How not to ruin a hiring manager's day
I've applied for design roles. I know what it feels like to obsess over a cover letter, second-guess your portfolio, and refresh your inbox for a week. Recently I found myself on the other side of the process, reviewing nearly 200 applications for a design role. It gave me a new perspective on what actually makes an application stand out.
Make the reviewer's job easy
This is the one idea that underpins everything else. Hiring managers are not sitting in a quiet room, thoughtfully considering each application. They're doing this on top of their normal workload, in between meetings, probably a little tired. Your job is to make it as frictionless as possible for them to understand who you are and why you're worth a closer look.
Everything that follows flows from that.
Your CV
Keep it short, clean, and legible. Two to three lines per role is plenty — give enough context to be understood, not a full job description. If you're more than a decade into your career, drop the early stuff. A focused, relevant CV makes a better impression than a complete timeline.
Don't over-design it. Save the flair for your portfolio. A clean layout with considered spacing and typography says more about your design sensibility than a heavily styled document that's hard to read.
Always submit as a PDF. A .docx file is a gamble — not everyone has Word, and there's no guarantee your carefully considered formatting will survive the round trip. PDF is what you see is what they get.
Your cover letter
Make it as short as you possibly can. Brevity is itself a demonstration of communication skill, and communication is core to the job.
Start with a one-to-three sentence elevator pitch: who you are, what you do, why you're a good fit for this specific role. Don't be generic. If your pitch could apply to any other designer, it's not doing its job. There were applications in that pile where the opening paragraph was almost word-for-word identical to a dozen others. Stand out by being specific.
Don't use generative AI to write or edit your cover letter unless you can reliably spot AI-generated copy. Hiring managers often can, and it immediately flattens your voice.
Include your portfolio link in plain text, just yourname.com as the actual display text, not a hyperlinked word like "here" or "Portfolio." Some hiring platforms strip or block links entirely, so if the URL isn't visible as text, it simply won't exist for the reviewer.
Better still, link directly to specific case studies that are relevant to the role. When I was reviewing applications, a shortcut to the most pertinent work would have saved time and shown that the candidate actually understood what we were looking for. Almost nobody did this. It would have stood out immediately.
Your portfolio
It doesn't need to be elaborate. Clean HTML or a well-set-up Framer or Webflow site is more than enough. What matters is that the work is easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to navigate.
A few things that genuinely stand out:
Testimonials. A short recommendations section — LinkedIn-style endorsements from colleagues or clients — adds credibility and character in a way that self-written copy simply can't.
A personal touch. A brief section about your interests, how you work, or what you care about outside of pixels makes you memorable. Hiring is partly about figuring out if someone will be good to work with. Help them answer that question.
High-quality photography of physical work. If you've designed anything in the real world, printed materials, signage, packaging, invest in a proper photo. It elevates the perception of everything else in the portfolio.
And please, check that your link works before you apply. A broken or expired portfolio URL is an immediate disqualification. With hundreds of applications in a pile, no one is going to chase you down.
Your case studies
A portfolio full of polished final screens tells a reviewer what you made. A good case study tells them how you think, and that's what they're actually trying to understand.
Lead with the problem. What were you solving, for whom, and why did it matter? A sentence or two of context before you show anything sets up everything that follows. Without it, even beautiful work can feel arbitrary.
Then show your process honestly. It doesn't need to be linear or perfect — real design work rarely is. Sketches, early concepts, dead ends, and pivots are all fair game. The goal isn't to present a tidy story; it's to demonstrate that there's genuine thinking behind the outcome.
On length, err on the side of less. If a reviewer has to scroll for five minutes to get to the point, you've already lost them. Include what's necessary to understand the problem, your approach, and the result, then stop. Editing yourself is part of the job.
On metrics and impact: include them if they're meaningful and you can back them up. But don't feel pressure to manufacture numbers for work that's genuinely hard to quantify, and in UX, a lot of it is. A hollow stat is worse than no stat. If the impact was qualitative — a process that improved, a team that worked better, a product that became clearer — say that plainly instead.
The bigger picture
The applications that stood out weren't necessarily from the most talented designers. They were from people who made it easy to say yes to them: clear, specific, well-considered, and respectful of the reviewer's time.
That's the job before you get the job.