Making Room for Beginners

It's no secret that companies haven't been particularly welcoming to early-career UX/UI Designers. The hesitation is understandable: concerns about lack of technical experience, potential behavioral issues, difficulty taking ownership of deliverables, or simply not having a more senior professional on the team who can mentor and guide a junior through their development.

As we've discussed before, this results in a massive imbalance between senior and junior job openings — an equation that doesn't add up: new professionals need work experience to grow, but the opportunity to gain that experience never opens up. And so they stay stuck.

That said, there's an important counterpoint worth raising: despite their inexperience, we've seen many cases of junior designers being hired precisely because of their attitude — their collaboration, commitment, and delivery. Their main ingredient is drive: the eagerness to put freshly acquired knowledge into practice.

That ingredient should be treated as gold by any company that understands the value it can bring to their products over time.

The reality, however, is that most companies appear uninterested, unprepared, or simply too busy to build strategies that make hiring junior professionals viable — resulting in the loss of real talent. This is exactly the moment when a closer look at the product and the team becomes necessary, so that space can be created for these professionals in a strategic, gradual way.

Advantages of Hiring Juniors

People who find their way into UX/UI Design typically did so because they fell in love with one or more of its disciplines — or because they found in this profession a way to finally put underused skills to work. The fuel driving early-career UX/UI Designers is the desire to make people's lives easier, solve problems in innovative ways, connect meaningfully with users, be part of something extraordinary, reshape companies with a design mindset, and build products that genuinely delight. Companies that want to channel this energy should consider that hiring juniors might be exactly what their product needs. Here's why:

Building Stronger Teams Through Mixed Seniority

Not every design task requires deep experience. Teams made up exclusively of senior designers tend to lose productivity over time — and sometimes fall apart — because senior professionals find themselves doing all the hands-on production work, feeling undervalued and unable to dedicate their time to the strategic and business-level decisions that actually require their expertise. The solution is to build design teams that include less experienced professionals: people without ingrained habits, eager to see their first real projects come to life. Mixed-seniority teams are far more likely to consolidate and deliver better results.

Shaping Professionals Through Company Culture

Companies often fear investing in early-career professionals only to lose them shortly after. The most effective counter to that fear is deep cultural rooting. This isn't about surface-level perks — it's about creating a genuinely attractive work environment where people want to stay. That means giving them a voice, fostering cross-departmental connections, celebrating wins (even small ones) in meaningful ways, providing good tools, and more. When done well, a junior professional can absolutely put down roots, being shaped by the company's way of working, product vision, and market positioning — and genuinely feeling like part of something bigger.

Gaining Production Speed

With solid leadership and support from more experienced UX/UI Designers, teams that include multiple junior professionals can move faster: more people conducting discoveries and validations simultaneously, running user journeys and tests from different and complementary perspectives, producing richer and more scalable layouts. And of course, more minds thinking together means more capacity to evangelize the value of design across the organization.

Approaches That Work

A good starting point when considering hiring junior UX/UI Designers is understanding what motivates them, where they come from, and how to attract them with the right approach. Since they haven't yet had the chance to prove their value in a professional setting, it's entirely expected that their portfolios will consist mostly of academic projects and that their personal presentation may need refinement. Even so, the very existence of a portfolio shows genuine interest in pursuing an opportunity. Here are three approaches your company can use to build an effective junior acquisition process:

Host Events That Attract Talent

Organize collective design challenges. To do this well, the company needs a clear hiring objective and evaluation criteria — then creates a real product or feature brief for candidates to solve. Candidates are invited, brought together, and briefed on the company and the project, with job offers serving as the prize for the strongest proposals and performances.

Go Directly to the Educators

Reaching out to UX/UI training programs and bootcamps is an excellent strategy. Classes tend to start full and finish with a small group of people who truly stood out — and those people come recommended by their instructors. There's no shortage of quality programs to approach. In Brazil: Aela.io, Punk Metrics, Mergo, Tera, Alura, Gama Academy, UX Unicórnio, Awary, Digital House, EBAC, Mentorama, and How. Internationally: Ironhack, UXPM, Flag, IDF, General Assembly, EDIT (now also in São Paulo), and NN/g.

Create Formal Hiring Programs

Simply announcing that your company is open to hiring juniors isn't enough to attract strong candidates. We recommend building formal programs that openly communicate the details of the opportunity — without making it feel like a competition between candidates. The goal is to tell the market about the product or feature at hand, specify the expected profile with precision, create an aptitude and skills assessment, and provide a clear submission process for proposals.

These three approaches can also be combined or layered depending on your company's profile and how you want to present your brand and reputation in the market.

Wait — Don't Hire Juniors If…

Companies with less design maturity often look to hire juniors primarily as a cost-cutting measure or as a way to "start" their UX team. This needs to be said clearly: no junior should be tasked with founding a company's UX department. That mindset leads them to take on a massive, directionless workload — alone and without specific leadership. Worse, misread expectations of their role will push them toward visual marketing and internal communication tasks instead of actual product work. The result: no one focused on the user, on the technology, or on the business outcomes that matter. The right scenario is always to bring juniors in when strong design leadership is already in place.

Conclusion

Failing to create opportunities for early-career UX/UI Designers can mean losing exceptional talent. With the right leadership and strategy, juniors bring energy, resilience, and production capacity to teams — exactly what products need to reach their full potential.