Most companies hire a SharePoint designer the same way: someone who has clicked around a few team sites gets the job, builds a pretty homepage, and six months later employees still cannot find the policy they need. Files pile up in random libraries, permissions sprawl, and adoption quietly dies. The alternative is an intranet people actually open every morning, with clear navigation, consistent branding and governance that keeps it clean as you grow. This guide walks you through what SharePoint design really involves, how to define the role, where to source specialists, how to vet portfolios and how to onboard your new hire quickly.
What SharePoint Design Really Covers and Why It Pays Off
What a SharePoint Designer Does Day to Day
In production, SharePoint design is the work of turning SharePoint Online into an intranet and collaboration space that matches how your company actually operates. It sits between information architecture, visual design and Microsoft 365 administration, and it shapes how every employee finds, shares and trusts internal content.
- Planning information architecture: Mapping the site hierarchy, hub structure, metadata, content types and document library design so content has one logical home. A strong designer runs content audits first, then builds a structure that lets employees reach any key document in a few clicks instead of searching blindly.
- Designing communication and team sites: Choosing when to use communication sites for publishing news and policies, and when to use team sites connected to Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups for collaboration. Getting this choice right prevents duplicated content and keeps departments working in the place that actually fits them.
- Structuring hub sites and navigation: Connecting related sites through hub sites with shared navigation, branding and search scope. The designer plans global, hub and local navigation, plus audience targeting, so a sales rep in Toronto and an engineer in Austin each see the links and news that matter to them.
- Branding and page layouts: Applying modern themes, site designs, site templates and header and footer options, then building page layouts with web parts such as Hero, News, Highlighted content and Quick links. Good SharePoint design works within the limits of modern SharePoint instead of fighting them with fragile customizations.
- Governance and permissions design: Defining site owners, members and visitors, external sharing settings and sensitivity labels so confidential content stays protected. A thoughtful permissions model prevents site sprawl, reduces accidental oversharing and gives IT a clear rulebook for who can create new sites and who approves them.
- Migrating legacy sites: Moving classic SharePoint and on premises SharePoint Server sites with custom master pages and SharePoint Designer workflows into modern SharePoint Online. Since SharePoint Designer 2013 is retired as a tool, this means rebuilding pages, rethinking structure and replacing old workflows with Power Automate where needed.
Why Senior SharePoint Design Skills Belong on Your Priority List
- Employees find what they need: A well designed information architecture cuts the time people spend hunting for forms, policies and project files. That translates directly into fewer repeated questions to HR and IT, faster onboarding for new hires, and less frustration with a platform you are already paying for through Microsoft 365.
- Higher intranet adoption: People use an intranet when it looks credible, loads relevant news and makes daily tasks simple. Senior designers plan adoption from the start with page templates, content owner guidelines and training, so the site stays alive after launch instead of becoming another abandoned internal project.
- Lower risk and cleaner governance: Clear permissions, sharing settings and sensitivity labels keep confidential data where it belongs. A structured governance model also stops uncontrolled site creation, which means less cleanup later, simpler audits and fewer surprises when security or compliance teams review who can see which documents.
- A platform that scales with you: Hub based architecture and reusable site templates let you add new departments, regions or acquisitions without redesigning everything. Instead of rebuilding the intranet every few years, you extend a structure that was planned for growth, which protects your investment and keeps the experience consistent.
Getting Your House in Order Before You Hire
Clarify What You Need Before You Start Sourcing
Before you open a requisition, get your stakeholders aligned on what the intranet must achieve, who owns the content and how much of your current setup needs to change. A short internal discovery session with HR, internal communications, IT and a few department heads will save weeks of back and forth once a SharePoint designer is on board. If the brief also involves broader experience work across internal tools, our product design services can help frame the wider user experience before the SharePoint work begins.
Map the Scope and Current Site Landscape
Start with an honest inventory of what you have today. Are you building a new intranet from scratch in SharePoint Online, consolidating dozens of scattered team sites, or migrating classic and on premises sites with custom master pages? Each scenario calls for a different profile. A greenfield intranet needs strong information architecture and branding skills, while a migration needs someone comfortable with content audits, legacy structures and rebuilding old SharePoint Designer workflows in Power Automate. Write down the number of sites, the main audiences, the key content types and any compliance requirements so candidates can respond to a real brief.
Set the Seniority Level and Surrounding Skills
Decide whether you need a senior designer who can own the whole intranet strategy or a mid level specialist who will execute a structure someone else already defined. Senior candidates should lead user research, stakeholder workshops and governance planning. Then list the complementary skills that matter for your setup: Power Automate for approvals, Power Apps for custom list forms, Viva Connections to surface the intranet in Microsoft Teams, and familiarity with accessibility standards. Being explicit about this mix avoids hiring a visual designer who cannot plan structure, or an administrator who cannot design pages people enjoy using.
Choose Between In House Hiring and a Dedicated Remote Pod
An in house hire makes sense when the intranet is a long term product with constant content changes and you have someone to manage the role. However, recruiting a senior SharePoint designer locally can take months, and one person rarely covers architecture, branding, workflows and training equally well. A dedicated remote pod gives you a designer backed by complementary specialists, such as a Power Platform expert or a content strategist, who can scale up for launch and scale down afterward. For most companies, a pod gets a working intranet live faster while keeping costs predictable and avoiding a single point of failure.
Build a Requirement Profile That Attracts Real SharePoint Design Experts
- The mission: State the actual outcome, such as launching a modern company intranet, consolidating dozens of team sites under hub sites or migrating classic sites to SharePoint Online. Strong candidates want a clear problem to solve, and a specific mission filters out applicants who only know how to style a single homepage.
- The ecosystem and tooling: Describe your Microsoft 365 environment in detail: Teams usage, existing hubs, Power Automate flows, Power Apps forms, Viva Connections plans and any sensitivity labels already in place. This tells experienced SharePoint design specialists what they will inherit and helps them judge whether their background fits your setup.
- Team dynamics: Explain who the designer will work with daily, for example internal communications, HR, IT administrators and department content owners. Clarify who signs off on structure and branding decisions. Designers succeed when they know their stakeholders up front, and candidates appreciate seeing that decision making will not stall the project.
- System impact: Spell out how success will be measured, such as employees finding key documents easily, content owners publishing without IT help or fewer unmanaged sites. Connecting the role to visible business results attracts senior people who think about adoption and governance, not just colors, fonts and banner images.
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Sourcing, Vetting and Onboarding Your SharePoint Talent
How to Find and Assess Strong SharePoint Designers
Where to Source Candidates
Standard outbound recruiting for SharePoint design is slow because the title is vague. Job boards return a mix of administrators, developers and graphic designers, and screening them all eats weeks of your team's time. Many resumes still list SharePoint Designer 2013 skills, which tells you little about modern SharePoint Online work. A faster route is a pre vetted talent network where specialists have already shown real intranet launches, information architecture work and governance planning. You skip the noise, review a short list of proven candidates and move to meaningful conversations within days rather than spending a full quarter on sourcing alone.
Assessing Candidates Beyond the Resume
Ask every candidate to walk you through two or three real intranets from their portfolio. Listen for how they ran user research and content audits, why they chose a particular hub structure and how they handled permissions and audience targeting. Then run a hands on site design exercise: give them a short brief for a department site and ask for a proposed structure, navigation and page layout using modern web parts. Add a constraint, such as a tight deadline or a strict branding limit, to see how they prioritize. Finally, assess communication style, because a designer must explain decisions clearly to nontechnical stakeholders and content owners.
Your 30, 60 and 90 Day Onboarding Plan
- Days 1 to 30: Grant access to your Microsoft 365 tenant with the right admin roles, existing sites, brand guidelines and any previous intranet research. Have the designer interview key stakeholders, run a content audit and document the current site landscape, then present findings and an initial information architecture proposal for review before building anything.
- Days 31 to 60: Approve the site hierarchy, hub structure and navigation, then let the designer build site templates, themes and the first set of page layouts. Pilot the new structure with one or two departments, gather feedback from real users and refine the design before rolling it out more widely across the organization.
- Days 61 to 90: Launch the core intranet, finalize governance rules for site creation, permissions and sharing, and connect the intranet to Microsoft Teams through Viva Connections if planned. The designer should hand over content owner guidelines, page templates and short training sessions so adoption continues smoothly without constant support from IT.
Choosing With Confidence
Warning Signs and Strong Signals in SharePoint Design Interviews
Red flags:
- Homepage only portfolio: The candidate shows polished homepages but cannot explain the site hierarchy, metadata or navigation behind them. A beautiful landing page means little if employees still cannot find documents, so treat a portfolio without information architecture reasoning as a sign of shallow experience.
- Heavy reliance on legacy customization: They push custom master pages, script injections or SharePoint Designer workflows for a modern SharePoint Online project. This suggests their skills stopped at classic SharePoint, and it usually leads to fragile sites that break with updates and become expensive to maintain.
- No view on governance: When asked about permissions, sharing settings or site creation rules, they shrug and say IT handles it. A senior SharePoint designer understands that governance shapes the structure itself, and ignoring it leads directly to sprawl and oversharing problems later.
- Skipping research: They jump straight to layouts without asking who the users are, what content exists or how teams currently work. Designers who skip content audits and stakeholder interviews tend to build intranets that look modern but miss the real daily needs of employees.
Green flags:
- Structure first thinking: They start by asking about audiences, content types and existing sites before discussing colors or banners. Candidates who lead with information architecture, hub planning and audience targeting understand that findability drives adoption far more than visual polish alone ever will.
- Fluency with modern capabilities: They explain clearly when to use communication sites versus team sites, how hub sites share navigation and search, and which web parts fit each page. This shows they design within modern SharePoint limits rather than fighting the platform with brittle workarounds.
- Adoption planning: They talk naturally about page templates, content owner guidelines, training and measuring usage after launch. Senior designers know an intranet is a living product, and they build the support structure that keeps content fresh long after the initial project ends.
- Accessibility and Power Platform awareness: They design accessible pages with proper headings, contrast and alt text, and they know when Power Automate or Power Apps can solve a process problem. This range lets them deliver complete solutions instead of handing half finished work to other teams.
What You Gain by Working With SoftDoes
SoftDoes is a North America focused software engineering and talent delivery partner serving clients across the US and Canada. We give you immediate access to pre vetted senior specialists experienced in SharePoint design, already screened through portfolio reviews of real intranets and hands on site design exercises. You do not get an isolated freelancer; you get a team delivery model where your designer is backed by Power Platform and experience specialists when the project needs them. Replacement and scaling guarantees protect your timeline, and flexible engagement models range from a single specialist to a full pod. Need broader interface talent too? You can also hire UI/UX designers through us.
Ready to Bring a SharePoint Designer On Board?
If your intranet is hard to navigate, poorly adopted or stuck on legacy SharePoint, the right designer can turn it into a platform your people rely on every day. Schedule a discovery call with SoftDoes to talk through your current sites, goals and timeline. We will recommend the right profile or pod, share vetted candidates quickly and help you get a modern, well governed intranet live without the usual hiring delays.
