Career Portfolios – Important or a Distraction?

You may be hearing and reading career advice suggesting that job seekers need to prepare a career portfolio and use that in lieu of, in addition to, or as an integral part of their resume. That is standard advice for certain positions and industries where portfolios showcasing your career experience would be expected. However, before you launch into taking a considerable amount of time to create your portfolio, you need to understand whether that is what employers and interviewers want.

Career portfolios have always been common for designers, architects, journalists, and others since pictures, drawings, published stories or articles, awards, etc. are a more effective way to demonstrate their skills and work products. Recruiters and corporate interviewers would expect candidates in these areas to provide their portfolio demonstrating their skills and capabilities in addition to their resume summarizing their career progression.

If you are seeking a job in accounting, human resources, IT, logistics, manufacturing, operations, R & D, sales and in most other fields not described in the preceding paragraph, the document that recruiters and employers expect to see is your resume and not a portfolio.

In the preponderance of situations, recruiters and employers invite you to an interview because they want to find out what they want to know about you. They are not usually interested, at first, about what you want to show them.

Since interviewers typically schedule several interviews on the same day, here’s a typical scenario of how they work. In my executive search practice, we allotted two hours for each person. We set a maximum of 1 1/2 hours for an interview followed by ten to fifteen minutes for preparing notes on the interview after the candidate left. That left only about fifteen minutes to make or return telephone calls, make a trip to the rest room, and prepare for the next interview.

We had to work efficiently as we could only see about five people a day and on most search assignments, we could have as many as twenty people to interview! In our interviews, as is the case with those of most others, we had a prepared list of questions that we believed would give us the answers to what we wanted to know about you.

Occasionally, a candidate would bring their portfolio and attempt to show it to us. You can probably imagine our response, “Thanks but we only have a limited amount of time and we need to gather some information about you that we want to know.” This is what many interviewers will tell you as to why they are not interested in looking at your portfolio.

Since my background as a CPA was in audit, I wanted to do my own research and make my own assessments. Consequently, in my earlier years in executive search, I took the time to look at portfolios that candidates would bring to their first interview. What I found was that most appeared to be a failed attempt at showcasing their talents.

For example, their stories of achievements were usually poorly written and used too many words. Their stories often contained so many personal successes that I questioned how they could possibly be unemployed. They included certificates of completion of an abundance of seminars or short classes on various business subjects and awards for what most seemed to be inconsequential achievements, and, of course, several referral letters. It soon became easy to see why interviewers aren’t interested in looking at portfolios – No matter how much time people spent preparing it and how great they thought it was!

Preparing a portfolio to showcase your skills, experience, successes, and what you can offer an employer is best shown on your website. There it’s available to anyone who has an interest in looking at it. And they can do it on their time schedule, not yours.

There are some situations when you can write directly to organizations and describe how one or more of your skills, experience and achievements can help them. Even when your interest in helping them may not be matched by their interest in having your help at the moment, they often will keep your letter for future reference. I know people that have found jobs at companies long after they wrote an appealing letter that resonated with the recipient. You can read how to do this more effectively in Chapter 9 Communicating in my book, 12 Steps to a New Career.

Tags: career portfolio, job interview, job search, portfolio, resume