#hiring process

It depends on the job you're applying for. If you're applying for an artist position, no chance - you need a portfolio that shows your best art. For design or engineering, we will only really look at a github or website (or cover letter) if the candidate is really close to passing muster and we need a tiebreak. The heavy lifting is still done by the resume/CV. Any candidate for engineering, production, or design must be able to show us why we should hire her via that resume/CV. The most persuasive way to do this is for the candidate to show us that that she's already been doing the kind of work we need our new hire to do. There is no expectation when it comes to portfolios for engineering or design - plenty of folks get callbacks without a portfolio at all. I've been hired many times without a portfolio. However, if you have a portfolio and want to optimize your chances at getting hired, you must approach it from the perspective of a potential hiring manager.

We want to see the relevant work you did and the decision-making process you went through when doing that work. Making a hiring manager download an entire project and scrub through it without any direction is really bad for this. You need to convey the relevant information to us somehow, optimally in an easy-to-understand intuitive way. You want to remove as much friction as possible between us arriving at your page and reaching that conclusion.

If you really want to optimize your portfolio, you should build a curated presentation of the work you did and the choices you made. Explain the problems you faced, the decision-making process including the benefits and drawbacks of each potential choice, and then the final choice you made and why you chose it. Go over the difficulties in implementation you went through, especially where you had to pivot or change the design/plan and why. Finally, show me your finished implementation, ideally in a video or an embedded demo form so I don't have to download foreign files and run an untrusted executable on my workstation. Make it as easy as possible for me (the hiring manager) to see your work in the best light.

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My boss genuinely treats me like her little assistant who can only do (and struggle with) basic admin and in reality...

We have pretty similar experience and qualifications.

Like, lady. I used to MANAGE teams internationally in a big corporation, and you seem to have worked your whole career in local government. That's cute, but you've never faced the pressure of the private sector and the expectations placed on you at all levels. I'm not saying that's right to exist, but it takes a certain level of skill to be able to adapt to it - and I was able to!

This morning she has me reformatting the fonts and color scheme of a presentation I put together based on her notes.

The fact I could have written the whole thing from scratch AND if necessary presented it to an audience seems totally lost on her.

If you are ever looking for a job and the job application says you need X years of experience, subtract 2 or 3 from that number and if you do have that much experience than go for the job. Most places that hire will actually overlook the fact that you “don’t have enough experience” cause they usually do need people. As long as you basically prove that you are worth it and you have most of the other skills required, you’ll probably get the job.