5.5 min read

Recently, I found myself helping some design grads prep their design portfolios for job interviews. We prepped and theorized about how the interviews might go, tackling typical questions like “Which case studies do I show?” and “How deep into a project should I dive?”.

As we sat there and discussed the different approaches, I realized that the conversation was missing a larger point, namely that a design portfolio is a very fragmented representation of what a designer is capable of because finished design work really only tell half the story.

Design portfolios and design projects are frequently only reflective of portions of your effort of or skills, so how can you present a more accurate and holistic picture of your skillset? Particularly one that showcases your soft skills as well as your hard skills?

So if you are at a point where you are looking to prep your online portfolio (and yourself) for an interview, the following steps can help you build a more holistic picture of what you bring to the table.

1. Expand the job description

Let’s say you have been searching for a job as a senior product designer and you have found a company that sounds great and you are really excited. You read their job description and you think, “This job sounds great! I fit the description, and it sounds like a perfect job!”

Now that you have found the job, continue your search and go to sites like LinkedIn or Indeed.com, any site that will give you multiple job listings under the title of senior product designer. 

Find and copy at least 4 additional jobs descriptions from 4 different companies under the title senior product designer that seem like they could be relevant to you. The goal is to find and copy 5 job descriptions for your desired position.

Why do this?

The people interviewing are thinking two major things: “Can you do the work?” (hard skills/craft skills). And “Do I want to work with you?” (soft skills/people skills). While the visual layout of your portfolio is a strong indicator of your hard skills, it is typically through asking you questions or team exercises that the people interviewing you are trying to understand your soft skills. This tends to be the harder part of the interview to account for, in my opinion, as soft skills are just kind of implied in your visual work, but not discretely accounted for.

Your goal is to capture multiple job listings and expand on the list of desired skills so it is more well rounded, particularly the soft skills, which tend to be understated in a job description. That way you can purposely identify and account for them in your interview process.

Example

For example, here is a portion of job description for senior product designer that I researched and found:

Responsibilities

• Work collaboratively on a larger design team made up of interaction designers, visual designers, motion designers, prototypers and front-end developers focused on end-to-end experiences

• Develop and execute on a cohesive design plan and process for a product area

• Create and oversee scenarios, process flows, information architecture diagrams, wireframes, prototypes, UI pattern libraries, interaction guidelines and other artifacts required to develop and evolve designs for a set of products, tools and services

• Work closely with multiple disciplines (especially research and engineering) on aligned goals

• Communicate and execute strategic product/service design direction to top level leaders

• Demonstrate design concepts through prototyping

Breaking that list down, I find this mixture of skills:

Soft Skills

• Collaboration

• Work with multiple disciplines

• Communicate/execute design direction to top level leaders

Hard Skills

• Develop/execute a cohesive design plan and process

• Visual design 

• Scenarios

• Process flows

• Information architecture diagrams

• Wireframes 

• UI pattern libraries 

• Interaction guidelines 

• Demonstrate design concepts through prototyping

As you can can see, the description has a lot of hard skills, and some key soft skills, but arguably not enough soft skills to really get an idea of what they might ask to assess your soft skill strengths. Pulling from my 4 other job descriptions, I found these skills to add to my list:

• Works well independently 

• Eloquent storyteller 

• Strategic thinker

• Guide junior designers

  
  

Now, take your job description and break it down for yourself, like I did in the example above and be sure to add any additional skills that you want to talk about or account for that aren’t in the list.

2. Find out how the company you are interested in interacts with interviewees 

Potential employers have all kinds of ways of trying to understand how you think, work, and play with others. Some companies will give you design tests where you work in thier design studio for a few hours to show how you might tackle a design problem, whereas others may just sit down and have you put on a show by walking through your work. 

To help ascertain how your targeted company might want to get to know you, get online and research sites like glassdoor.com and see if there are any postings on how they interview, or possibly just google “what is the interview process at Company X” and see what shows up. This will help you know what you are up against. 

3. Map your design projects

Now that you have your list of skills, a job description, and some insight into your targeted companies interviewing process (if you could find anything), it is time to map your skills to your projects so you can construct your portfolio narrative.

The purpose of this exercise is to get you to think in overarching narrative of who you are as a designer, not just who you are on any one given project. Choose your top projects, ideally no more than 4 or 5, and put them on a white board or on some sticky notes, or just draw it up on a piece of paper. It should look something like the following:

Now start thinking about how your skills map to the projects. I recommend drawing lines like so:

If the description listed skills that you don’t have, mark those some other way. I drew red circles around a few in the example above.

We can see that for my example, project A was the strongest frontrunner that had the highest combination of soft skills and hard skills, followed by project B. And projects C and D contained important skills I might want to highlight, but not much else.

Therefore, I would construct my narrative around A, with B as a back up, but I might not do all the work to fully blow out projects C&D. I may just put together enough assets and narrative to highlight the specific skill I wanted to call out.

As you go through your mapping exercise, try to answer the questions below:  

• Which projects are best representative of the largest number of skills required for the job? These are the projects you will want to lead with. Ideally there is only 1 or 2 frontrunners.

• Are there important soft skills for this interview that can only be mapped to an otherwise not relevant project? How might you share a snippet of that project to showcase that one skill?

• Are there holes in your skill set (like the circled red ones?) that are critical to the job but missing from your projects? Is there a way for you to make a small artifact or talking point to account for it? 

• Are there skills you just don’t have? Can you turn that into a talking point about something you are looking forward to learning?

• Do you have award winning work that can help shine a positive light on your body of work?

• Are there potential clients you could work with to help fill the gaps?

Once you have done this exercise and have worked through the questions above, you should have a more holistic view of how your projects work together to support your narrative you want to put forward for this job position. In the next installment I will explore how to dive deep on a single project and how to prepare for it.