Your next design hire is a compliance decision before it's a talent one
By Ray with my favorite human, Benjamin Scott. News Brief,
TL;DRUK hiring practices now require design leaders to prioritize compliance with employment status and intellectual property laws, impacting how design roles are structured and managed to avoid legal and financial pitfalls.
You are staffing up, or trimming down, or both. The market is uncertain and the rules around who you hire and how have gotten sharper. New guides, new job boards, and new signals about where experienced leaders park themselves all point the same way. Let me catch you up on what changed and what to do about it Monday.
The label in the contract stops protecting you
If you hire in the UK, your first decision is not "who" but "what." A 7-step guide from Deel lays it out plainly: employment rights run through three statuses, employee, worker, and self-employed, and the actual working relationship decides which one applies. Calling someone a freelancer does not make them one.
That matters for the off-payroll rules, known as IR35. A "freelance" designer who works full-time for you, uses your equipment, joins every ritual, reports to your design manager, and needs approval for holidays looks a lot like an employee to HMRC. Decide the role before you write the job ad, not after the offer. Core designers embedded in squads and design leads with ongoing ownership should be employees. A one-off campaign visual? That is where a contractor fits.
The design exercise you love could owe minimum wage
Here is one that trips up product teams specifically. That take-home portfolio task you send candidates can become a National Minimum Wage problem if it is really just free work. Acas guidance says unpaid work trials should be reasonable and generally no longer than one day. If the person is doing real work instead of being assessed, you may owe them.
Keep tasks short, time-boxed, and unrelated to live commercial work. Pay candidates for longer strategy work, workshops, or anything that produces usable output. And watch your AI screening tools. UK data law restricts fully automated decisions that reject people, so keep a human in the loop, document the logic, and test for bias. Never let the tool make the final call on a designer.
Own the Figma files, not just the invoice
Contracts are where good hires turn into expensive disputes. A freelance designer can hand you a full design system and still own the copyright unless your agreement transfers it properly. "We paid for it, so we own it" does not hold up. Spell out ownership of Figma files, prototypes, components, design tokens, research reports, and code snippets in writing.
And budget honestly. Comparing a gross salary to a contractor day rate is not a real comparison. Add employer National Insurance, pension, holiday, sick pay, tools, and management overhead. If you are closing a product area in 2026, treat it as a proper redundancy process, not a cancelled role. A week's pay caps at £751, with statutory redundancy maxing at £22,530.
Where the candidates and the mentors are moving
On the supply side, the pipeline is getting more direct. PMCareers.org launched in beta to let product managers apply straight to companies instead of routing through third-party boards, curating real roles from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta. Fewer hoops for the candidate means faster response times for you, if you are competing for those people.
Experienced operators are repositioning too. Former Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman joined Greylock as an executive in residence, advising founders on "the hard parts of scaling that don't fit neatly into a board deck." When people who ran a $1.75 billion company park themselves in mentorship instead of a new operating job, it tells you where senior talent is willing to spend time in an uncertain market.
The deep cut
The risk sits in your existing team, not just your next hire. Look at the "freelancer" who has been embedded with you for a year, attending standups, reporting to a manager, using your laptop. That relationship may already be an IR35 problem, and the fix is not a new contract clause, it is changing how the work actually happens or moving them to payroll. Audit your current contractors before you audit your job ads. The person you hired eighteen months ago is the one who lands you a bill.
Three questions for your team
- Which of our current "contractors" would fail an IR35 test based on how they actually work day to day, and what do we change first?
- Does our design exercise ask candidates to produce usable work, and if so, are we paying them or exposing ourselves to minimum wage claims?
- Do our contracts explicitly transfer ownership of Figma files, design systems, and research, or are we assuming the invoice covers it?
