What to ask before you hire
Portfolios have never been less informative. Anyone can present twelve striking images now. These questions are designed to find out whether there was a person making decisions behind them.
Reviewed
Ask about what they discarded
Request the rejected directions for a project and the reasoning. A designer who cannot explain why one route beat four others was not directing, they were selecting. This single question sorts most candidates within a minute.
Ask about licensing and handoff
Which tool produced which asset, what its commercial terms permit, and what files you will actually receive. Vague answers here are expensive later, when your legal team asks a question nobody recorded the answer to.
The question to ask yourself
Whether you can recognise good work in your category. If not, no interview process will save you, and paying more for a vetted route is genuinely the rational choice. That is not a sales argument so much as an uncomfortable observation.
- Show me what you rejected and why
- Which tool made this, and under what licence
- What files do I receive, and are they editable
- Walk me through a project that went wrong
Questions about what to ask before you hire
What is the single best question to ask?
Show me what you rejected for a project and why. A designer who cannot explain why one route beat four others was selecting, not directing. It sorts candidates in a minute.
What answers should worry me?
Vagueness about which tool produced which asset and what its licence permits. That gets expensive later, when your legal team asks a question nobody recorded the answer to.
Where to go next
Related pages people usually read alongside this one.
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