Nailing the Portfolio Review
A hiring manager’s perspective on evaluating design portfolios
In an output-driven field like design, portfolios are a necessary evil. There are many perspectives on the value and efficacy of portfolios, but for individual contributor or production-focused roles, they are invaluable for demonstrating your skills and experience.
At Glassdoor, your portfolio is evaluated during a number of stages in our interview process. First, we look at your portfolio during our initial application screening. At this stage, your portfolio supports your resume by showing examples from your experience. Next, we ask you to present to us a few projects from your portfolio either over a Zoom meeting or in person. This is your chance to narrate and really dig into the details.
At either stage, there are many things you can do to make or break your chances of successfully showcasing your skills and experiences. I’ve seen it all as a hiring manager for product design roles. Here are a few tips to stand out and make an impact with your portfolio.
The basics
Schools seem to be training design students — far better today than when I went to school — on what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for and how to build a portfolio. Most portfolios today include more than just images of polished final deliverables. They highlight the purpose, methods, and collaboration that went into producing the final output and the success metrics, outcomes, and learnings that measured its effectiveness.
Unfortunately, I think the pendulum has swung too far to the side of oversharing. Yes, it’s great to understand your process and how you arrived at the solution to the problem at hand, but unfortunately, the details often overshadow what’s really important.
Just like you would when designing a product or experience, when building your portfolio you should consider:
- Audience: First recruiters, then hiring managers and hiring committees. What are their goals & pain points? Given what they’ve communicated in the job description or through their communication with you, what do they value?
- Constraints: How much time will your audience have to spend on your portfolio? What context will they need to understand what they’re looking at (hint: there’s such a thing as too much context)? Are they browsing on their own or will you be presenting? What format will be most effective (hint: your decision to use a website or slide deck may differ depending on the answer to the former question)?
- Story: What do you hope to communicate to your audience? What are the key learnings or successes at the heart of the project? Hint: pick and choose key aspects that highlight YOUR contribution. Leave extraneous details out.
An important constraint to consider is the hiring team’s time. I am often reviewing 10-20 portfolios in one sitting. Because I review every portfolio that I receive, I have limited bandwidth to spend on each individually. Help me find the signal amongst the noise. Tell me a story that I’m compelled to dig into, and don’t make me wait too long to get to the punch line.
Tell me a story that I’m compelled to dig into, and don’t make me wait too long to get to the punch line.
A picture is worth a thousand words. While design is not only about the visual output, your portfolio should be designed to showcase your skills including polished deliverables. I need to be able to see what you have produced so that I can understand your strengths as well as where you will need support when you join my team. Lead with visual artifacts as much as possible and fill in the story with words.
One last word on images — be sure to consider the resolution and responsiveness of any images you include. Many, but not all, design hiring teams will be working on high-resolution monitors, so your images should default or respond to multiple resolutions or have the option to expand from their original format.
Your contribution
Design is generally a team sport, so your ability to work well and collaborate with others is key to your success in your next job. I value knowing who else you worked with and the role you played on the team, so please be honest and forthright about your individual contribution to a project. What was your role and what were you responsible for? How did you collaborate with everyone?
I value knowing who else you worked with and the role you played on the team
Did someone else produce the motion graphics for the video you posted to your website? If yes, please say that. Did you storyboard the motion graphics or project manage the production of the video? That’s valuable too and I’d like to hear more about that. Are you interested in improving your motion graphics skills in your next professional opportunity? Very cool — let’s dig into your career goals and make sure this opportunity aligns.
In addition to being clear about how you contributed to a team effort, I would like to know about some of the challenges you faced. Some examples of things that are of interest:
- Navigating an unfamiliar domain
- Working with a difficult stakeholder or unreliable team
- Advocating for user-centered methods
- Responding to negative feedback or pivoting when your solution did not perform well in usability testing or out in the wild
There will inevitably be unexpected challenges in a professional environment, so I am looking to see how you’ve overcome roadblocks in the past. What did you learn from navigating something you didn’t anticipate? Can you take ownership of failures?
Tell me a bit about the outcome of your team’s efforts. I don’t expect every project to be a success, so it’s ok to highlight a project that wasn’t one. In fact, it may be more interesting to me if your portfolio demonstrates self-awareness, accountability, and resilience.
A project that wasn’t a success could still demonstrate self-awareness, accountability, and resilience.
Finally, showcase the work you want to do in your next role! If you enjoy doing research, showcase projects where you’ve spent time speaking to users and synthesizing learnings. If you love sweating the details in Sketch and Framer, throw your visual designs into a clickable prototype that I can play with. Conversely, it’s ok to downplay the contributions you made that you didn’t enjoy or don’t want to focus on in the future.
A note on confidentiality
It’s important to note that as professional designers, a lot of our work is conducted under NDAs or other confidentiality terms. Make sure to check with your employer on any restrictions and whether you can show or distribute work, password protect content, something else or none of the above. As a hiring manager, I am not looking to get you into any hot water, but I also don’t intend to reference your work again once we’ve discussed it.
Pro tips
As someone who has interviewed for many jobs, I want to share how I format my personal portfolio. Remember that considering your audience, constraints, and the story is most important — your mileage may vary!
Here’s the format I follow for each project:
- Project title and company info
- My role and primary partners on the project (plus some action shots of the team at work)
- Project summary, including background, outcomes, team structure
- Outcomes and final deliverable with captions or explanations of the screen in case someone is reviewing independently
- How we got there — I usually pick 1–3 lessons learned that I want to key in on, whether it’s an “aha!” moment in discovery research, a method I used to generate solutions or gain consensus with my team or stakeholders, or how we pivoted after learning a “gotcha” in usability testing.
When I present projects from my portfolio, I always leave time for questions — hopefully I have told an interesting enough story that the panel will have questions about the project. I usually expect that the panel will challenge something I presented (hint: I do this ;), or ask me to think about things differently. This is on purpose and designed to see how one responds to feedback. You got this!
Conclusion
Compiling a portfolio can be tedious and time consuming, but investing this time now will help you scale yourself for interviews in the future. Try to document projects soon after they are completed so that the details and story are fresh in your mind. You may sometimes have the luxury of already summarizing projects for a class or on the job, so take advantage of those resources (be mindful of confidentiality limitations).
At Glassdoor, we are primarily looking for you to describe your work and approach clearly and concisely. We want to understand your strengths as well as where you will need support so that we can set you up for success when you join the team.
Don’t forget to include things you’ve done outside of work or school, such as speaking at a conference, serving on the board of your local IxDA chapter, mentoring, etc. This is your opportunity to showcase how awesome you are and why you’ll make a stellar future colleague.
We are in the business of helping folks find a job that they love — we want you to love working with us. Good luck!
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For more on how we hire for design at Glassdoor, check out Jordan Girman’s post on Landing the Product Design Job — https://medium.com/glassdoor-design/landing-the-product-design-job-f46f5dc4db4b
