When I joined UNOWHY in 2018, I was the only designer for five products. The instinct, especially for designers who have spent years developing strong craft opinions, is to hire someone who works like you: same tools, same process, same visual sensibility. It feels safe. You can review their work quickly, onboard them fast, and get them up to speed without friction.
The problem with hiring a copy of yourself
That instinct is understandable but produces the wrong team. If your entire team thinks and works the same way, you have not expanded your capability, you have just increased your headcount. The blind spots you had on day one are still there on day one hundred, now multiplied across five people. And in a context like UNOWHY, where we were building a five-app SaaS ecosystem for 465 schools across Île-de-France, the range of problems was too broad for any single design style to cover well.
Over three years, I recruited five designers. Each hiring decision was deliberate about the same question: what skill does this team not yet have?
Hiring for the gap, not the match
The first designer I brought in had a strong motion and interaction design background. I was working primarily on information architecture and visual systems at that point. The team needed someone who could make the product feel alive in ways that static screens cannot communicate.
The second hire was a researcher. Not a UX designer who also does research occasionally, but someone whose primary skill was structured user inquiry: interview design, synthesis, building research repositories. Before she joined, our knowledge of users was informal and fragmented.
The third and fourth hires brought systems thinking and technical fluency respectively. One understood how to architect Figma files so they scaled across multiple brands without becoming a maintenance nightmare. The other could prototype in code, which meant we could validate ideas with real interactions before committing to development sprints.
What the evaluation process looked like
For each role, the evaluation process started from the same place: I listed honestly what the current team could not do well. Not what would be nice to have, but where we were actively struggling or avoiding. That gap became the brief for the role, and the lens for evaluating candidates.
In practice, this meant I sometimes passed on candidates who were excellent generalist designers but would have been redundant. And I sometimes hired people with less overall experience who had deep expertise in a specific area the team genuinely needed.
Diversity of skill as a structural asset
What emerged over those three years was a team where the diversity of approach was the actual product. Different designers brought different instincts to design reviews. Problems were approached from multiple angles before a direction was locked. The motion designer challenged interface decisions that felt static. The researcher challenged assumptions that had never been tested with real users. The systems thinker flagged inconsistencies that would cost two weeks of rework if they reached production.
By the time the team reached five people, the SQOOL suite was serving over 500,000 students across Île-de-France. That coverage required not just more design output, but better design judgment across a wider range of problems.
The lesson is simple to state and harder to apply: hire for what the team needs, not for what feels familiar. The discomfort of onboarding someone who works differently than you is temporary. The benefit of having a complementary skill on the team compounds over time.