Hire a Taste Maker, Not a Taste Taker

They're being overlooked. Not because they lack skills. But because they haven't mastered software that won't exist in five years.

The Invisible Resume

Your experienced friends—the ones everyone knows are exceptional—are getting filtered out by job descriptions that demand "3+ years of Figma experience" or "Webflow certified."

Puh-lease.

These people have already lived through the transition that matters. They cut film on actual cutting tables. Hand-set type. Made the leap from yellow pads to their first Macs. Migrated from print to digital when everyone thought it was temporary. Survived the great CRM wars of the 2000s. Watched marketing technology cannibalize marketing budgets. Rolled through oodles of CMSs and content platforms—each one promised to be the one. And now they're rolling up their sleeves with AI, treating it like what it is: another tool in a long line of tools.

They've absorbed 317 different versions of Adobe.

They carry the scars of migrations that most people will never experience because platforms stabilized after they proved themselves in the chaos. And that's exactly the skillset being ignored.

The Real Skill Shortage

Every headline talks about "storytelling" and "taste" as the differentiators in an AI-augmented world.

Fair point. Those are the skills that matter now.

But here's the thing: AI learned storytelling and taste from the work these experienced creatives produced. The models were trained on decades of their decisions, their frameworks, their problem-solving. They shaped the aesthetic that machines are now regurgitating through neural networks and careful prompts.

And yet, the hiring market treats someone who's been doing this work for 20 years as less hireable than someone who became "Webflow certified" last quarter.

That's backwards.

A Platform Isn't a Skill

Can they learn Figma? Of course. Webflow? Absolutely. The latest AI image tool that launches this summer? Give them 48 hours.

The platform doesn't matter. It never did.

What matters is the taste that gets expressed through the platform. The ability to make a decision and defend it. To see through a client's stated problem to the actual one. To know when something feels wrong before they can articulate why. To simplify complexity. To make choices that compound over time.

You don't learn that from tutorials. You learn it by making thousands of decisions, living with the consequences, and refining your instincts across multiple mediums, multiple crises, and multiple technological upheavals.

The next platform will be different from Webflow. Just like Webflow is different from Flash. Just like digital was different from print. But the taste—the decision-making muscle—that transfers across every boundary.

Why This Matters to You

If your competitive advantage in 2025 and beyond is rooted in taste—in making choices that resonate because they feel right, not because they follow a template—then your hiring strategy needs to reflect that.

You need people who have spent decades refining their judgment. Who've watched trends come and go and stayed grounded in principles. Who understand constraint not as limitation but as clarity. Who can teach others not just how to use a tool, but when and why it matters.

These people exist. They're just invisible to algorithms built to match job descriptions to resume keywords.

Stand Tall

If you're one of these experienced creators watching the market and feeling overlooked—if you're tired of being passed over because your Figma experience is "only" three years old despite your design intuition spanning three decades—know this: there are companies that get it. Companies that measure skill differently.

If you're building a team and you're serious about taste as a differentiator, stop filtering for platform expertise. Start filtering for judgment. For the ability to learn quickly. For the portfolio of decisions that show the thinking, not just the tools.

The best hires are rarely the ones who are already fluent in what you're using. They're the ones who understand why you're using it—and can spot the moment you should switch.

We Think Differently About This

At Everything Design, we've built our reputation on one principle: taste compounds. The best work comes from teams where decision-making is distributed across people who trust each other's judgment, who've earned their intuition through repetition, and who see every new tool as an extension of what they already know how to do well.

We hire for this. We work for clients who value this. And we believe it's the only scalable advantage left in a world where AI makes the basics accessible to everyone.

If this is how you think about creative talent—if you're building for taste, not platform fluency—let's talk about how we work together.

Whether you're a client looking to build something with real taste, or you're someone who's spent years developing yours and want to work somewhere that recognizes it: we're here.