The junior designer hiring crisis is a subject that’s near and dear to my heart, and Figma’s new hiring study puts hard numbers to it. The headline is encouraging—82% of organizations say their need for designers has increased or stayed steady. But the breakdown by seniority tells a different story.

Andrew Hogan, Head of Insights at Figma:

More than half of hiring managers (56%) say there’s increasing demand for senior design hires, compared to just 25% who are hiring for more junior roles. For many leaders, it’s less of a hiring philosophy and more a matter of bringing on designers who can tackle the problems they’re facing.

56% versus 25%. That gap keeps widening.

Daniel Wert, CEO of executive search firm Wert&Co, calls it out:

It just boggles my mind how few internship programs there are these days. I think it seems shortsighted. The best teams, the best organizations, have a lot of diversity…in terms of years of experience and where people are in their career. You want to have a nice cross-section of junior and mid-senior designers.

Every strong design team I’ve built or been part of had that cross-section. Seniors set the bar. Juniors challenge assumptions and bring energy. Mid-levels hold the whole thing together. Remove any layer and it gets brittle.

Wert again:

Hiring managers are looking for unicorns because they misunderstand how multidisciplinary design is. They want [top-tier] design, but are only willing to hire one person. Great design teams [have] multiple people with complementary strengths—not a single superhero.

This is the real problem. Companies want one person who can do visual design, product strategy, systems thinking, AI integration, and user research. That person doesn’t exist. Great design is a team sport, and the vanishing bottom rung of the career ladder is only making it harder to build those teams.

The fallacy that CEOs and CFOs keep telling themselves is that AI will make this unicorn “product builder” possible. I have my doubts.