Employer Guidelines
Designed.org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit building equal-opportunity career resources for designers, regardless of income or geography. Every job listing here — whether submitted directly or pulled in from another source — is expected to hold to the same standard. This is what we mean by that.
Pay real compensation, and say so up front
Listings should show real, bounded compensation — not "market rate" or "DOE," and not a token minimum with no maximum. Some of our members are in places where this is legally required (Colorado's Equal Pay for Equal Work Act and New York's Labor Law §194-B both require a genuine minimum and maximum, not an open-ended figure) — we ask for it everywhere, not just where it's mandatory.
No spec work, no unpaid labor
We follow AIGA's own position against disguised spec work: a real design task should never be a free, unpaid condition of being considered for a role. Legitimate unpaid categories — volunteer work, internships clearly labeled as such, pro bono projects a member opts into — are different from being asked to do speculative client work to "prove yourself" before an offer. The same goes for unpaid labor dressed up as something else: an unpaid "trial week" doing real production work, an "equity only" role where equity is standing in for real compensation rather than supplementing it, or ongoing "training" that's actually the job with no pay attached. Listings that require payment from the applicant, in any form, aren't welcome here either.
No discriminatory or misleading listings
Listings should describe the actual role, actual requirements, and actual employer — not a bait-and-switch, not a role that discriminates on protected characteristics, and not a listing designed to collect resumes for something other than the job as described.
This isn't a real job
A real employer never needs your bank account, routing number, a copy of your ID, or a payment from you — for equipment, a background check, or anything else — before you're hired, and a real interview doesn't happen entirely over chat with someone who won't get on a call. If a listing or a message from an employer through this platform does any of that, it's a scam, not a job: report it with the "Job scam" reason on the listing itself so we can pull it down.
Our members' private activity stays private
An employer never gets access to a member's private learning progress, Critique history, or any internal ranking or score — Designed doesn't produce candidate rankings or scores for employers at all. If a member wants to share specific evidence of their work with you — a Critique response, a completed learning path, a project — that's their own choice to make, not something we hand over on your behalf.
Every direct listing is reviewed
A listing submitted directly through Post a Job goes into a review queue before it's ever shown publicly — it isn't live the moment you submit it. Review includes checking the listing itself against these guidelines and, where possible, whether the submitter's own email is associated with the employer being posted for. This won't catch everything on its own — plenty of real employers post through a third-party applicant-tracking system whose domain won't match their own — which is exactly why a human still reviews every submission rather than relying on that check alone.
If something's wrong with a listing
If you're a member and a listing you find doesn't hold to these guidelines — real or suspected — let us know so we can look into it and remove it if warranted. A pattern of violations from the same employer results in that employer being removed from the platform, not just the one listing.