Get the Pages Perfect: Make Your Portfolio Stand Out
Your portfolio is the professional face you need to present to the world – often before your actual face makes an appearance – and it needs to wow prospective employees with work that is varied, exciting and oozing with talent. It also needs to shine brighter than the fifty or so other varied, exciting and oozing-with-talent portfolios sitting on the recruiter/hiring manager’s desk.
So how can you make sure your portfolio stands out?
- Less stuff, more things
A portfolio with three well-chosen case studies, showing how you’ve used your creative ingenuity to solve a problem the hiring company can relate to, is better than 10 case studies with little relevance and minimal variation.
2. Make it beautiful…
It may sound obvious, but your portfolio needs to be stunning to look at and functional for the person looking at it, too. A quirky design that would fit nicely in the Tate but covers a potential employer in glitter/Formaldehyde/paper streamers when they open isn’t going to do you any favours. Make life easier for whoever is recruiting and they’ll make life easier for you.
3. …but balanced
We all want to lovingly paste our best bits of work into our portfolio whilst surreptitiously sliding the not-so-great projects under the rug, but it doesn’t do to run from your failures. Spend a little time fixing up the work you’re not so proud of, bring it to the level of work you ARE proud of, pop it in your portfolio and tell the story of what you’ve done and why. Impressive.
4. Show it off
Of course your portfolio is online, you hip young digital whizz, you – but have you achieved the gold standard? Directing a potential employer to a password-protected link (tweaked to be relevant to them, of course), showcasing prototypes or a showreel, will earn you some extra digital creative points.
5. Now learn it backwards, forwards and upside down…
When you’re invited for that all-important interview (arranged for you by an all-star team of recruitment experts…), you need to know every detail of your portfolio. What year did you make this? What kind of feedback did you get on this? How exactly can you be sure of the impact of your work? The more you know, the more impressed they’ll be.
Portfolios are never easy, but putting the time into crafting something beautiful, engaging and easy to read will pay dividends later. If a portfolio is a true representation of your creative style and approach, it makes it easier for a recruitment agency to get to know you and, ultimately, connect you with the employer, role or project that’ll take your career to new heights. Contact us today to see where we could take you.