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These three people need to fall in love with your UX portfolio.
Here’s how to make it irresistible for them so you can land your dream job!
In the User Experience (UX) world, your portfolio is more than a collection of your work. It’s a showcase of your skills, your process, and your personality, and the main asset in your application packet to land your dream job. But creating a standout portfolio isn’t about displaying your best work — it’s about understanding your audience and the hiring process.
Your portfolio must pass through various stages of the recruitment process, including candidate screening, ATS Software, and interview selection. At each stage, it needs to answer questions and address concerns before they even arise, so you can move to the next phase of the hiring process.
Your portfolio will be viewed by three primary users during the recruitment process, usually in this order: The Recruiter, The Hiring Manager and The Team.
I encourage you to consider your portfolio as another UX project: familiarize yourself with your users, understand their needs, and make their experience as seamless as possible. Your goal is to make it simple for them to access essential information about you and answer most of their questions.
My experience on the hiring end:
In my role at Microsoft, I’ve served as a hiring manager, assisted my manager in filling positions, and participated in the hiring committee for my prospective manager. From these experiences, here are some of the things I have observed:
- We don’t read in detail, we scroll: Images are helpful for conveying and retaining content.
- We often review portfolios in mobile devices: Portfolios that aren’t responsive immediately lose credibility.
- A good first impression is crucial: An engaging homepage catches my attention and biases me to continue exploring the site.
- I tend to click on the first case study because it’s prominently located, and I assume it represents your most important work. Rarely do I deep-dive into…
