5 files to upload... Choose wisely.

For anybody who has ever applied to a corporation through their hiring website, you have probably encountered the option to upload only 5 files, all of which must can be only a few hundred kbs.

What do you do? Glamor shots? Process?

A link to your website?

This drives me up the wall!!! My biggest pet peeve with being a designer… Even when applying to RIM they couldn’t upload my pdf even when I asked specifically.

The best you can do is link to your online portfolio and say your PDF is available upon request.

I feel at a disadvantage with them only looking at my years of experience and not even asking for my portfolio.

The life of a designer :sunglasses:

A link, definitely yes, but from the perspective of an HR/Hiring Manager, and assuming that they will not go any further than what is in front of them, then what?

I hope he/she does go to my website, that would make things a lot easier, but do you know if they care about seeing work initially? Does that not come til later?

Craft 5 specific images.

A few glamour shots.
One of CAD models
One of physical mock ups
One of sketches
One showing some ethnographic or market research perhaps

Show them what you can do succinctly and efficiently. That should only take 5 images anyway. In five clicks of a PDF I know if I’m going to go further…

Thank you Yo, that was very helpful.

You’re welcome GEBS… and that advice could also influence your longer, in person presentation. If I have to get 20 pages in before I see some tangible, actionable results, it is not going to work. Put your cards on the table first, then tell me a story.

We all are tempted to make similar mistakes. I recently had to give a presentation to Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of frog, and 40 of his design students who flew in from Vienna. I was crafting a presentation of case studies of recent public work. The VP of the creative group globally a happened to be in the studio from NY the day before and I gave him a run down of what I was planning… he said to me “Michael, that is a beautiful presentation, but you won’t get three slides in” Instead he advised me the same as I advised you above, show them what I have done, hit them over the head with that, and then romance a story.

So I backed up to a Pecha Kucha I gave about my work and my approach at a RISD event earlier in the year and used that as a base, starting with a slide that has 130 tiles of projects from the past 15 years! It is an attention getter, puts the cards on the table as I suggested earlier… It went well.

You can see the base presentation here: 3MB PDF… I modified this so it wasn’t this exactly, and had more frog work in it obviously. I also ended the presentation by showing a book on Hartmut and frog that I had bought the year after I graduated design school, 1999, when most of these kids were 10 years old. It was a nice prop to put things into perspective for them… plus I got the book signed :wink:

http://michaelditullo.com/articles/MD_PK.pdf