In the span of a few short years, user experience design has gone from being barely understood to becoming a key competitive factor for today's businesses. The demand for UX professionals has never been greater.

This newfound success has made it challenging for teams to hire great UX professionals. It's equally as difficult for highly-qualified UX professionals to land great positions. There's a mismatch between the outcome we desire and the hiring practices we use.

Hiring is now the biggest challenge that the UX design community faces, as we grow our influence inside our organizations and deliver great products and services. And yet, when do we focus on designing an effective hiring process?

In this informative and entertaining presentation, Jared will share how hiring practices can hurt a team's efforts to grow. He'll walk us through a proven, intentionally-designed hiring process that delivers highly-qualified team members, while also creating a delightful candidate and interviewer experience.

A not well-known fact: In 2015, Jared Spool joined President Obama's White House staff to help the newly-created U.S. Digital Service design their hiring process. It was a high-priority, high-risk effort that couldn't afford to turn great candidates away, nor bring on under-qualified new hires. During his tenure, USDS grew its team of amazing designers, developers, product managers, system reliability engineers, and policy specialists from 20 people to more than 220, all in less than 6 months.

At Center Centre/UIE, he's coached UX managers and hiring teams on the best ways to hire hundreds of new team members and grow their teams. He's used his knowledge to build an online workshop, HiringMasterclass.com, which trains teams all over the world.

Jared does all of this to help fulfill the hundred-year mission of Center Centre/UIE (the company he founded in 1988): eliminate all the bad design from the world. As he sees it, the only way to make that happen is to ensure every organization has the UX professionals they need to deliver well-designed products and services.

You'll find his writing at uie.com. You can also follow his adventures on the Twitters at @jmspool, where he tweets daily about UX design, design strategy, design education, and the wondrous customer service habits of the airline industry.

This meeting will be held at Vistaprint's facility at 275 Wyman St in Waltham. Park in the garage or the large parking lot in back of the garage and walk around to the main entrance. 275 Wyman St can be reached from the North by taking exit 28 from rt 128/95 makng a left hand turn onto Trapelo Rd, and then another right hand turn onto Smith St (which becomes Wyman St after about 1/2 mile) once you cross Rt 128. From the South, take exit 27A-B from I-95/128 and stay in the exit lane until you get to the Wyman St turn off. Don't take the sharp right onto 3rd Ave and Totten Pond Rd. There'also a shortcut coming from Canbridge on Rt 2. Get off Rt 2 at the Waltham St/Lexington exit, take a left hand turn onto Hayden Ave, then make another left at the traffic light onto Smith St.

We will be taking Jared to dinner at Green Papaya after the talk at about 9pm.

Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at http://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/computer/. You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational emails about future talks at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ieee-cs, our self-administered mailing list.