Recruitment is a highly tuned skill; not only do you have to be knowledgeable in your company and the field you're hiring for, but you have to be able to cut through the prose, nervousness and first impressions to see the diamonds in the rough as it were.

When it comes to recruiting for a position like graphic designer, it can be difficult to find a candidate that not only has the skills, but shares the vision of where your company is going and how they're getting there. Graphic design is as much subjective art as experience-driven skill and that can be hard to measure from a recruitment standpoint.

There's so much information to understand before choosing a designer, here is a list of just a few of the things to consider if you need to be on the lookout for graphic design candidates for your company.

Know Where to Look

There are thousands of websites, groups, forums and other “hangouts” that graphic designers haunt. In order to find the best designer for your project, you need to know where to look for the designers that might be able to accomplish the task.

AIGA is an excellent resource for those wanting to advertise their design skills, so it's an excellent place to start looking at portfolios if you want to hide a full-time designer. Their Designer Directory allows you to search by a variety of criteria, including location, which can help narrow down your search to areas around you immediate vicinity.

Creative Hotlist is another excellent resource for pouring through those portfolios. Right from the front page you already get a glimpse of portfolios that belong to talented designers. The only issue may be narrowing the search to something more manageable to your needs. If you're on a time limit this could be vital.

Behance also offers a plethora of designers the chance to showcase their work for your perusal. Again, the selection is so vast, you might want to consider a telecommute position when you search with this method. The designers that you find aren't guaranteed to know your products or services, so keep this in mind.

Know What You Want

Be prepared, when you hire a graphic designer to clearly outline the scope of your project and what is expected of them. You'll need to set clear expectations so that you understand how the graphic designer will work with your company ahead of time and that they can meet your deadlines and do work that consistently lives up to not only your expectations but matches the level of work and image you are building or maintaining for your business.

Know Your Budget

Another area where graphic designers vary widely, there's no set pricing scheme for skilled craftsmanship. Graphic designers set their own prices and they can be startlingly high. Make sure you're upfront about your plans for paying them and be sure you check with your candidates regarding what price they believe is fair for their work. Finding a designer on a tight budget is going to be harder than if you have some flexibility so, if possible, build in a little room for negotiations.

Work Smarter

If all of that seems a little daunting when faced with your own deadlines and other workloads, don't worry. There's another option to explore if what you're looking for is someone to work on a specific project or smaller projects in general, there's a way to get what you need, at a price that will please your budget and won't require the legwork that hiring even a temporary or part-time designer comes with.

Companies like BlueJeans take the guesswork out of recruiting a graphic designer to your team by offering a unique contest-based vetting process. You supply the details, colors and as much vision as you want, and the artists deliver the designs they feel will best meet your needs. The hardest part might be choosing which design to go with at the end of the contest.

These sorts of companies have worked hard to take all the nuances of hiring a graphic designer into consideration so that when you use their services to find the artist for your next logo, web design or brochure, you're getting top quality results without the time it normally takes to simply find the designer that your company will be working with.

Conclusion

In the end, there are a thousand ways to go about finding a graphic designer, and the simplest way isn't necessarily going to be the best for your company or project, but with technology making telecommuting more of a reality all the time and graphic design being all about working behind the scenes, there are options that taking finding the right art for your project or business quicker and more simple than the traditional hiring method. In essence, you can sit back and let the designers come to you. You get great selection without wasting your own or the designer's valuable time and you still walk away with great art.