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A successful design team is rarely composed of single-talent professionals, and rarely comes from a single source of referrals. This was one of the recurring themes of the third Coroflot Creative Employment Confab, held this time in a pleasantly un-rainy Portland, Oregon, and featuring a panel drawn from some of the region's most renowned design-driven employers.

Nike, Intel, Ziba and Cinco Design have all achieved notoriety in their fields for churning out great ideas and great products at a reliable pace, and the representatives of those firms on hand last Thursday -- Beth Sasseen, Nick Oakley, Chelsea Vandiver and Kirk James, respectively -- each claim heavy reliance on professional diversity for their success. That diversity, it turns out, manifests not just within teams (Ziba's designer + engineer + researcher + social scientist groupings are a good example), but within individual designers.

James, Cinco's co-founder and Creative Director, concurred with Vandiver's assessment that "hybrid people" are crucial to communication across disciplines, using their multiply-trained backgrounds to "translate" from one discipline to another. Without such polyglot professionals, they agreed, it's easy to fall into the cliched practice of tossing concepts over the wall into the next professional group.

Finding and maintaining this diversity is an elusive skill in its own right, however, beginning with referral networks. While Oakley led a unanimous statement that personal recommendations are the best source for candidates ("credibility" and "trust" were the reasons most widely cited), Vandiver explained that returning to the same networks or colleagues for new recommendations eventually results in a homogeneous team: comfortable, but ultimately less innovative. For that reason, she and Sasseen both claimed to consciously seek hires with a range of experience levels, giving some preference to those from unexpected sources and with unexpected skill sets. The idea of an interesting narrative in an applicant's resume or CV was advanced too: designers often change jobs, so 10 years of experience can tell a story. Successful candidates make sure it's a good one.

The attendees, nearly evenly split between job-seekers and talent-seekers, wasted no time telling their stories: the atrium of University of Oregon's White Stag Block was filled with conversation and casual portfolio review within minutes of the event's start, and most lingered after the panel until the venue officially shut down.

Images from the post-panel cocktail hour are below, and video of the entire panel discussion is in the works.