scope and strategy, the chances are great that you’d be left with a disappointing design, so many revisions, and frustration at both yours and designers end.
The scope of your project alongside your strategy shall be very clear and definite. It should be comprised of all the right milestones you wish to achieve, the deliverables you expect from the designer, the costs you are capable of incurring, and the deadlines you are comfortable with. Once you define all these things is a clear and adequate manner, things would become real smooth with hiring a virtual designer or even a virtual design team.
Build Relationship and Know Their Passion
Just as it is highly significant to build a strong relationship with your in-house employees so that you can work with them in a long term and make the most of their skills and talent, it’s important to have an understanding and good relations with your virtual designer or design team as well.
Though it looks typical, but asking your virtual designers their birthdays, talking to them about the weather and their likes and dislikes at times possesses real significance. You can also send the electronic gift cards on their birthdays or when their work touches your heart. This would surely put their morals real high and bind them into a much loyal and powerful relationship with your organization.
Do Not Skip the Rituals of an Interview
Hiring a virtual designer using third party websites such as brandsdesign is no doubt a great idea. From matching you with the best of designers from their expanded talent pool to securing your payment with an extended money-back guarantee of thirty days, it offers all the right benefits. However, you shall not skip the rituals of an interview. Brandsdesign surely matches you with a designer that goes perfectly with your requirements, but asking some generic questions and getting to know your designer before starting the work is always a great idea.
Communication is the key and it can surely help you getting to know your designer better and explaining your brand to them as well. This way you can easily determine if the designer is capable of doing what you expect of them or not and so does the designer.
Test Their Communications Skills Upfront
The last thing you would want is that your virtual designer stops responding for days in the middle of an ongoing project, right? So, always test their communication skills upfront. Do not just sign the deal and then regret later. Talk to them in the beginning, analyze how serious they are with work, and determine if they are good at communication or not.
All these factors might seem to you secondary but what on earth you’d be doing with their primary design skills when they won’t reply to you on time, huh?
Better search more than to regret later.
Agree to A Workable Time Zone
Outsourcing design companies make it easier to hire a virtual designer from almost any part of the world. However, this brings a difference in times zones. There are a lot of chances that the designer you’re working with is from an entirely different time zone. In that case, you shall agree to a specific time zone with your designer. Talk to them, find out what suits their schedule and tell them about yours, and come up to a time frame with mutual understanding so that none of you feel overwhelmed.
Consider A Variety of Designers but Hire One at A Time
When hiring a virtual designer, always consider a variety but hire one at a time. It’s good to engage with more and more designers and to know their skillsets and talents during the hiring process. But the most important thing is not to get confused among them and cut them off the list much quickly. As you continue to cut off all those you don’t find perfect to work with, you eventually end up with the one that reciprocates well with your needs and boom.
Always Trust Your Vibes
It’s always good to trust your vibes and with hiring a virtual designer, it works like wonders. Finding a designer with a super skillset and experience isn’t difficult, there are many available these days. But the real effort is to find one who understands your needs and knows to turn your imaginations real. And the one thing that surely helps you through this process is intuition. Thus, you shall hire a designer as soon as you feel like they’ve understood your brand well and possess the capability to further understand your design requirements.
To put it all condensed, with the increasing demands and requirements of design in the form of custom logo designs, responsive UI IX designs, web designs, landing pages, and so much more, it has become a lot necessary to have a versatile team of designers at hand. However, it is a lot expensive to hire such an in-house team of designers and bear all their expenses and liabilities, hiring a team of virtual designers can always go in favor. Therefore, it won’t only save your cost but also be a means of high-end professional designs for your brand that can fully contribute to your success and achievements.