Hiring My First Designer: What It Revealed About Global Labor Trends

As a new “startup founder,” I’m going through the process of hiring a UX/UI designer and a software developer. I made a previous post about this, but now that I’ve actually hired my first person—a UX designer—I felt compelled to write about the experience and connect it to broader global trends in hiring and labor.

The Overwhelming Response

The designer I hired is an experienced professional from Pakistan. We connected after I posted a short note on LinkedIn, just a regular post on my personal page, not even a formal job listing. I have about 3,000 connections there, and within two days, over 200 people reached out to express interest in one of the two roles.

It completely blew my socks off. I had dozens of emails and direct messages pouring in. As someone who’s never hired before, it was overwhelming. To manage the response, I created a Google Form, a lengthy questionnaire designed as a values assessment to test for what you’d call “company culture alignment,” though at this stage, the “company” is basically just me.

Narrowing It Down

From this questionnaire, I identified a handful of top candidates for each role—not based on their portfolios or technical skills, but on their responses. I quickly realized that many highly qualified and even overqualified people had reached out. From there, I conducted a few interviews and eventually chose my first collaborator.

Connecting to Global Labor Trends

This small experience reflects a much larger reality. We’re living in an era where there are far more qualified professionals than there are available roles, especially in creative and tech fields. It’s something people feel intuitively, and this situation illustrates it perfectly.

There’s also a deeper trend here around the globalization of white-collar work. For decades, companies have moved production to countries with lower labor costs. But over the last 10–20 years, we’ve seen the same logic applied to knowledge work, design, engineering, research, customer support, you name it.

My own employer, Thomson Reuters, has expanded its workforce significantly in places like Manila, India, and Mexico City. The people in these offices are every bit as capable at product design or software engineering as those in New York or London.

What My Experience Says About the Future

In my case, I was able to hire someone in Pakistan with a degree in product design and over seven years of experience for a one-week project, for just $200. That’s an incredible rate for work of such quality, and it means I can bankroll my early-stage startup directly out of my own modest paycheck.

For founders in high-cost countries, this opens up huge possibilities. You can build something real, even on a middle-class salary.

The “So What”

For businesses, the benefit is obvious: access to global expertise at a fraction of Western costs. But for job seekers in North America or Europe, this also means increased competition from an international labor market.

In a digital age where collaboration happens online, geography matters less and less. Communication tools have erased much of the distance that once limited who you could hire—or who you were competing with.

A Note on Ethics

That said, I want to acknowledge the ethical dimension. I’ve seen firsthand that people abroad have the same level of skill, education, and creativity as anyone here. Yet because of global economic imbalances, their wages are often dramatically lower.

I can’t afford to pay a Western wage right now—but I also believe it’s wrong to exploit those differences. My approach is to pay fair local rates and, once the business generates revenue, to raise wages significantly. That not only rewards talent but also transfers capital from wealthier nations to places that have historically been underpaid for equal work.

Trickle-Down, But Actually

If you’re paying someone in the tens of thousands per year or above-average local wage, they’re likely to spend most of it within their community. That money circulates. It fuels small businesses and local development in a way that’s simply not true for billionaires hoarding capital in offshore accounts.

Conclusion

My first hiring experience showed me both the promise and the complexity of global digital labor. It’s easier than ever to build something small and meaningful with people across the world—but it also challenges us to think harder about fairness, responsibility, and the kind of economic world we want to help create.

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