Top Talent Management Strategies for Startups to Retain Designers

David Torrealba・2022-07-08

A CEO explaining corporate strategies to staff members in a startup. 44 percent of companies worldwide hire assessment services to design plans for recruiting for professional positions. Image from Unsplash

44 percent of companies worldwide hire assessment services to design plans for recruiting for professional positions. Image from Unsplash

Editor's note: Although this series is written for startups, there are crucial points that designs should take care of when finding a job in startups. Let's learn how to research and make true success in your design career!


A startup is an emerging company, usually with a small number of employees, funding from investors, and a focus on growing fast. The company may be in the process of developing its product or service, or it may be a social venture aiming to address a social problem.

The implementation of a talent management system in a startup can yield many benefits for the company and its employees.

One of the most difficult tasks for a startup is talent management. With a new team of designers, an emerging company must deal with operational and logistical issues. To grow your business as a startup owner, you must be able to manage a large team of professionals such as graphic designers.

This article will teach the key tips to create an effective talent management strategy to retain designers. The main result you want to get is financial growth. So, get ready to implement crucial changes to see an evolution in the process of business continuity, development, and digitization.

How Do Companies Use Assessment for Talent Management?

According to Statista, these are the purposes for which businesses hire assessment services worldwide:

Purposes Grade of usage
Recruiting for professional positions 44 percent
Hiring for technical positions 39 percent
Selecting executive candidates 35 percent
Identifying skills needed for internal mobility 25 percent
Identifying good candidates during campus events 12 percent
Selecting contingent workers 9 percent
No use assessments at all 24 percent

4 Talent Management Strategies That Help You Hire Good Designers

Pay attention to the following tips if you want to hire good designers and build a high-demanded business in the market. As for designers themselves, these are the things you should consider before joining a company or working for a brand.

1. Help Your Designers to Scale Positions

Designers’ growth means the company’s growth. Keep their expectations high, and help them improve and perform more complex tasks to gain expertise and deliver better outcomes.

That’s the best way to start wisely managing all the emerging designers your business has to give to the market. That talent usually stems from coding bootcamps like App Academy, General Assembly, Thinkful, Coding Dojo, Springboard, Flatiron School, and more.

Remember that competitiveness is the rule in the modern market. Make your designers competitive with high-standard technical skills. If you offer job training sessions, they will gain more problem-solving abilities for issues related to technology. Those kinds of requirements are what e-consumers usually ask for the most from modern startups.

2. Promote Effective Teamwork Among Designers

A startup with a deeply rooted teamwork culture is a business intended to win. Promote organic teamwork based on the implementation of an IT infrastructure. Combining professional talent with technology will provide a synchronized platform for high-quality products and services. Project management software and big data systems play a key role in the current market.

The more cooperative values you promote, the more designers will engage in a global work philosophy, which can improve the startup's overall performance in its market segment. Teamwork is supported by soft skills such as communication and problem solving, but technical skills such as data science and design are required to develop that scheme.

3. Organize a Team of Talent Managers

Utilizing specialized personnel as a talent management strategy to lead the rest of the corporate team is prudent. Human Resources Managers are the most appropriate professionals to help designers to stand out in their respective roles. Building a team of talented managers, or hiring one person to fill this role, is one of the best ways to grow your business by tapping into the power of designers.

If you do not exert strategic control over your designers, their ideas will disperse. Organizing your designers and their respective courses of action fosters an environment conducive to creative thinking.

4. Create a Check-and-Balance Corporate System

Checks and balances are extremely important, not only in politics but also in the day-to-day operations of the corporate world. A startup needs a system that works well to verify the fluency of tasks and the workload distribution meant for designers. The best way to implement that scheme is by investing in IT resources for the logistics department, where you can track all the operations.

A startup that constantly monitors clearness, accountability, and punctuality is a company that will always attract customers and investors. This is what an organization does in a new project that is based on IT and the quality of people with tech skills.

Conclusion

In summary, investing time and financial capital in creating new structures for talent management with a strong basis in information technology is key for the future. As the job market evolves, the way startups interact with emerging designers will change in the long run. New skills will rise as new technologies shape the necessities of the market.

Next read: How to Get the Best Designers and Reduce Turnover: Three Tips