Designers: Make sure I see your portfolio link
I love design, but I love designers even more. It’s a pleasure to talk to so many user-centered creatives in my role as a UX hiring manager. To honor that relationship, I’d like to share back some advice from my experiences — so that you can design your application with the user (that’s me and my kind) in mind and land your dream job. Here’s the first instalment, originally published on UXswitch, a designer-centered job board for User Experience professionals, under the title Make Sure Your UX Portfolio Gets Seen … 5 Tips.
Last week I turned down an applicant based on his not-relevant-to-what-we-need cover letter and a quick double-check of his CV. I mentioned, as an aside, that he should have included a portfolio.
In fact, he did.
It was a link at the bottom of his cover letter. I missed it.
Now, I don’t mind links. Some UX recruiters insist you send a PDF portfolio, but I don’t care what form your portfolio takes. I am looking at your application in a series of browser tabs anyway, and I like interactivity.
Just keep in mind that a link is harder to find than an attachment.
In the tool we use to manage your application (and in many other recruiting UIs), an attachment is 20x bigger, shown with a preview and located in a consistent place. It’s easy to find.
If you submit your portfolio as a link in the defined field on our website when you apply, it will show up in a consistent place. But given that most applicants don’t use it, I’m not primed to look there first. I’m not primed to look anywhere first because portfolio links are all over the map in the applications I see — sometimes in the header, sometimes in the text, sometimes in the footer … of either the CV or the cover letter.
And pretty much always only once.
How can you make sure I get to your online work fast? Applicants who used these strategies led me to their portfolio faster:
- Repeat the portfolio link in both header and body text — and on both CV and cover letter.
- Make it stand alone: Make it a single bullet or get some white space around it.
- Place your portfolio link in a separate document attached to your application.
- Include both a hyperlink and the full text of the URL. (In certain application management software, the preview of the resume doesn’t properly support PDF hyperlinks.)
- Include several deep links to highlight the most relevant work. This does double-duty since the list of links takes up more space (and thus gets more attention) and helps me get to the most meaningful examples first.
Your portfolio is the most important part of your application, so I’m itching to see it. If you follow some of the advice above, you will make my life a little easier. With less friction finding your work, I can more fully enjoy the designs themselves. For your thoughtful designing of information with the hiring manager’s joy of use in mind, I say “Thank you!”
