A Web Designer decides how your website looks and reads: the composition of each page, the typographic hierarchy that guides the eye, how brand identity is expressed on screen, and the visual system that keeps thirty pages feeling like one place. Two distinctions help when writing the advert. Unlike a Graphic Designer working to fixed compositions for print or campaign assets, a Web Designer designs for a medium that resizes, scrolls, and fills with content nobody has written yet. Unlike a Product Designer shaping an application's flows over repeated use, the Web Designer is usually working on a first impression measured in seconds. Assess this role primarily through portfolio critique rather than interview answers, because the ability to explain why a layout is arranged the way it is separates designers from decorators.
Run the interview as a portfolio critique and spend most of it on one project. Ask why the page is arranged as it is, what the visitor was meant to do, and what the designer would change now. The answer reveals whether decisions were reasoned or aesthetic instinct dressed up afterwards. Look for work that survives real content: long headlines, awkward product names, imagery of mixed quality. Ask to see the phone version of any desktop layout they show you. Designers who present only wide hero shots are often hiding the part of the craft that is hardest.
Ask them to pick a page from their portfolio and explain what they would remove. Editing ability is a strong signal and rarely faked. Then: how do you design a template when you do not know how long the copy will be or whether there will be an image? Practical answers mention rules, states, and constraints rather than one perfect composition. Ask about a time a developer said something could not be built as designed and what happened next, which reveals collaboration style. Finally, ask how they would judge whether a page they designed is working.
Agency and studio designers ship a high volume of sites and often want deeper involvement with one brand. Freelancers with strong portfolios can be trialled on a paid project before any permanent commitment, which is the most reliable assessment available for design work. Design communities, portfolio platforms, and local creative meetups are the obvious places to look, and referrals from developers you trust are unusually reliable because developers know who annotates their work properly. Include a link to your current site in the advert, since designers want to know what they would be improving.
Be wary of portfolios shown only as polished presentation images with no link to a live page, since it is impossible to tell what was built and what was aspiration. A designer who cannot articulate a reason for a layout beyond personal taste will struggle when stakeholders disagree. Watch for work that ignores small screens, and for anyone dismissive of constraints such as accessibility, brand rules, or build effort. Another warning sign is treating every project as an opportunity to redesign the brand, which tends to produce conflict with marketing rather than better pages.
Design hiring lives or dies on reviewing work consistently, and portfolio links scattered across email threads make that almost impossible. Pitch N Hire's ATS keeps each candidate's portfolio, notes, and reviewer scorecards on one record so marketing, brand, and engineering stakeholders assess the same work against the same criteria. Structured screening questions about responsive experience and design systems cut the pipeline down before anyone spends an hour on a critique. If you run a paid exercise, storing every submission alongside its feedback keeps the comparison fair and makes the final decision quick and explainable.
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