What do design recruiters look for in a portfolio? 👀
Hi! I’m Jess! 👋🏽 I’m a creative specialist recruitment consultant based in Dubai. I mainly work roles within the UX/UI/CX, product, service and graphic design space. I can’t even tell you how many design CVs and portfolios that I’ve seen… hundreds, if not thousands, so I have a pretty good idea on what a hiring manager is looking to see when scanning through them.
With the design industry so busy right now, I thought I’d write a post that may help out some people. If you are a designer and you are open to new opportunities, then it goes without saying that your portfolio should be kept up to date with some of your recent work. If you’re in the process of updating it, I’ve listed a few pointers below that could help you out. I plan to write further articles diving deeper in to each point I’ve made here, so if you have any questions on anything I’ve mentioned, just ask 😊
What medium are you going to use?
Firstly, think about what medium you are going to use to showcase your work. Are you going to have a website? A PDF? Behance? Etc. My personal suggestion is to always have your own website if you can. You can showcase so much more here and you have so much more creative freedom.
Include your CV
Make it easy for me to identify where I can find this. I need at least a basic list of your role titles, companies and time scales. You could even just include a PDF of your Linkedin profile. Also, if you did a short stint somewhere, tell me why. Perhaps it was a short term contract? Let me know. I’ve seen many candidates rejected because “they left their previous company within 6 months, they will likely do the same here”.
Show me your full process
Evidence your end-to-end process. Show me some full case studies as well as the end product. What I want to see is your design thinking throughout a process. Where did you start? What was the first thing you did when working on a project? Did you sketch anything by hand? Show me. What research did you do? Show me. What testing did you do? Show me. 👍🏽
Make it easy for me
A recruiter (especially if a muggle 😉) will scan through a portfolio in a matter of seconds. If its not easy for me to identify what I’m looking for straightaway, it’s likely I will just move on.
Don’t assume knowledge of your reader
It’s possible that the first person to scan through your CV/folio could be a HR member that has no design knowledge. Make everything simple. Do you know what A/B testing is? Do you know what “Hick’s law” is? It might sound simple, but list it somewhere. A recruiter could be scanning your profile with a list of buzz words in front of them and if you don’t hit them, they could move on.
Explain yourself 💭
Tell me about your product, team, individual and shared responsibilities. It’s easy for a hiring manager to wrongly assume what you’ve worked on in a particular project. If there’s more than one of you in a team, identify the parts of the project that you worked on/owned/lead.
So… Let’s talk about NDAs
Most designers are under NDA. It’s pretty common right? 🤔 So, thumbnail a snippet of an anonymised project and password protect that particular page. If your folio is a PDF, just advise whoever you’re sending it to that it’s confidential and can’t be forwarded on, this shouldn’t be an issue. Showcase something else if you really, really can’t post your recent stuff… maybe some freelance work you’ve taken on?
Tell me a story! Give me a great UX!
Personalise your folio… Not only with your branding, but instead of listing a few bullet points of how you like to spend your weekend, show me what you get up to. We all know that we like to visualise, so maybe include a small page/section with a couple photos of your hobbies/pets/inspiration posts. I think you’d be surprised at how many people would actually look at this stuff.
Thanks for reading! 😁
