UX Planet — Medium | Tiffany W. Eaton @wildlittlethingsphoto

If you only needed a portfolio to get a job, it would be easy. Anyone could do it given the time and resources.

So what’s the secret that transcends the portfolio? You.

Having a good portfolio doesn’t address what it takes to get a job done, and it doesn’t answer all the questions about you. It isn’t fair to base a candidate solely on the quality of their work, but instead, how they work.

Here are a few reasons why the portfolio isn’t the only thing recruiters are focusing on when looking for an ideal candidate and how they decide whether or not a candidate is worth investing in.

Who are you?

@rawpixel

When you meet a designer in person, they want to know you. What are you passionate about? What projects are you most proud of?

When you are clear about the value you can contribute and it aligns with what an organization is doing, your chances of getting the job are higher than someone applying online. This is why meeting with another designer is so valuable. It’s not always about you and the job, it’s about establishing a connection with another person.

My good friend Sam Anderson and I didn’t get internships with our portfolio. In my case, I didn’t have a solid portfolio of work that matched with the job I ended up doing. We got our first job experience by connecting with someone on a deeper level and simply having a good conversation with them. It wasn’t about the job at all.

How do you communicate?

@rawpixel

Communication is essential because it has the power to make things happen and it conveys the unique value you can bring to work. When talking to a designer, they want to see how you communicate. This leads to a few key things they are looking for:

• How do you work with others? Would you be able collaborate well with the people in this organization?
• What is your process like? Can you concisely explain your process and design decisions?

Working together with people results in finishing work faster. Effective communication is what allows ideas to be heard and to prevent misunderstanding. In UX, verbal communication is just as important as visual communication and the thought that goes into the products we create.

What do you value?

@epicantus

How well you would fit in the organization? Do your values align with the company mission? Do you have skills that can be effectively utilized in the environment? Are you prepared to take on the kind of projects they provide you?

Regardless of your technical skills, the big differentiator is how well you mesh with other designers in the company. If you both value similar things, it’s a fit. People don’t want to hire people whose values are different than the organization’s. You probably wouldn’t be happy working there anyway.

You would also be saving the recruiter time, because to them, meeting the designer before deciding to hire them or not is a huge investment they need to be confident in making.

…Then look at the portfolio

@nate_dumlao

If the designer has technical skills and the right mindset and meshes well with the other designers, they’ll probably get the job based on requirements. If a designer’s technical skills aren’t quite there yet, but they would contribute well to the culture, they can (and should) be mentored. Mentorship takes time and patience, but it is so worth it when you have people who are super passionate about an organization and the people they work with. They learn fast and are able to take initative. You just need to push them in the right direction.

From my experience, I didn’t start out meeting all the requirements of my role. I learned on the job. My manager and teammates encouraged me to reach out to other people in the company, and to communicate with my stakeholders throughout my project. Their guidance was able to help me grow and learn new skills at an extremely fast pace. They believed me to succeed and that’s what I did.

Conclusion

It’s not the portfolio which gets you the job, it’s you! If we dictated the quality of the designer based on their portfolio, that would put a lot of designers with different skills, especially the soft skills, at a disadvantage. Not every designer can push pixels. Not every designer has verbose language. The list goes on.

We choose designers based on the quality of how they work and who they are. I wouldn’t want to hire a designer who wasn’t passionate the work I was doing. Chances are, they will probably get bored or leave the company.

People are what drive the quality of design. They are what a job so worthwhile, and in UX design, you are working with them daily.

Check out my recent collaboration with Skillshare on teaching the basics of UX research here!

To help you get started on owning your design career, here are some amazing tools from Rookieup, a site I used to get mentorship from senior designers:

Links to some other cool reads:

• The Downfall of Design Teams and Products- How to Recover and Facilitate Inclusive Design Culture
• What I learned from teaching a Skillshare course on design as a student
• How writing 106 articles in a year has helped me grow as a designer

Portfolios Aren’t What Get You the UX Design Job was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.