Design recruiting, portfolios, and showing work

Jared Spool tweeted about hiring designers and requiring portfolios a couple days ago:

As a design hiring manager. I require a portfolio. In Org Design for Design Orgs, I wrote:

The most important representation of a designer’s career is not their résumé, but their portfolio. Design managers end up reviewing dozens, if not hundreds, of portfolios for any role. For those designers who do not have public portfolios, ask to see one. Any designer under consideration must have a portfolio. No portfolio means no job.

As with any discussion started on Twitter, there exists greater nuance than can be comfortably communicated.

His blanket statement that “the best designers don’t have them” is wrong–many great designers do. But, yes, many great designers don’t have an updated portfolio handy, because they’re busy.

As a hiring manager, I am willing to start the recruiting process without a portfolio, if there are other positive indicators in play—their resume shows they’ve worked for companies with high design standards, or there’s a strong personal referral.

I advocate for 2 screening interviews before an on-site. In the case of someone without a portfolio, my first discussion would be to vet them as professionals, as people, their career, their trajectory, and if they seem to be a fit for the role I’m looking to fill (appropriate skills, seniority level, interest). The second discussion would be a detailed discussion of their work. While this wouldn’t need to be a formal portfolio, they would need to be able to walk me through 1-2 projects, even if that means pulling up working docs from hard drive folders.

But, and this is the key point: no designer is coming on-site without having shown their work in the screening process.

It’s also worth mentioning that when they ARE on-site, I do expect a more formal portfolio presentation, to be given to the interview panel and possibly other members of the design team. So if this person is serious about the role, they will need to find time in their ‘busy’ schedule to pull this material together.

If they claim to be too busy to do so, that’s a sign of disinterest, and it’s best to move on.