Choosing the right creative director at your nonprofit can be crucial for your organization’s marketing success. We’re in the middle of a search for a new creative director at Food for the Hungry, and as I’m moving through the process, I’ve found candidates with a wide range of experiences and expertise. It’s been an enjoyable process learning about candidates’ backgrounds and their vision for how a nonprofit’s brand and fundraising intersect. I’ve developed these 25 interview questions to help you find your next creative director. Pick and choose the right questions for your interview process.
- Tell me about your current role and how your experiences will translate into the creative director role at our nonprofit organization.
- Describe your leadership style. How do you like to lead a team?
- How would your staff describe you?
- How does a nonprofit organization’s brand and fundraising work together?
- You’re asked to review a fundraising appeal. What do you look for?
- How do you handle an internal client who, when asked for feedback about a designed piece, keeps responding, “I just don’t like it”?
- Describe a situation where you’ve had to work with a difficult personality. How do you coach that person to performance? Or, if it’s a coworker, how did you manage the relationship to be productive?
- You design what you feel is the right thing for a campaign, but your executive leader doesn’t like it. You believe it’s the right direction to go. How do you persuade your leader this is the right design direction?
- Tell me about a brand you admire and why you admire it.
- What are three design trends you like?
- Someone from another team comes to you and says, “we need to develop a new logo for this fundraising campaign.” How do you respond?
- Tell me about your previous team. What were some of the best things your team accomplished? What were some of the challenges?
- How would your previous staff describe you?
- How do you provide constructive feedback to a designer?
- Tell us about a time where the scope of a project was too much to deliver by the deadline. What did you cut? How did you decide what to cut to make the deadline?
- How does testing, data, and analytics inform your designs?
- What are some challenges you find in brand development? How do you overcome them?
- Is it appropriate for design to overrule what data is telling you? If you test and the results show you one way works, would you ever go with the other design?
- Tell me about a situation where you had a staff member working on a project, and work product just kept not turning out the way you desired. Revision after revision, it just wasn’t right. How did you handle the situation?
- What is the most significant creative challenge in your career to date?
- Who inspires you?
- What types of projects do you like to work on?
- How should design be measured?
- Summarize the steps you take to onboard a new designer.
- What do you think of our brand?
These interview questions should help spur some ideas for you in your creative director search.
