5 things you should fix in your portfolio

For the last 2 years I've seen hundreds of portfolios. Some of them were great, some of them are okay. But more than a half of personal pages are pretty bad and will probably fail to grant you an interview.

This article is a short list of mistakes you should fix if you want to attract HRs and Recruiters attention.

Remember this:

HRs and Recruiters are the first people who will see your portfolio. They have some programming knowledge but usually only the very basic things. You will not impress them with the code but you can impress them with the image.

Your portfolio should look clean and pretty. Not for you but for HRs and Recruiters. It's very important.

1. Color theme and layout

The first things I see when I visit someones portfolio are the layout of the page and its colors.

Many people think that dark theme with acid green text is cool. But it's not. Any acid colors and mixes are the greetings from 2000-2010. It's not relevant for modern design.
If you're Front-end developer - your application may be rejected right on this stage.

Junior developers like to add lot of blocks to their page duplicating some non-important info, adding animations, scrolls, auto-typing text, etc. Just to show they know how to do this.
But as a result - you will get heavy page with lot of unnecessary staff that totally destroy the focus of HR person.

Conclusions

1. Never use acid colors without valuable reason. Pay attention to calm or pastel colors. I can recommend you to use color generators like Coolors, Colorhunt or Colormind .
2. Remove all unnecessary info. Ask yourself - why HR will need to know this info about you. If you can't give the answer immediately - delete this element.
3. Make sure your page is well structured. Everything must be on it's usual flow, not hiding in the corners or appearing once in 5-10 seconds with unnecessary animations.

2. Broken elements and responsive design

You may be surprised but about 20% of portfolios I've seen have some broken elements: blocks on the page, links, animations, forms, etc.

If you are sharing your portfolio with HR you must be sure it will work 100% correctly. On any device. All your example websites and scripts must work. Don't forget to update old links, especially if you changed something on your hosting or paths in your social medias.

About 30% of portfolios from juniors are not responsive or have troubles with adaptation to different screens. It's not a good thing if you want to get a job as a Front-end dev but your website isn't working correctly.

Conclusions

1. Check if all your social medias links are working.
2. Check if all your projects are working. I recommend to use hostings like Hostman to store your apps.
3. Make sure your website is responsive. It's a must-have today.

3. Go away from popular projects

I think about 90% of all portfolios I saw include projects like these:

• ToDo list
• A clock or a timer
• Flipcard game
• Calculator
• Weather app

Literally everyone is doing such projects. They are not impressive and not interesting. But if you want to be hired - you SHOULD be interesting. So you have 2 options:

1. You can still take the idea of this ordinary project but you should create a modern, good looking app and add some new features to this idea. Add filters and bookmarks to your ToDo list. Insert alarm clock, timer, time zones, etc to your clock. Create achievements list, high scores, different levels, etc for your Flipcard game. Develop the idea and create something unique. Not just changing a few styles watching some tutorial.
2. The better way is to create something uncommon. Something totally unique. You can use websites like Ideas AI or App Idea Generator. If you think the idea is hard - just simplify it.

As a result - HRs will see that you can build different things, not just the projects offered by YouTube teachers.

A few more important things to check

4. A button to download your resume

Make sure HRs will have an option to download your PDF resume. For many companies PDF resume is a must-have for consideration. Having a button on your website will make this process much faster and easier.

5. Why you?

A regular recruiter or HR may check several dozens of portfolios in a day. There can be dozen of other candidates with similar skills. Ask yourself, why HR will chose you, not the other person? It's just a simple question you can be asked during first short interview. Make sure you have an answer.

Hope this article will help you on your journey and will help to get a job in future!