In our new series Ask an Expert, we’re speaking to the specialists who help design firms thrive. This week, we talked to Duke Butler, the CEO of Duke Talent, a design-specific recruiting company based in Los Angeles and operating nationally.

Since founding his company six years ago, Butler has grown his network substantially, working with 200 design and architecture firms across the country to scale and staff their studios. Here, he talks about how he’s gained the trust of AD100 firms; what it takes to attract the right talent; and his firm’s new offering: matching homeowners with designers.

Tell me a bit about Duke Talent.
I founded the company in 2020. My entire career has been focused on just this one niche: It’s primarily single-family residential boutique [design companies]. We work with 200 studios, about 46 of [which] are AD100. That’s really our world. So, making placements, matchmaking between interior designers, architects, project managers [in] full-time or part-time roles, but we also recently started connecting designers to private clients.

What drew you to this area of the market?
I moved to New York after college. I wanted to be a cartoonist, but I ended up working at a design and architecture firm as a studio coordinator. I fell in love with the industry. I really enjoy being around creative people with taste, people with an eye. I like being able to work with them and help them navigate their careers. It’s a people business. All I do all day is talk to interior designers and architects about what they’re looking for, what they’re working on, their motivations, their frustrations, aspirations. I like being able to say, “OK, this is what you’re doing and this is what you want to do. How can we position you? How can we formulate a plan to get you where you want to be?” That’s what I get a lot of fulfillment out of.

How have your services evolved since you opened up shop?
Once Covid hit, I wanted to reinvent our offerings, make them more approachable, more affordable and more efficient—just a better service overall. When I started in the industry, the standard was that there would be a placement fee that was typically 20 percent of the starting base salary [for the position you fill]. Over the years, especially into Covid, a lot of our competitors raised that to 25 or even 30 percent. We went the other direction. We actually dropped our fee to 15 percent of the base salary, and we added other more client-friendly policies. We began to offer a refund [if a candidate didn’t work out] while other agencies offer a replacement candidate and typically keep your fee no matter what.

We wanted to create a more approachable relationship with these studios. I’d rather work with a studio that I personally align with aesthetically—smaller, more boutique offices that do really great design. Often, the firms that can work with a major headhunter like Bespoke Careers and can pay a 30 percent fee tend to be really large firms like HOK and Gensler. We work with the more boutique offices that operate in a different stratosphere than some of those larger ones. Sometimes it’s a single principal looking for their first hire or a five-person firm looking for a design director. We want to make it more approachable and more affordable for those types of studios to be able to afford a headhunter. In doing so, we can service more studios, work with more candidates and make those placements.

You invested a lot in your proprietary software. How does that work?
Essentially, old-school headhunting and recruitment is very antiquated, in that it’s like a little black book or a huge Excel spreadsheet. It’s very tedious.

I wanted to be able to get really specific. Say you’re an architect in Malibu, you do single-family residential and have a modern style. These are hyperspecialized categories. You can’t post [a job] on Archinect and get the first person that comes in. If you’re building a $50 million house, you need someone that’s done that before, especially if it’s classical traditional [like the work of ] Fairfax & Sammons or Ferguson & Shamamian Architects. They need someone that went to Notre Dame or University of Virginia. It’s very specific. So that was an early realization, that I could sort of automate that matchmaking. I call [the key dimensions] the big three: location, industry and specialty.

Location’s important because you really need to be in a certain market. There’s not much fully remote design work available. The second is industry. It’s a binary fork in the road: Generally, you’re either an interior designer or you’re an architect. And then lastly, specialty: single-family, residential, hospitality, commercial, etcetera. That’s what we use in order to make a placement.

How does your system help zero in on those categories?
Let’s say we’re doing a search for a residential interior designer in New York. I can filter candidates in our system and really zone in, find someone that works in the industry in the area I’m looking for. Even as specifically as: Are they in Manhattan or Brooklyn? We have filters like style preferences, specialties, whether they’re looking for part-time, full-time or consulting. We even ask if they are looking for an in-office position, hybrid or remote. And, of course, salary details.

Do designers usually come to you with a full job description, or something more general?
We see a whole spectrum. Some people come to us and say, “I want someone in Brooklyn that is an interior designer that does single-family that knows Revit and Studio Designer.” And we have four to five filters at the start. A lot of times we work more on a consulting basis, where we’re really working out, “Who do you need? What is the current breakdown of the studio? What is the biggest bottleneck? Is it procurement? Is it project management? Are you having trouble on the FF&E side and you need a real tastemaker to come in?” The best part of the job, to me, is working with designers to figure out what they need.

Besides working with boutique firms, what makes your company stand out?
What’s unique about the service is 95 percent of the candidates that we work with are already gainfully employed. They’re not really looking on job boards. They have dormant LinkedIn profiles. But if something comes online that would be relevant, that would be exciting to them. They’re passively looking. Designers tend to move [firms] every two years. It’s the best way to level up in salary and title within this industry. So we just have an open communication with 10,000 designers at a time, essentially.

For a firm that’s never used an outside recruiter, what’s your elevator pitch
The main pitch is it’s all upside. It is 100 percent results-based, with no catches. Other agencies will charge you to engage their services. You pay a deposit or retainer. It costs money that you’ll never get back. Ours is contingency-based—it costs nothing to collaborate. A fee is only due if you find the right person. It’s nonexclusive: You can work with other agencies. You can post on your own. It’s not limiting. It is only upside in the sense that you’re going to be able to tap into a different market of talent. I always say, post on your own. That is the most affordable way to hire. But if that’s not working, or you are willing and able to invest in your team, this is a great option.

What do you see design firms often getting wrong in the hiring process?
What you put in is what you’re going to get out. I equate it with selling a house. If you really want to sell your house for top dollar, you’ve go to put in the work. You’ve got to clean it up, get a fresh coat of paint. Do everything you can to make it the most presentable possible option. It’s the same with your studio. So that means getting press, tending to your Instagram account, your website. Understanding your policies. Do you offer benefits? I’ll work with a lot of studios that are looking to make their first hire. And I have to say, “If I post your job right now, there will be zero interest because your website doesn’t work. You don’t offer benefits. You don’t know what you’re looking for. There’s no cohesive pitch here.” So the first thing is that you have to come to the market with a compelling story.

We say no to [working with] almost one studio every other week because they don’t have their things together. If we were to post this [position] this would be detrimental to our entire brand because it’s just a mess. You do have to put in the groundwork of making your company an attractive place to work.

You recently started matching homeowners to designers as well. How did that come about?
It happened organically. We had homeowners come to us who had just bought an $8 million home out in the Hamptons. And they have no clue who to work with. They needed a designer. And they’d gone to a proper AD100 studio, but they felt like they were like eighth on their list, paying $500 an hour. They had to fight to get in the door. And this is a proper project. This is a huge budget. It’s like a million-dollar budget, but the marquee studios that everyone reads about are so busy that they don’t even need that work.

That [part of our business has] expanded really quickly. It started off helping one person. Now that’s turned into three. It’s an exciting opportunity where [people] come to me and say, “I love Amber Interiors. I love Southern California rustic, approachable design. Is there anyone in your network that has done work in the Hamptons that aligns stylistically to that, who is available to start on Monday?” I go into our platform, plug in those filters and make my list. I can go through and pick the best ones that would be most relevant stylistically for that client and then we have a flat-fee referral arrangement.

That’s essentially the entire thesis of our platform: You don’t have to be Gensler to afford a headhunter. You can be a great boutique office and use our platform to find talent, just as you can be a homeowner with a decent budget and find a high-end designer or architect.

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