As a creative, your portfolio and inventive work represent you and your abilities. It showcases and highlights your talents and your most beneficial skills. When applying for jobs, the hiring manager and employers expect more than a resume and a cover letter; their most important form of judgment is your portfolio. Here are some of our favorite tips for improving and building a digital portfolio that will make you stand out!
Trust your host
When you are creating your online portfolio, it can be easy to use a free website or service that will offer templates to help you establish your site. We recommended that you pay for any premium versions in case of advertisements or URL extensions rather than a personal domain (for example, clutchnow.com is more professional than clutchnow.wixsite.com).
Along with choosing a premium, you must trust your website host. Whether it is the information you give, the ability of the help and customer support team, or whether the host crashes/will not be in business much longer, these are all necessary components to consider.
Put your best work at the top
It can feel natural to put your work in chronological order, as you would on a resume, but putting your best work at the top in descending order is crucial. The reason you should put your best work first is that recruiters and hiring managers are not going to dissect every piece of work you created. They are looking for astonishing work, and talented individuals, not to mention they are scrolling through dozens upon dozens of portfolios. It takes recruiters only 6 seconds to decide if you are a fitting candidate, so put your best work forward!
What you do
An important factor that many people leave out on their portfolios is explaining the work you’ve done. The purpose of your digital portfolio is to showcase work. It may feel weird to write a description of your work, but it will only help you. On your best pieces of work, go into detail about how you created the product, what the project process was like, and the final results. Writing a description is an ideal opportunity to gas yourself up and brag about how about your talents and ability to create fantastic work. Let your confidence shine through in the descriptions of your work.
How to get in contact
It may seem simple, but a contact page is vital to leave your contact information on your portfolio, just as you would a resume. On your homepage or a separate contact page, display all of your contact information. When creating the contact page, include your full name, the city/town you live in, phone number, email address, and any other personal information that you feel would be useful for a hiring manager and a recruiter to have.
Always make room for improvement
It takes a lot of time, energy, and dedication to design and create an online portfolio. Once you feel that you finished, a sense of accomplishment will brush over you, but in reality, you will never definitively finish creating your online portfolio. Updating your website is a good idea to update and check on your portfolio every few months for typos, reformatting, updating work and content, etc. A hiring manager or a recruiter will deter you from an interview if the link to your portfolio has not received an update in one or two years.
Clutch is a creative staffing partner. We connect digital, creative, and marketing professionals with companies looking for freelance, temp-to-hire or direct hire resources.
