The Challenge

Find a way to support local designers who were faced with unemployment.

The Outcome

Steel City Designers is a LinkedIn community for all Pittsburgh-based designers, recruiters, and hiring managers built to encourage networking. The Steel City Designers website was built to highlight designers looking for work and enabling recruiters and hiring managers to proactively find and vet candidates for open positions they are trying to fill.

My Role

As the founder of Steel City Designers, my roles included user research, branding, web design, community building and outreach, video editor, copywriter, and interviewer.

Focus on a niche.

Steel City Designers came into existence based on research I was doing while volunteering to build a career prep program for a local UX design group. This career prep journey afforded me opportunities to interview university faculty, career coaches, hiring managers, recruiters, and designers. What became abundantly clear was the need to provide support to designers at all levels. Students and graduates were faced with an uphill battle to be noticed in a crowded job market. The designers who were unemployed, or those individuals looking to transition into design, were also faced with a saturated market. Through this research, and based on my personal experience, it was clear something needed to be done.

After doing various research—through interviews and a survey—what was most needed was a way to connect designers with recruiters and hiring managers looking to fill roles. The frustrations were clear for both parties.

1. Designers were frustrated with seeking out open positions, tailoring their resumés to meet the requirements of the role, and submitting their application. All of this effort felt antiquated because there was little to no feedback coming from the company. Oftentimes, companies were not even responding with a rejection.

2. Recruiters and hiring managers were frustrated because there were so many applications being submitted, that there was a heavy reliance on ATS to narrow down the candidate pool. This still left these folks with sometimes hundreds of resumés to look at in order to narrow it down further to a more manageable number of candidates.

Other research included looking into other communities currently available. Two examples of communities included adplist.org, which was established as a global network of designers looking for work. Having a niche designer group was powerful, but the sheer volume of designers looking for work around the globe was daunting. Another example was Project 1000 Hires. This community was tailored to anyone and everyone looking for work, which made it difficult for recruiters to narrow their search to design. Thus, Steel City Designers focuses on designers specifically, and even further, designers only within Pittsburgh.

The end result was two-fold. First, I would establish a community of designers specific to the Pittsburgh market to foster networking and idea-sharing in the area. This is being accomplished through a LinkedIn network where connections between designers, recruiters, and hiring managers are highly encouraged. Second, I built a website dedicated to highlighting design talent in the area as a way for recruiters and hiring managers to find and vet talent that would supplement what they were already getting through applications.