“Hey Siri, where can I find a Product Designer?”. “There is one option”, Siri says and shows the address of an interior design studio on the corner. If you don’t give up after that, you will come across freelance platforms, tips on how to improve a job description, and probably even lots of job websites saturated with recruiters. But what if you need a full-time Product Designer eager to work remotely and spending from $100 to $1000 on just a single job post is not an option? Well, you are in the right place.
Recruiting for a startup is hard, but finding the right Product Designer who will make your product look, feel, work and sell better is a real challenge. At asynchr we help companies streamline their hiring process and find top talent for hard-to-fill positions. If you are ready to kick off your search, we have compiled a list of free job posting opportunities to hire Product Designers, including niche job boards and online communities that will save you time and money.
1. Hire from the creative pool
Behance
Behance is a social networking platform owned by Adobe used by creative professionals mostly to showcase their work. According to Betterteam, there are 12 million job seekers on Behance specializing in a variety of fields, from architecture to motion graphics. Job postings are now free for a limited time (because of the pandemic). To post remote jobs use ‘Anywhere’ for the location. There is also an option to choose a few relevant categories, like Product Design and UI/UX.Creativepool
Creativepool features more than 300k creative professionals with resumes and portfolios. All job postings stay active for 60 days. Candidates can even tick the ‘Remote’ box when searching for jobs on the website. Furthermore, jobs get promoted on Twitter. Creativepool HQs are in London, so it looks like job seekers are mostly based in the UK.Hyperisland
Hyperisland is an online school with HQs in Stockholm that also hosts an open job board for so-called ‘digital creatives', meaning people in marketing, leadership, tech, and design. There is no way to post a job without choosing a specific location, so you need to clarify the remote nature of the role and the company in the description.The Dots
Do you wear a suit to work? If you want to use The Dots for free job postings, get rid of it. The Dots is a platform for "free spirits": creators, entrepreneurs, and teams. A single job listing on The Dots usually costs £195, but luckily they don’t charge a penny if you post internships or remote roles for no-collar professionals.Open Source Design
Do phrases like “open source design” or “libre software” make your heart beat faster? Open Source Design advocates the use of open-source software and companies who work with it can list their jobs and gigs there. The location field doesn’t even exist, and all job posts mostly feature links to companies’ websites, external flows and just Google Docs with all the details.
2. Narrow it down to Product Design
UX Jobs Boards
This job board is a veteran of the UX job market. Launched in 2008, it has a community of more than 10k UX professionals. A standard listing on the UX Jobs Board is free and stays up on the website for 30 days. Use Anywhere location to attract remote workers. If you want to get promoted on UX Jobs Board social media or to be featured in any way possible, pay extra.UIUXjobsboard
Another niche job board with a focus on startups and tech companies. No frills, just a long list of jobs with an option to put your offer into a narrower category like UX, UI or Product Design. Job postings are free, and you don’t even have to pay for ticking a ‘remote’ box. The job board is a real low-cost carrier: just like for extra legroom you pay $5 for every job post boost.Just UX Jobs
A shiny phrase “Free to post, free to apply” in the heading of this job board says it all. You can put anything in the location field, write something like ‘Berlin/Remote’ or ‘Anywhere’ or just leave it blank. The candidate has a good chance to see your listing anyway, as the board is tiny — only around 50 active job posts.Mind the Product
This community created by product people for product people has its own job board with ‘remote’ and ‘flexible hours’ filters. Job posts stay up for a month, get included into newsletters, retweeted to @prodmgmtjobs and published on their Slack channel.3. Find candidates ready to work for startups
AngelList & F6S
If you are a startup, these resources are like a curated LinkedIn to promote your jobs to Product Designers. The overall candidate pool on AngelList is 3.2M+, and on F6S it is only 150K+. Advertising remote roles is available on both.Ask HN: Who is Hiring?
Who is Hiring? is a monthly thread for jobs on the Hacker News (HN) forum that looks a lot like Reddit with a focus on computer science, tech and startups. Users can post jobs in their projects or companies in the monthly thread, and Product Design, UX and UI recruiting is quite common. A few indexes and websites are built around HN Who is hiring thread, such as Whoishiring.me, Hnhiring.com and Remoteleaf directory.4. Break into online communities
- r/DesignJobs With more than 45k members this subreddit is fully dedicated to jobs in design. The rules say “Graphic Design related posts only”, however, UX and Product Design jobs are being posted with the [Hiring] tag.
- r/RemoteJobs is a subreddit with 11.2k followers and remote roles in any field.
- r/forhire with more than 200k members is the most popular thread for posting jobs on Reddit.
- r/hiring has 10k members and is made specifically for job listings.
Discord and Slack
- Designer Hangout is a professional design community of 18k+ members. Claims to be the world's #1 UX design community, providing everything from mentorship to jobs. The only problem is it’s by invite-only, and a few thousand people are on the waitlist;
- Memorisely is a UX/UI Design online Bootcamp that also holds a slack community with a job thread #ux-ui-jobs;
- Design Buddies: #paid-opportunities;
- UX / UI: #jobs;
- UX Mastery: #jobs;
- Digital Nomads: job ads seem to be welcome on all its channels.
- The Designers League is a cozy private group of more than 20k design professionals. Job listings are not even mentioned in the rules, but there are already posts featuring job opportunities for designers. Give it a try, make it look friendly and casual.
- Design x Tech A sweet combo of design and tech. Job posts are allowed in a special monthly thread.
- Designers Guild is a place for designers of various fields, from architecture and fashion to gaming and UI/UX. Job ads go in monthly thread.
- UI & UX Designers
- UI/UX designers
5. Get the cream of the crop
Experienced recruiters don’t just post an ad, sit back and wait. They walk through a variety of tools and techniques to source the best candidates who are often happily employed and thus hard to reach. asynchr is a free all-in-one tool that enables you to look beyond job boards and to reach out to elusive and hard-to-engage passive candidates, even if you don't have a superstar recruiter (or any recruiter) or the desire to spend the entire working day on hiring. If you are using asynchr, you can target passive job seekers through professional communities, a.k.a. their natural habitat.
Job seekers spend less than 50 seconds reading a job ad, and grabbing their attention is a real challenge. asynchr promotes video-based job ads since candidates find them more relatable, engaging and “human” than text job descriptions. You are more likely to get to passive candidates with a video job ad, as in-feed videos get more engagement. Videos also bring your company and personal branding to the next level.
Do you want to know more about tech hiring? Check out our previous article on where to post job opportunities for developers.