There's a moment that's become familiar to anyone hiring creatives over the past decade. You're looking at someone's portfolio. It's solid enough. Then you spot the line: "50K followers on TikTok." Suddenly, the conversation changes.
When that happens, those of us of a certain age, who came up during the days of print, have felt the fear. The fear of no longer being relevant. Maybe it's paranoia, maybe it's realism. Either way, if you've not a died-in-the-wool social native, it's tempting to feel your "old-school" skills are no longer adequate, and the algorithm has become the new resume. But what if that era is about to fade? The path to getting your first design job might soon look very different.
Is the tide turning?
The assumption that social fluency equals creative value made sense when social media sat at the centre of cultural life. Increasingly, though, that centrality appears to be weakening.
Ofcom data published in April found that fewer than half of UK adult social media users are now actively posting, sharing or commenting, down from 61% in 2024. Meanwhile, only 36% believe social platforms are good for their mental health, and a third have deleted an app because it was affecting their wellbeing.
The mood is shifting. This week's announcement that the UK will ban under-16s from using TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook and X feels like another sign of that change. What's striking isn't simply the policy itself, but how little public resistance it appears to have generated, compared with the debates that surrounded social media a decade ago.
Whether the legislation succeeds remains to be seen. But culturally, it reflects a growing willingness to question assumptions that once seemed untouchable. And that's where things get interesting for creative industries.
Rebalancing, not revolution
None of this means social media skills are about to become irrelevant. Clients will still want social content. Agencies will still need people who understand how visual culture moves online. And teenagers will inevitably find ways around restrictions, just as they've done elsewhere. But there's a difference between circumventing a platform and being shaped by it from childhood.
For over a decade, social media has acted as a powerful formative influence on aspiring creatives. It's shaped not only what they consume, but how they think about creativity itself: what gets attention, what gets shared, what succeeds.
If future generations spend less of their developmental years optimising content for algorithms, they'll arrive at design school (and eventually at job interviews) with different instincts.
They may be less conditioned by the high-stimulation, short-form aesthetics that platforms reward. They may be more willing to explore slower, deeper and more varied forms of creative practice. In some ways, it could feel a little like stepping back into the pre-2010s creative landscape (but with better WiFi).
What this means for hiring
If you're responsible for hiring designers, it's worth thinking now about what this shift means for the talent pipeline. The candidates you'll see in five to ten years will have grown up differently. Their portfolios may look different too: less platform-optimised, potentially richer in other ways. The instinct to reject someone because they don't have a strong social presence may start to look, frankly, as outdated as rejecting someone for not knowing QuarkXPress.
Maybe I'm a hopeless optimistic, but I think there's a broader opportunity here to restate what design education is actually for. If the appetite for digital natives has put pressure on colleges to teach content creation over craft, a cultural shift away from social media could ease that pressure.
None of this is inevitable, of course. Industries don't change hiring habits easily or quickly. But the UK's ban challenges a long-standing assumption: that the people best equipped to navigate social platforms are necessarily the most creatively valuable.
They never were, of course. It just took a piece of legislation, and the beginnings of a cultural retreat from the doomscroll, to remind us.
