Quick Answer:
When hiring an instructional design consultant, tool proficiency should be a minimum requirement, not the primary selection criterion. Strong consultants also know how to diagnose the business need, ask the right questions, challenge assumptions, explain their design decisions, and focus on the outcome the organization is trying to achieve.
When an L&D team needs an instructional design consultant, one of the first questions is often practical: “What tools does this person need to know?” Maybe the project requires Storyline 360, Rise, Camtasia, or another platform the team already uses. Those requirements matter, especially when a consultant needs to step in and contribute quickly.
If you look at many instructional design requisitions on job sites, you’ll find something else is often harder to find: the business problem the consultant is being hired to help solve.
That is where a reasonable hiring practice can become a costly one. Focusing too heavily on tools can make it easy to confirm what a consultant knows how to build without learning enough about how they determine what should be built in the first place. Naming the tool is not the problem. The problem is letting the tool list carry the whole evaluation.
You can confirm someone knows Storyline in five minutes. You cannot confirm in five minutes that they will ask the right questions. So, hiring teams naturally screen first for what they can easily verify, and eight weeks later a good-looking course arrives that may or may not move the number that started the project.
Why the Tools-First Requisition Feels Safe
When You Hire an Instructional Designer
Screening for software is easy to defend. You can ask for a certification, check a portfolio for the telltale look of a particular authoring tool, and rank candidates on a spreadsheet. It is a criterion that holds up in a hiring debrief, and nothing about it requires defending an instinct.
Requisitions also get reused. A posting written three years ago for a different project gets adapted rather than rethought, and the tool list survives because it is the easiest part to keep.
Why Tools-First Hiring Can Miss
the Best Instructional Design Consultants
Tools tell you what someone can build. Consultative thinking tells you how they approach the work.
An instructional design consultant may be brought into a project after the organization has already determined what needs to be built. In that case, the consultant isn’t being hired to revisit every decision that came before. But they still need to understand the business need, the audience, the desired outcomes, and the constraints of the project so they can make sound design decisions.
That is what tool proficiency alone can’t tell you. Two consultants may be equally skilled in Storyline, but one may simply execute the request while the other asks questions that uncover a better way to structure the learning, identify a potential issue before development begins, or suggest an adjustment that makes the solution more effective.
And sometimes, those questions do reveal that an assumption should be reconsidered. A requested course might actually point to a missing job aid, an unclear process, or another issue that training alone won’t solve. A strong consultant knows when to raise that concern and when to move forward with the solution that has already been thoughtfully chosen.
Software skill reflects production capability, and on many projects that is exactly what is needed. The mistake isn’t hiring for tool proficiency. It’s allowing tool proficiency to become the only measure of whether someone is the right instructional design consultant for the project.
What Consultative Thinking
Actually Looks Like in Instructional Design
Consultative thinking isn’t about questioning every decision that was made before an instructional designer joined the project. It’s about understanding enough about the need behind the project to make good recommendations throughout the work.
You can often see it in the questions a consultant asks. They want to understand the audience, what learners need to do differently, how the learning will be used, what constraints may affect the design, and what success should look like.
It also shows up in how they work. A strong instructional design consultant doesn’t simply take an SME’s content and turn it into a course. They organize and prioritize information, recommend approaches based on the audience and objectives, explain the reasoning behind their design decisions, and flag issues that could affect the effectiveness of the learning.
And when something doesn’t add up, they ask about it. That might mean questioning whether or not content belongs in the course, recommending a job aid instead of another module, or raising a concern about an assumption that could affect the design.
Tool proficiency helps a consultant execute the work. Consultative thinking helps them make better decisions while doing it. When you’re hiring an instructional design consultant, you want to evaluate both.
Five Ways to Screen Instructional Design Consultants
for Consultative Thinking Instead of Tools
Tool proficiency is relatively easy to verify. The harder part is determining how a consultant will think once they’re working on your project. These five approaches can help you evaluate instructional design judgment without adding another round to your hiring process. They’re also useful questions to raise with a staffing partner so the consultants who reach your desk have been evaluated on more than software skills.
1. Give Candidates the Context Behind the Project
Don’t stop at, “We need someone who knows Storyline.” Explain what you’re building, who it’s for, what learners need to be able to do, and why the project matters.
Then pay attention to what the candidate wants to know. Do they ask about the audience? Existing content? SMEs? Learning environment? Constraints? Measures of success? Their questions can tell you a lot about how they’ll approach the work once they’re on the project.
2. Ask How They Would Approach the Project
Give the candidate a realistic instructional design situation and ask them to talk you through how they would get started.
You’re listening for their thought process. What would they want to understand before making design decisions? Who would they involve? What information would they need? Where do they see potential risks or unknowns?
There isn’t necessarily one right answer. The goal is to hear how they think before they start building.
3. Ask Them to Explain a Design Decision, Not Just Demo a Tool
Portfolios show you what someone produced. Go one step further and ask why they produced it that way.
Ask the consultant to walk you through a design document, storyboard, or finished learning solution and explain the decisions behind it. What did they learn about the audience? What alternatives did they consider? What changed along the way? Why did they choose that particular approach?
The finished product demonstrates technical capability. The explanation behind it reveals instructional design judgment.
4. Ask About a Time They Recommended a Change
Consultative instructional designers don’t simply execute every request exactly as it arrives. Ask for an example of a time they recommended a change to the content, structure, delivery approach, or scope of a learning solution.
Maybe they convinced an SME to remove unnecessary content. Maybe audience analysis changed the design. Maybe they recommended a job aid to accompany the course or identified an accessibility issue early enough to address it.
The point isn’t whether they challenged the entire project. It’s whether they can recognize an opportunity to improve the learning and confidently make a recommendation.
5. Treat Tool Proficiency as a Requirement, Not the Whole Evaluation
If your project requires Storyline, Rise, Camtasia, or another specific platform, verify that expertise. A tight deadline is a poor time for a consultant to learn a critical tool.
But once you’ve established that the consultant meets the technical requirements, keep evaluating. Tool proficiency tells you whether they can execute the work. Their questions, recommendations, design rationale, and past decisions tell you how they’ll approach it.
10 Interview Questions to Ask an Instructional Design Consultant
What Changes When You Hire for Consultative Thinking
When you hire an instructional design consultant for both technical skills and consultative thinking, you get more than someone who can execute the work. You get someone who asks questions, understands the audience and project goals, and makes thoughtful recommendations throughout the design process.
That can lead to stronger design decisions, fewer surprises and less rework. It can also help surface issues early before they become more difficult or expensive to address later in development.
Tool proficiency still matters. Your consultant needs to be able to execute. But technical capability combined with strong instructional design judgment gives you a consultant who can contribute to the quality of the solution, not simply build it.
What to Read Next:
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Frequently Asked Questions
No. Tool skills are necessary and should be verified. The mistake is treating them as the primary qualification rather than the entry requirement. Set a clear floor for the tools your project needs, confirm it, and spend the rest of the evaluation on how the candidate thinks.
Two additions cover a lot of ground and both fit inside a standard interview. Put the real problem in front of the candidate and note whether questions come before recommendations, and ask for a design document with the reasoning intact. Neither requires a paid work sample or an extra round.
Some projects are. A migration to a new authoring platform or a rebuild in a specific tool has real technical requirements, and those belong in the requisition. The distinction is whether the tool requirement follows from a decision someone already diagnosed, or whether it is standing in for a diagnosis nobody did. Our overview of reasons to hire an instructional design consultant covers how to tell the difference.
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The same distinction applies across every L&D role. Whether you need eLearning developers, facilitators, virtual classroom producers, or LMS specialists, the strongest hires clear your technical floor and then ask what the work is actually for.
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