The best design hire I ever made did not have an extensive design portfolio.
He had a decade of experience in behavioral therapy.
I was building the design team at CirrusMD, a telemedicine platform that enabled physicians to deliver care via a screen. The design problem was not visual. It was human. How do you make a frightened patient feel safe through a chat interface? How do you structure a clinical conversation so nothing critical gets missed? How do you design for someone who is sick, anxious, and unsure they made the right decision by opening this app?
Most designers approach those questions through research methods. He approached them through lived practice. He had spent years reading patient behavior, de-escalating difficult conversations, and understanding how people communicate when they are scared and vulnerable. That was not a skill I could find in a portfolio review.
I could teach him design. I could not teach anyone what he already knew.
That hire changed how I think about building teams.
Most design leaders hire designers. They look for craft, portfolio, software proficiency, and prior industry experience. Those things matter. But they are the floor, not the ceiling. The teams that do the most interesting work are the ones built around the problem, not the discipline.
When I think about the gaps in a design team, I do not ask who is missing from the org chart. I ask what knowledge we lack in the room. Sometimes the answer is a traditional designer. Sometimes it is someone who has spent years studying how people behave under pressure, how systems fail at scale, or how clinical decisions are made.
Bootcamps and career pivots opened doors for candidates who brought something that no design program could produce. I have always been willing to walk through those doors.
The portfolio tells me what someone has made. It does not tell me how they think, what they understand about people, or what they know that I cannot teach.
That is what I hire for now.