Work with me

The company I work for, Language International, needs help. We need another designer to join our small team. We know who we want.

Update (2009-10-25): We are located in Cambridge, MA, USA and this is a full-time, in-person position.

Find out more about Language International, because I’m not going to talk about that here.

The business and development team (2 business folks, 2 engineers, and me) discussed what we thought makes up the ideal candidate. We made a list of qualities and assigned an arbitrary rating scale to grade the importance of each quality.

Must have skills

The first portion is a list of absolutely necessary skills. If you don’t match our expectations here, it’s going to be a hard sell. That said, if you’re proficient with the 2nd list of preferred skills, you might still have a chance.

Prototyping

Able to build rapid prototypes (regardless of technology, i.e. Paper, HTML/CSS…) ideally you can take a design from sketches to markup.

Markup and style

Capable and comfortable implementing designs with HTML/CSS.

Design taste

Has great taste in design. Cite sources of inspiration or influence: i.e. Books, blogs, etc…

SEO fundamentals

Understand the essentials of SEO, “good content + good markup + linking strategy = good SEO.”

Unafraid of code

Understand how back-end technology works. The point is, you can’t be scared to work around and within PHP.

Preferred skills

It would be great if you have experience with the following. These are still important to us, but not as much as the previous list. Icing on the cake, as it were.

UX design and research

Solid skills in experience design. You can expect to sketch interfaces and user flows. Would be great if you have experience with research as well.

Manage and measure UX

Can manage and measure the success of design. You should have experience defending your design choices with business and user goals.

Experienced with non-designers

Has worked directly with Business folks, Engineers, and Designers (i.e. You should be comfortable working with designers and non-designers alike). We’re looking for a team player, not someone who only works in heroic issolation. This isn’t a “toss it over the fence” position.

Articulate design requirements

Can identify problems and possible solutions based on the concepts mentioned in meetings.

Visual design

Capable of visually designing interfaces (read: graphic design).

SEM experience

Has worked with a company whose source of new customers are derived from SEO and SEM.

Start-up experience

Has worked at a start-up company.

Diverse employment background

You’ve probably worked as a freelancer, but you’ve also held full-time jobs (e.g. paid non-hourly, which breeds a different kind of work ethic than a part-time/freelance only background).

Drupal and jQuery

You’ve worked with Drupal and jQuery. That’s what we use.

Nice to have skills

I’m mostly kidding here.

• Likes coffee, tea, and/or quality beer.
• Has positive attitude, e.g. uses smiley faces in IM’s.
• Is tickled pink by fine typography.
• Knows when to high-five, and when to low-five.
• Tweets.

How to apply

Forward your resume and portfolio to Karen Ong, our CEO and hiring manager. Your first task will likely be to inspect our site and give us a short list of glaring errors or problems with the design (of the experience variety). I’ll be the first to admit, there are tons of problems with our site and the flow between pages.

What would you do if we hired you? It’s a hypothetical question that warrants a hypothetical answer. If you have any questions regarding this job opening or our company in general, please feel free to contact me. Cheers, I hope to hear from you soon. We’re trying to fill this spot as soon as possible.