The hiring manager is your user

Hiring Design Engineers recently has left me with a slightly awkward opinion: some of the portfolios I’ve seen are too creative.

Which is a strange thing to find myself saying, given the role I’m hiring for. I want to see people experimenting, building interesting things, and caring about the details. But when that creativity makes it harder to understand someone’s work, I start to wonder who the site was designed for.

If you’re using your portfolio to find a job, the hiring manager is one of your users. We talk about understanding people and designing around their needs all day, yet a portfolio can become the place where we forget to do it.

I’m arriving with a fairly specific job to do. I want to understand what you’re good at, what you’ve shipped, and which parts you were responsible for. I’m trying to work out how your experience relates to the work we need someone to do, and whether we should have a conversation.

Help me answer those questions, and you’ve already shown me something useful about how you design.

Make the work easy to understand

A lovely interaction tells me something about your attention to detail, and then I want to understand your part in it. You might have designed the product, built the production implementation or joined to refine that particular interaction. Knowing which gives me a much better sense of the experience you’d bring.

Give me enough context to understand the project before asking me to explore it. What was the problem? What did you own? What shipped? From there, I can choose to read about the decisions, constraints, and awkward bits that made the work interesting.

That doesn’t require a giant case study. A short, specific explanation alongside the work can do a lot. Being clear about where you needed help is useful too, because I’m also trying to understand how you’d work with the rest of the team.

The site itself should make that reading easy. Familiar navigation, legible text, and obvious links give me more attention to spend on what you’ve made. If I have to learn a new way to browse before I can find your projects, the interface is taking effort away from the thing you’re trying to show me.

I notice when a portfolio makes those questions easy to answer. It gives me an example of somebody understanding what I need and designing around it, before we’ve even spoken.

Give the experiments their own space

I still want to see the weird stuff! An experiments or playground page is a great place for the interaction you built out of curiosity, the visual idea you couldn’t leave alone, or the thing with no obvious commercial purpose.

Put it somewhere I can find it, and let me choose to spend time there. Once I understand your experience, that space can tell me more about your interests and how far you’re willing to push an idea.

Your whole site can still feel like you. Typography, writing, and small moments of personality can make a straightforward experience distinctive. You get to decide where a surprise adds something and where it gets in the way.

Of course, you might be making the site mostly for your own enjoyment, which is a good enough reason in itself. If you’re using it to find a job though, try reading it as somebody who knows nothing about you. I should be able to find the work, understand what you did and see where you might fit; then I can spend some time with the weird stuff too.