A graphic designer staffing agency sources, screens, and presents qualified design candidates for contract, contract-to-hire, and direct hire positions, handling the full search process so your team focuses only on interviewing serious candidates.

That means writing a detailed job profile, sourcing from our pre-vetted creative network, running structured screens on portfolio, tool fluency, and work style, and presenting only candidates who are genuinely ready for your role. Not just available. We also handle offer coordination, onboarding logistics, and post-placement check-ins to make sure the placement is sticking.

For most graphic designer searches, KORE1 submits the first qualified candidates within 48 hours of a completed intake call.

That’s our average. Not a guarantee for every role. Direct hire searches with specific seniority requirements, or niche specialties like motion graphics or packaging design, typically take one to two weeks because the talent pool is genuinely smaller and we don’t pad submissions with weak matches just to look fast. You’ll only see candidates we’d actually vouch for. We hold it every time.

Contract graphic designers typically run $40 to $90 per hour depending on experience level and specialty, with senior brand designers and motion specialists at the higher end of that range.

Direct hire placements involve a one-time placement fee, usually 15 to 22 percent of the designer’s first-year salary. Paid after a successful start date, not upfront. Most clients find this significantly cheaper than a bad permanent hire, when you factor in the rehire cost, team disruption, and months of lost output. That math usually lands in one place pretty quickly.

Portfolio review is the starting point, but it’s just table stakes. We run a structured screen that covers brief interpretation, how the designer handles revisions, tool fluency on your actual stack, workflow habits, and how they collaborate with people who aren’t designers.

For senior roles, we add a cultural alignment conversation. Always. A great designer who can’t work with your marketing team is still a failed placement, and that’s on us. Our screening is designed to surface those fit issues before you spend any interview time on a candidate who isn’t genuinely right for your environment.

Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop are the baseline — most graphic designers we present know all three cold, and we confirm it during screening rather than taking the resume at face value.

Add Figma if your team works in digital or hands off to developers. After Effects matters for motion and video work. Some enterprise marketing teams run heavy Canva workflows for social volume. Be specific about your actual stack during the intake call. “Adobe proficiency” is too vague to screen against, and we won’t pretend it isn’t.

It depends on the role. Direct hire is right when you’re filling a core, ongoing creative role where culture fit and long-term investment both matter, like a staff brand designer, in-house art director, or senior visual designer who’ll anchor the team.

Contract or contract-to-hire makes more sense when the need is project-specific, when budget flexibility matters, or when you want to evaluate a designer’s actual output and collaboration style before committing. Both are valid. We’ll ask the right questions during intake to help you decide which structure fits the situation. Often it’s clear. Sometimes we need a conversation to figure it out together.

Three things, usually. The designer can’t take feedback from non-designers, their work pace doesn’t match the team’s tempo, or there’s a tool mismatch that wasn’t caught in screening.

Portfolio quality alone doesn’t prevent any of those. Our evaluation specifically targets work style, feedback tolerance, and tool fluency on your actual stack, not just what someone claims to know. The BLS Occupational Outlook notes that graphic design roles vary significantly across industries and work environments. That matters. Matching those differences to your team is what keeps a promising candidate from becoming a painful rehire three months in.