Portfolios and Past Work

For many roles candidates already have work to show. Reviewing it costs little and answers questions no interview can.

The principles in “Portfolios and Past Work” become easier to maintain when ownership and time spent are visible. Teams evaluating the full guide can use it to coordinate the administrative work around assessment, identify stages that repeatedly expand and plan capacity, while keeping the hiring decision tied to job-relevant evidence instead of raw activity totals.

For an independent benchmark, compare the process with CIPD selection methods guidance; the useful test is whether the local method remains job-related, proportionate and explainable.

What it is good at

Demonstrating real capability on real tasks, over time rather than in an hour.

Showing range and judgement that a single exercise cannot.

Costing the candidate nothing additional, which matters given how much processes already demand.

And starting a conversation: the best use of a portfolio is usually as the basis for structured questions about specific decisions.

The verification problem

You cannot tell what was theirs.

Collaborative work is the norm in most fields, and a strong portfolio may represent a strong team.

The solution is not suspicion but conversation: ask about specific choices, constraints and what they would do differently.

Somebody who did the work can answer those immediately; somebody who did not cannot.

What to ask about a piece

What the brief and the constraints were.

What you decided and why, at two or three specific points.

What you would change now.

And what your role was, asked directly and neutrally.

Four questions, ten minutes, and they resolve the verification problem better than any policy.

Who has a portfolio and who does not

Confidential work cannot be shown: internal projects, client work under agreement, security-sensitive roles.

Career changers have nothing in the new field.

People from roles that do not produce artefacts have nothing at all.

Which means a portfolio requirement excludes systematically, and it should be one route among several rather than a gate.

Anonymised and described work

Where a candidate cannot show the artefact, a written description of the problem and their approach serves most of the purpose.

Accept it. Requiring the artefact itself excludes whole categories of experienced people for reasons unrelated to capability.

Scoring it

Against the same job requirements as everything else.

Not on presentation quality unless presentation is part of the job.

And with a rubric, because portfolio review drifts toward personal taste faster than any other method.

Unpaid speculative work

Asking for a new portfolio piece is not a portfolio review; it is a work sample, and the note on unpaid labour applies.

If you want to see new work, say so, scope it to hours rather than days, and consider paying for it.

What to check

Do you ask about specific decisions, or only look at the output?

Is there an alternative route for candidates who cannot show work?

Do you score against job requirements or against taste?

And are you accepting descriptions where artefacts cannot be shared?

The point

Ask about specific decisions in a portfolio rather than looking only at the output.

Four questions resolve the verification problem better than any policy.

Underlying all of this

Almost everything in this collection reduces to one discipline: write down what the job requires, assess that thing directly, record the evidence, and look at your own outcomes afterwards. None of it requires buying anything, and organisations that do those four things consistently outperform ones running longer processes built from instruments chosen before the requirements were known.

The recurring pattern

The recurring failure across every section here is the same: measuring what is convenient rather than what matters, then never checking whether it predicted anything. The check is an afternoon of work once a year, and it is the step that separates a process that improves from one that merely persists.