One of Lifesize’s biggest pushes recently has been to invest in demand generation and online marketing and thus we find ourselves hiring quite a bit in the marketing department lately. Though the examples I talk about below refer to a marketing role, the concepts can be applied to almost any position where you are designing or developing a product. The two most common roles that come to mind are marketing and engineering. Whether that product is a web application, a piece of machinery, or a marketing brochure, if you spend your days creating stuff, the concepts below can apply. And in general, the concepts below are targeted at more entry level to junior hires. If you are further along in your career, you may take the concepts below for granted, but even if you are a mid-senior level professional, everyone could use a refresher and perhaps after reading this, it might inspire you to make improvements to how you market and position yourself to potential new employers.

When Lifesize recruits for marketing talent, typically we are looking for strong skills in certain areas like Web Design, Graphic Design, Written Communication Skills, Social Media, etc. In almost all cases, there is no way for us to tell how good your skills are without a portfolio. If you were a high school senior looking to get recruited by a college team, how could you convey via a resume or a phone interview, how good of a basketball player you were? Sure, you could tell them your vertical jump, height, weight, points/rebounds/assists per game, etc but at some point, in order to paint a full picture of how good a player you are, we need to see you in action. High School athletes nowadays put together highlight reels to send to prospective coaches to try to get noticed. Actors and Musicians put together demo reels to send to potential producers to get noticed for gigs. For roles that require skills that can’t necessarily be quantified, there is no better way for us to evaluate your skills than to look at the work you’ve done. You can tell an interviewer all day about how good you are with Photoshop, but the bottom line is that this work can’t simply be boiled down to a bullet point on a resume or a couple sentences in a cover letter. You have to show us what you can do. Remember when you took the SAT’s and you had to write an essay in 90 minutes based on a certain topic? Similarly, innovative companies and hiring managers are going old school and asking candidate to write content during their interviews to show their ability to think quickly and meet deadlines.

If you’re applying to a role that has a major writing component to it, it should be a no-brainer that you would have a writing portfolio available for review. If you’re fresh out of school, don’t be afraid to send college papers that demonstrate your writing abilities. If you’re applying to a graphic design role, you should have a portfolio of graphic design work that you’ve done. Going even further, if you could put this content online in a personal website, that would be going that extra step that will get yourself noticed. (And make a recruiter or hiring manager’s life much easier!) You can even hire a web designer for a short project to make a website like this for you if you don’t know how to do it and there are simple CMS systems like Wordpress that can handle all the heavy lifting so you won’t have touch a line of HTML/CSS code ever. Remember, the hiring managers are looking at many resumes and portfolios and will probably spend on average 30 seconds reviewing it all! So it’s in your best interest to make a big impact in that short time. It’s so simple to put an online portfolio together - it’s just a matter of taking the time to do it. A portfolio link should be one of the first things referenced on your resume as well as your cover letter, if you decide to send one. If you’re a marketing candidate and a recruiter asks you for a portfolio and your response is “I can pull one together”, that’s a red flag. And if the job description specifically states that it is required and you don’t have one, that’s a double red flag!

Marketing positions are in extremely high demand. I find that most mid-senior level marketing folks have portfolios when they are required however many entry level to junior level candidates haven’t taken the time to do this quite yet. Whether it’s a lack of confidence, ignorance, laziness, or they just don’t know any better it’s an unfortunate situation and local colleges today should be taking time out to prepare candidates on how to put together a proper portfolio and market/differentiate themselves to potential employers as it would make a world of different for those candidates finding it hard to get the proverbial “foot in the door”.

If you don’t have any work experience and you’re fresh out of college, find a buddy to do some pro-bono graphic design/PR/Marketing work for and put those samples up in your portfolio. If you’re a developer, make it a side project to develop an innovative useful application with some business application and send the code samples along with your resume to a potential employer.

If you don’t have any work experience, don’t despair! Make a highlight reel of yourself and show us that through the legs reverse dunk that you threw down. Be creative, and remember: Show. Don’t Tell.