Recruiting a Creative Team for a Startup and High Growth Companies

In general any creative role, Designers, Art Directors, and Creative Directors, requires candidates who can demonstrate the following:

Creativity

Enthusiasm

Flexibility

Additionally for high growth and startups there are two more factors to consider: 

Time - Can the candidate commit to more than the normal Monday to Friday 9-6?

Business Building Skills - Can the candidate engage growing the business?

Let’s look at the first need: time. Startups often require a tremendous investment in time. Conversations, brainstorming, and designing new processes will take place 27/7. The ideal creative candidate must show a mental tenacity to invent creative strategies and have the physical robustness to get by with very little sleep.  

In fact, the ideal Creative talent for this role will come into work on Monday saying something like: “I’ve been thinking about the organization of our visual assets and I think I have a short term solution that will work until we can invest in a DAM solution.” The growing needs of the business require someone who can put in long hours and much active thought into the business building effort. Make sure your creative candidate has the mettle and especially the desire to stand up to these rigors.    

And now let’s address the other skill need: business building skills. Startups do not have defined creative processes; art and designs are created on the fly. Probably the creative processes will simply use the existing business infrastructure. Special needs like Digital Asset Management tools or workflow tracking software are future state endeavors. These creative processes will require short, medium, and long term strategic thinking and technical savvy not generally in the tool kit of the typical art director.

In fact it is ideal for the Creative candidate to have solid business, management skills, and software skills like Excel or, especially for a start up, Google sheets. A Creative Director with business experience can help define creative processes that will seamlessly integrate into the overall business structure.  

Generally, core business needs such as software and servers are created first and then creative processes are added to this technological infrastructure. It is essential the process and technological needs of future Creative users are addressed early on and integrating business and creative needs is essential.  

In this role the Creative is responsible for present and future needs. Moreover it is essential to define and address the current creative needs and establish workflows that can handle the creative needs for the next six months and even a year beyond.