Level Up Your Hiring With These Recruitment Tips From AD100 Designers

OperationsLevel Up Your Hiring With These Recruitment Tips From AD100 DesignersWhen finding good employees gets tough, designers—not surprisingly—get creative

By Kyle Hoepner

January 11, 2022

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Even without a pandemic, the past two years would have been eventful for Corey Damen Jenkins. He has zoomed by a succession of milestones such as joining the ranks of the AD100, publishing his first book Design Remix, devising a much-admired dining room for last year’s Kips Bay Decorator Show House in Dallas, and being recruited to teach a video course on interior design for MasterClass. At the same time, his studio undertook a geographical move to New York City from its original home base in Michigan.

This combination of rapid growth and relocation made adding staff an especially critical task for Jenkins, just as perfect candidates were becoming increasingly hard to track down in a job market upended by COVID. What he calls “the biggest hurdle” was acting as “a de facto human resource manager while wearing the CEO and principal designer hats at the same time.”

Previously, his most prized employees tended to come as referrals, Jenkins notes. But now, “I knew we were going to need help sourcing the right people—and fast.” So, at the suggestion of a colleague, he partnered with a professional recruiting group, Interior Talent. The arrangement worked out well: “They didn’t poach any design firms to bring me stellar choices. They interviewed dozens of candidates and narrowed down the selections to two or three. They also served as a liaison in negotiating salaries and doing background checks.” Collaborating in this manner left Jenkins free to focus on his clients and other aspects of the transfer to Manhattan. “Now I can’t imagine not employing a recruiter to hire my staff,” he concludes.

2020 and 2021 brought employment challenges to New York designer Ryan Korban as well. Concurrent with a slowdown in his business creating retail spaces, coronavirus lockdowns catalyzed a boom in residential commissions. “The staffing needs of a team are very different for residential than for commercial,” he says. “I needed people who knew how to navigate the high-end residential sector.”

Listening to the laments of various friends who were event producers for the fashion industry—who were all experiencing their own pandemic slump—got Korban thinking. Putting together luxury events “is a great parallel to what we do,” he says, and those in charge “understand the hand-holding, they understand high-end clients, they understand install. The experience there is very solution-oriented, with backup plans and just having to make it work.” He feels that shifting from events to interiors offers a good balance for new employees: “There’s a lot of crossover, while there’s also enough for someone to learn.”

Most of the designers who labor on Korban’s residential projects now come with at least some background in events. “To try and find help in an industry that’s booming is really difficult,” he says. “Searching in industries where people are looking to make a pivot is much more interesting, and it brings a fresh perspective.”

AD100 inductee Martyn Lawrence Bullard has had to innovate in the quest to keep his Los Angeles firm fully crewed. “We’ve obviously done all the ads in the right places, as everybody else has been doing,” Bullard says, but the need for personnel still outstripped his ability to make hires.

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Then a thought occurred: Do new employees really have to be new? “I began going back to favorite past design assistants who had left and opened up their own businesses, and said to them, ‘Why don’t you come in and help with some of my projects, which we can run through your office?’” Bullard would preside over the design and client meetings, while his once-and-future associates would handle follow-through and procurement in return for a slice of the profits.

“It ended up being incredibly successful,” Bullard reports happily. “It’s enabled us to spread the work around with people I really trust, who understand my tastes. On their end, it’s bringing more money into their offices, and more training and an understanding of a bigger picture of design for their staff.” Partnering with former assistants, who come to their assignments with a complete toolkit and require no onboarding, has allowed Bullard’s studio to “continue with the workload we have, take on new clients, execute jobs in a timely manner, and still provide the same quality of design.”

Bullard’s cooperative deals have even brought unanticipated benefits. Some of his helpers now find themselves dividing time between multiple design offices. “They’re loving the freedom of being able to work in these different environments, and the knowledge they’re able to gather from the perspectives of the different designers,” he says. “They sometimes bring to the table other ways of doing things that actually might be quite good for our own office. It’s proven to be an interesting thing.”

While tried-and-true best practices for hiring are far from obsolete, challenging times require inventive responses. One option not to be overlooked is simply hanging onto good people who are already in place. These three design leaders have proved, however, that going beyond the obvious in terms of talent acquisition can pay real dividends. ”We’re only as good as the team that supports our endeavors,” Jenkins says. “So invest well in your company’s infrastructure.”