Updating the hiring manager bar

I’ve had some really good feedback on hiring-manager-bar, and I wanted to spend more time on the examples behind it.

The original idea still holds: if you’re using a portfolio to find a job, the person reviewing it should be able to understand what you made, what you were responsible for, and why your decisions mattered. I wrote about that in The hiring manager is your user.

Where I wanted to go further was how the skill applies that judgement to different kinds of work. A brand designer might show how a system helped other people produce a campaign. Somebody applying for their first management role might have useful coaching and facilitation experience before they’ve ever had direct reports. An experiment can demonstrate good judgement whilst leaving production experience unproven.

Those differences matter, because otherwise it’s easy to ask everyone for the same case study, the same metrics, and the same process diagram.

So I’ve expanded the training examples and evaluation data, drawing on around 60 hours of design and hiring material. That’s been distilled into reference notes which the agent can read when they’re relevant to the review. The focus is on understanding contribution, collaboration, taste, and what the actual role involves, whilst respecting the things someone can’t share publicly.

There’s also a repeatable evaluation suite now, covering 29 portfolio scenarios, and we checked the public content of eight live portfolios. Those live checks assessed the content we could access; layout and interaction behaviour still need their own review. The evaluation records keep the results and the changes made afterwards, including the cases that exposed problems.

I want the feedback to be more specific about what somebody’s work already demonstrates, and where a change would actually help a hiring manager understand it.

The regular agent version and the standalone Figma Design and Make edition are both updated. You can install the skill from the same collection:

npx skills add kemiljk/skills -g --skill hiring-manager-bar