Your Online Presence: A Design Recruiter's Perspective
To land your dream design job, it’s important to understand how your online profiles and presentations work together.
Your LinkedIn profile leads people to your website or online portfolio. Your web portfolio helps you get the interview. Finally, your portfolio presentation helps you land the job. Each part is important, and mastering all three will set you up for success.
At Good Maven we are all about offering advice for designers from the insider’s viewpoint so we can help anyone developing their career in design.
TLDR: Create an engaging LinkedIn profile to encourage recruiters to click through to a nicely designed and easy to navigate online portfolio. Seal the deal with a strong presentation.
LinkedIn Profile:
Think of your LinkedIn profile as your online resume. It gives potential employers a quick look at your professional background and acts as a gateway to your web portfolio (which you might host on Dribbble, Behance or others).
A well-crafted LinkedIn profile should make recruiters and hiring managers want to see more, so keep it up-to-date! This way, they can get an accurate picture of your experience and skills.
As a designer, your LinkedIn can serve as a passive portfolio. Be sure to include a link to your work, as recruiters or hiring managers for your dream job might pass on your profile if someone else has a portfolio readily available. Top tips for enhancing your LinkedIn:
Employment history: Ensure your employment history is up-to-date and relevant, including details about your roles in specific industries (e.g., start-ups, agencies, SaaS, fintech). Recruiters often use keywords related to these industries to find candidates, so keeping your profile updated ensures you’re visible in searches.
Optimize Your Headline and Summary: Your headline and summary are the first things people see. Make sure your headline clearly states your expertise or current role, and use the summary to showcase your unique value, key skills, and career achievements.
Highlight Key Skills and Endorsements: Add relevant skills to your profile and ask colleagues or clients for endorsements. This boosts credibility and ensures you appear in recruiter searches for those specific skills. Key skills could be “Interaction Design”, “Product Design”, “Visual Design”, “Prototyping”, “Web Design” etc.
Web Portfolio
Your web portfolio is where the magic happens. It’s what gets you the screening call and, hopefully, the interview. This is your chance to shine by showcasing the results you’ve achieved and demonstrating your design skills—whether it’s visual, interaction, or product design.
When we review web portfolios, we’re often going through a long list of candidates, so it’s important to make an impression quickly. If your portfolio doesn’t immediately show your ability to create impactful and relevant work, we might not dig deeper.
Make sure your landing page (or most recent posts) represents you as a designer—think of it as your personal brand. Consider the platform you use to showcase your design work. As above, Dribbble and Behance can be good places to start.
You may need to protect some bits of work behind a password. This is especially handy for work under NDA with a client, or work in progress.
Here are a few popular platforms where you can host your portfolio:
Dribbble:A community-driven platform focused on visual design, web, and app interfaces, where designers can share small shots of their work and get feedback.
Behance: A top platform for creatives across various disciplines to showcase and discover work, covering everything from graphic design to photography.
Squarespace: A user-friendly, all-in-one platform offering customizable templates for building sleek, professional portfolios, especially for creatives.
Wix: A drag-and-drop website builder that allows you to create a highly personalized portfolio with a range of design tools and templates.
Adobe Portfolio: Free with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, it allows seamless integration with Behance and customization for creatives to present their work professionally.
ArtStation: Ideal for concept artists, illustrators, and professionals in the gaming and entertainment industries to showcase high-quality visual projects.
Carbonmade: A simple and intuitive portfolio builder specifically tailored for creative professionals looking to showcase their work without the need for technical expertise.
Bento: A minimalist portfolio platform, ideal for showcasing work in a clean and simple format with easy-to-use customization options.
Read.cv: A sleek and modern portfolio platform, especially popular among tech professionals and designers, focusing on clean, structured layouts to highlight experience and projects.
Framer: A powerful tool for creating interactive, high-fidelity portfolios with the ability to prototype, animate, and customize designs, ideal for designers looking to showcase interactive and visually rich work.
These platforms offer a variety of options depending on the level of customization, interactivity, and design flexibility you're looking for in your portfolio.
Portfolio Presentation
Time to seal the deal. Once you’ve made it to the interview stage, your portfolio presentation is where you can really stand out.
This is your opportunity to not only show off the results you’ve delivered but to dive into the process and people skills that helped you get there. It’s about showing how you think, collaborate, and solve problems—proving that you’re the perfect fit for the role.
For expert tips on creating a strong portfolio presentation, check out our article, Crafting a Standout Design Portfolio: Ultimate Checklist
By intentionally designing your online profile, web portfolio, and portfolio presentation, you can create a seamless and engaging online presence that attracts recruiters and helps you land your next design role.
