Hiring a good designer is really tough, the startup I work at went through a few before finally finding one that was worth the money.

We ended up using something called Upperstudy [1] and liked the process overall. You get a designer for your team that has talent but less experience and is being mentored by the founders of the company who used to work in design for notable companies.

The work your designer does is monitored / scrutinized by their mentors within the company and in the beginning you end up working quite a bit with both your designer and the mentors at the company to make sure you are all on the same page.

If it's a good fit at the end of a trial period, you have the option to bring the designer onto your team full time, and if not you can part ways there.

[1] https://upperstudy.com/

It might be worthwhile to take a look at dribbble. If you haven't heard of it before, it's like a social network for designers to showcase their latest design work. There are some incredible designers on there with fantastic work, specifically around website/UI/etc.

Particularly useful to you might be their hiring section [1]: designers can opt to mark themselves as available for work. I know of a few designers who've been hired through dribbble and it seems to work well. Also, the person hiring can see the kind of design work they tend to produce.

[1] https://dribbble.com/hiring

I run a product design agency, I won’t mention it as it’s not a plug for me. Just a word of caution - Dribble shows off nice looking screenshots - mostly UI - but rarely good UX. In fact, quite the opposite.

Not to say that’s the norm, but if you want design thinkers and not just Figma jockeys, be sure to throw a few UX questions their way.

I agree with this. You'll want to do due diligence before you hire anyone. But someone of the best designers I know of are on dribbble because it's such a popular site. That does mean there's a lot to sift through, of course.

Do you mind sharing some examples of good UX vs just nicely looking UI? Looking to learn, hence the question.

Doesn't sound like anyone had any skin in the game. The behavior you described is what I'd expect from contractors and freelancers.

Happy to discuss my strategies over a 15 min call if you’re up for it. I’ve gotten decently good at figuring out what to look for when evaluating them.