Evaluating Portfolios
What matters most is the story
Yesterday during one of my DesignOps workshops — this time at the Design Leadership Summit in Toronto—one of the attendees asked a pretty good question:
When interviewing candidates and having them present their portfolios I’ve noticed a growing trend of candidates presenting directly from their web sites. This has led to a scrolling like presentation instead of using something like slides that are more appropriate. What do you think about this?
Portfolios are a bit controversial. Some people don’t think that a portfolio is a good artifact for evaluating the capabilities of a designer. Some people think that you can’t evaluate a designer without one. Then there is the question of when in the hiring process would be best for requiring a portfolio.
Honestly, across a team of designers seldom the time is taken where a candidate assessment team is calibrated about how they evaluate a portfolio. So, even if a portfolio can be evaluated well, it seldom is.
But the original question was assuming that for a candidate to present themselves with their web site was poor form. At first I was thinking I was going to agree with the assumption of the queston. I mean you are presenting yourself in order to get a job, so you should undersand the absolute best way to do…
