Tom Scott

Stealth

Investing in a renewable energy project and brokering other investors to the project. Away from this, I am looking for interesting companies creating real impact in the world.

Investing 

Verified

Using a curated design talent network to build best-in-class teams. 

More to come. Building the plane as we fly it. 

Subscribe to Verified Insights where I'll be writing about my insights in the market.

Founder

Unreasonable

Unreasonable builds community between entrepreneurs, institutions, and investors to profitably solve pressing global problems. As an Unreasonable Mentor, I'm part of an international network that is dedicated to leveraging business to solving the seemingly intractable societal and environmental challenges of our time. My expertise is helping build and scale teams for companies going through hyper-growth.

Advisor

Fearless

Co-founded Fearless from the spare bedroom. Grew to 50+ people, 8-figure business in 3 years.

Co-Founder & CCO (Sold & Exited)

Fierce

Fierce is the design studio of Fearless Group.

Co-Founder

Fearless Talent

Fearless Talent is the Talent business in Fearless Group.

Wiser

Clients - Thriva, 10X Banking, Starling Bank, Toyota, BT/EE, Farfetch, Gousto.

Principal Design Consultant

Source

Clients - Eurostar, Zoopla, Guardian News & Media, Kamet Ventures, Graze, Bookatable, Ticketmaster.

Over the last 4 years, I co-founded a £10m+ revenue company in design.

We built products and teams for FTSE 100, start-ups and everything in between.

Then, in 2023, we decided to part ways.

Now, I have a hypothesis when it comes to hiring design talent.

I believe every company is looking to:

1) Reduce the time to hire 
2) Hire the top 1% of talent

I'm building an exclusive design network, will the sole purpose to connect the world's best designers with companies who want to level-up in design and build world-class teams. 

For companies, they will get a pre-vetted list of designers who have been verified in a short timeframe so they can get on with executing projects and creating a team without wasting time on sourcing, interviewing and procrastinating.

My credentials: 

- Worked with elite CDOs to build out design teams.
- Helped build a design agency, so I get design in and out. 
- Built design communities in 46+ countries.
- Interviewed the world’s best leaders on various topics.

My results: 

- 80k+ designers following my journey on socials
- 100m+ impressions in the last 4 years
- 500+ design hires in the last 5 years, in 9 countries.
- Saved companies £1.1m in agency fees, through our innovative talent model.

Email: tom@itsverfied.io
Twitter: @tomscottt

Co-Founder & CCO

Designer 
↓
Senior Designer 
↓
Lead Designer 
↓
Creative Director 
↓
Global ECD 
↓
Partner
↓
*Joins Apple
↓
Designer

2023 design hiring market in a nutshell: 

- Teams being cut by 50%
- CEO’s diluting design impact
- Cutting middle management 
- Centralised → decentralised
- “Proper” CDO’s on the market 

It’s been a year of survival, with many ignoring the fact design can infuse the business strategy 1-5 years out. 

Teams are being cut, but often 99% of the remaining designers get double the workload. 

I could build a world-class 100+ team with immediately available CDOs, VPs, Staff, Lead, and Senior ICs. I've never seen the amount of quality designers on the market. 

Hire designers based on what they can bring to the table, not shiny logos on their resumes.

There are so many great designers you’ve never heard of.

Stop this BS glamour search. Just because someone has "Meta" or "Google" on their resume doesn't mean they will be right for you.

Feeling lonely and remote working does not get talked about enough. 

Loneliness is so bad for your health, yet what are we doing to support people remote working and living on their own who are suffering in silence?

I live on my own, and can go days without seeing another person IRL. Coupled that with a traumatic life event, it can be a lot for someone working remote and can easily slide into a state of depression. 

Yes, fully remote has perks, but with that we must look for the risks. 

Today I feel lonely. Doesn’t matter status, salary, title, how many bedrooms you have, loneliness is the same.

5 things I found about hiring top designers: 

❌ They need to be the "best" designer in the room
✅ They understand shipping product is a team game

❌ They sit in their ivory tower and demand respect
✅ They can flip conversations to demonstrate ROI

❌ Struggle to align design success to how the biz views success. 
✅ Strong business literacy + can prove how design influences. 

❌ They have an updated portfolio, always. 
✅ They show shipped work, raw files etc. 

❌ They conform, are passive, and embrace uniformity.
✅ They embrace who they are, unapologetically. 

The best people I've hired remain loyal to their personal beliefs and get inspiration from multiple areas of their life and work.

What would you say are the traits of the top designers? 

P.S. who are the top 3 designers you've worked with? 

I spoke to Doug Powell for the Verified Insider last month on: 

- Scaling design within IBM 
- The path to design leadership 
- Succession planning for leaders
- The state of design leadership in 2023

Doug is a "proper" design executive, with over 30 years of experience, Doug has served as a VP of Design of Design at IBM and Expedia Group, where he oversaw design practices, design systems, designer career and leadership programs, as well as the scaling of cross-functional design thinking practices across the companies.

Doug is someone to follow if you're looking for advice from a design exec, he also has his own podcast "This is a Prototype" on all things design leadership. 

The link to the episode is in the comments. ✌️ 

14 things I've seen in the design world in 2023: 

→ A lot of insular design communities. 
→ More designers moving into product.
→ Rise in "player-coach" roles. not good. 
→ The death of IA continues at rapid speed.
→ Crazy long interview processes, even ICs. 
→ A lack of design literacy hurting businesses* 
→ Desire amongst designers to diverse income. 
→ "True" CDO's on the market for the first time.
→ Can we just stop the "seat at the table" chat? 
→ The "biznification" of UX in 2023 is increasing. 
→ Design people managers are the least in demand. 
→ Designers want to remove "design" from their title.
→ Senior IC's have been most in demand for companies.
→ Leaders took jobs 2 levels below, simply to pay the bills. 
→ Increase in design leaders moving into HR/Culture roles. 

*A lot of chat is about designers' need to understand business. Yes, but also companies need to understand design. This is why my belief is we need to be speaking to CTO's, CPO's, CEO's, instead of purely talking between ourselves (which is great) but we need to get integrating with other disciplines more. That's how change is made. 

This is why I've not created a design community after shutting the last one down which had 6000+ members, I am working on something to bring digital executives together, with design being part of the conversation, not the only conversation. 

P.S. What have you seen in 2023? 

#1 way to attract great designers: 

Show the work.

The best talent care about: 

- The work 
- The work 
- The work 
- The work 
- The work 
- The work 

The best talent want to ship work that impacts millions of people, looks incredible, work on hard projects.

Stop hiding your work. 

Start showing the community.

Your inbound rate will shoot up.

I'm working on a "State of Design Hiring" report. 

(reposting this from 2 weeks ago. On the final push for data)

The aim is to collect all data, interviews and survey responses in November. 

And, December, make it look pretty. 

If you are: 

- Working "in-house" 
- A design hiring manager*
- Have 5 minutes to fill out a form
- Based in Europe, UK, USA, the Middle East or Asia

I want to get a fair split of respondents across location, sector, size of organisations etc. 

By design, I am specifically focusing on digital product design, research, UX, DesOps etc. 

*Or have hired designers in the last 12 months. 

I'd love to send you the survey. I hope this will help many companies acquire the right design talent for their teams, which helps the design community further advance and integrate design correctly into organisations. 

You can DM me and I'll send you the survey. 

I appreciate any time you can spare. Please share this post if you don't hire designers, or tag someone who does. Thank you 🙏 

It shouldn't take longer than 21 days to hire a designer. 

(from briefing to offering a candidate. This is IC's, not leadership) 

This is our standard process (for permanent hires): 

Briefing 
↓
Calibration/Submittals (Week 1) 
↓
1st/2nd Interviews (Week 2) 
↓
3rd Interview/offers (Week 3) 

It's simple. There's great talent out there ready to be hired. 

If you are internally aligned before interviewing, appropriate salaries, materials ready to send candidates, well-written JDs and a great briefing. When you have all of this, there's no reason you can't make a hire in weeks.

The C-suite reflects what companies care about. 

(Out of the FTSE 1000 companies, I bet less than 10% have a CDO)

Most of them have a CTO, CPO, CMO, CDO (Digital) there. 

The majority tuck design away in decentralised teams, away from key business decisions and from being the voice of what the human using the product or service wants or needs. 

If we've got no one reflecting human-centred design at the C-suite, we're losing. 2023 has proved when times get tough, CDOs are in jeopardy, it's easily one of the most precarious positions in the C-Suite because every CEO has a different opinion of what design is. 

This is both scary and exciting. I see a world where every FTSE 1000 company has a CDO at the helm. Let's go. 

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