UX Portfolio Myth: Your personality is not what UX recruiters want in your portfolio (Myth 5 / 5)

Sarah (00:00)

If you’ve been told your UX portfolio must show your personality and passion, I want you to know that is false. The truth is, personality and passion are not going to get you the interview. What will get you the interview is proof. After you get the interview, your personality and passion can come up in interviews. But if you don’t lead with proof, you’re not going to get interviews.

I can’t believe we are at our fifth part of this series, the five UX portfolio myths that are costing you interviews and offers. And today is really a pet peeve of mine. I think a lot of the UX narrative around portfolios is this somewhat current obsession about showing your personality and recruiters and hiring managers.

Just want to see proof that you can do the thing that they are hiring for. And so if you distract recruiters and hiring managers with your personality and passion, that is going to suppress what they want to see, which is the proof that you can do the job that they are hiring for. So if you do not lead with that proof, you are not going to get an interview. So

Oftentimes when I’m looking at portfolios, I notice that trying to include your personality and passion actually competes with the content of your portfolio. And here’s what I mean: you maybe choose a font because you think it shows your personality. In reality, that font can make your portfolio hard to read. Or maybe you add like a bunch of design elements to your portfolio. There’s like

Background stuff. There’s kind of like bits and pieces floating all over the place. Maybe you’re even using animation a little bit, or for every single element in your portfolio. And that is a huge, huge distraction. Side note, animation can also make people literally sick. So for anything in any design, let’s zoom out, not just your portfolio, but for

Anything you are working on, you should be able to justify why it is there. so for animation, I would challenge you. Why is that animation there? Why did you choose that font, for example? And if the answer is I thought it showed my personality, that is the wrong answer. Another thing I see a lot of UX people do is adding like a logo, a personal logo.

To their portfolio, or if you make a website, your website. But as you know from this series, you do not need to make a UX portfolio for your website. I recommend a presentation. But regardless, this idea of having a logo for yourself, oftentimes it can distract. it can also be hard to read, especially like

Some of you are not thinking about if you make a logo for yourself and you shrink it down to like a smaller size, it’s pretty much impossible to read a lot of the time. So don’t let this attempt to show your personality compete and conflict with the content of your portfolio. So think twice about adding certain fonts because you think it shows your personality.

Background elements, design elements, little artistic stuff all over the place, it is probably not serving you well. It’s a distraction from the proof. And recruiters and hiring managers just want to see the proof that you have the skills to do the job they are hiring for. Now, how do I know this? Because as I told you in this series, every month I interview recruiters and hiring managers so I can hear directly from them what they are looking for.

So you can hear from me what they’re looking for. So when I tell you these tips and advice, you can know that it is based on real research and not just like my opinion that I had when I woke up that morning. So in my interview with Steph McDonald, who is the lead recruiter at HubSpot who focuses just on UX design roles, she

Kind of summarized this topic of personality in your portfolio really brilliantly. And I just want to read it to you. She said, it’s like a fashion designer who puts on all her jewelry, then takes three pieces off before she walks out the door. Put it all on there, but maybe take a few things off. And what she was saying, and you can go listen to the holy interview, it’s episode 168 of the Career Strategy Podcast.

But essentially she was saying in your portfolio, before you hit send, look at it again and see if there’s anything that you could remove. Because especially in the world of AI, and I think this happened before, but there’s a tendency to add more and more and more, right? Because especially with AI, you can do it really fast. But design is really about taking away.

And so that also applies to your portfolio. It’s cliche, but sometimes less is more. And in your portfolio, I would say less personality, more proof that you have done what they are looking for in the job description. So if someone has told you you need to add more personality and passion to your portfolio, again, as I’ve said, ask them why.

And if they don’t have a solid answer for that, then that is just them probably saying something that they saw somewhere else on the internet, but they haven’t really thought it all the way through. But when you put yourself in the shoes of recruiters and hiring managers, and when we think of people like Steph, which I just told you about, Steph wants to see the evidence, the receipts that you’ve done, the things that she needs in the role she’s hiring for.

That is what will help you stand out. It’s not the cute font you choose or some animation you added to your website. It is, does this person’s portfolio signal that they’re going to be able to succeed in the role I am hiring for? So put proof before personality in your portfolio.

I I can’t believe we are at the end of this five-part series. If you’re jumping in at the end, I really, really encourage you to go back and listen to all five. They’re pretty short. myth number one, you need three to five projects in your portfolio, false. Myth number two, you need a portfolio website, also false. A presentation will be faster.

Cheaper, save you a lot of headaches, and reduce the risk that you blow the first impression you have to recruiters and hiring managers. Myth number three was that you need to show the whole end-to-end process. You don’t. It’s better to go deep into a few parts of what you did rather than to show everything. Because when you show everything, you’re gonna overwhelm yourself trying to make it, and you’re gonna overwhelm the recruiter or hiring manager.

Myth number four, you can’t show work that didn’t launch or what went wrong. Again, false people who actually work in UX and people that you want to work with understand the projects get canceled. They don’t go as planned all the time. And recruiters and hiring managers want to hear about that. Because chances are, when you get hired at their company, things will not go as planned. Projects will take detours and pivots, and they want to know.

What you do in those moments and how you’ve navigated that in the past. So this is your permission to include projects that didn’t launch or what went wrong in projects that didn’t go as planned. And today’s myth, myth number five: your portfolio needs to show your passion and personality. False, you already know why. All right, that is it for this series. Hey, if you followed along in this series, I would love to know what you thought of it. So leave a comment.

Send me a message on LinkedIn. Reply to my emails if you’re on my email list. But let me know you thought this was useful. And if this helped you change your approach to your portfolio or made you realize you’ve been stuck in your portfolio because you’ve subscribed to these myths that the UX industry keeps just putting out there, but very few people are questioning. And if you’ve been following me for a while,

You know that I think against the grain. You know that I always love to ask why and figure out the context. And so that’s the point of this five UX Portfolios Myth series, to think differently about what you’re told in the industry and to connect you with what recruiters and hiring managers I’m talking to on a monthly basis actually want.

And before I go, if you are struggling with your portfolio, the portfolio is just one of the things that I help people with inside Career Strategy Lab, which is my UX job search coaching program. Maybe you’ve heard about it before, maybe you have no clue what it is. It is where I help UX and product people navigate their job search and get hired or promoted with average five figure salary increases. So

If you’re stuck in your job search or you want to be ready for the unexpected, If your portfolio has been in redesign mode for the last month, three months, six months, or longer, maybe this is your sign that you need a change of strategy. And that strategy is inside Career Strategy Lab. So if you want to learn more.

Go to careerstrategylab.com and click on UX Career Coaching in the top navigation, and that will direct you to where to learn more. Or feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m very reachable and happy to guide you to how myself and my team that I have trained, who actually work in UX can help you get hired or promoted faster. All right.

That is all. I will see you in another episode of the Career Strategy Podcast.