Advice for college students creating an online portfolio, resume, and cover letter

Hi, I’m Justin. If you’re reading this you are either:

A) A student of mine at Indiana University, or

B) You got here from a Google search or possibly an AI prompt-based search.

Your portfolio site, resume, and cover letter are probably the result of a class or template setup by someone else, possibly another instructor. They’ve given you advice on how to structure this, by slotting in variables for your real-world experience.

The thing is, to someone like me on the other side of this hiring equation, it is noticeable, awkward, and kinda weird.

Bad, formulaic cover letters get ignored by humans and the Applicant Tracking System robots

I routinely get cover letter that all start with some slight variation of, “I’m really excited to be applying for [position title].” Cover letters and portfolio sites are also bursting with do-nothing phrases like, “I’m passionate about design/programming/apps/game design/etc.”

This is all further complicated by Applicant Tracking Systems, or an ATS. An ATS is the robot that sits between your resume and a decision-maker’s inbox. Employers that get hundreds or thousands of resumes can’t and don’t look at them all. They rely on software like an ATS to sort through them, like Google does webpages, looking for keywords that closely match the intention. If they say they want “1-3 years of Photoshop experience” and you write “I have experience in the Adobe Suite”, that doesn’t say “Photoshop” and it doesn’t say for how long. So the robots offs your application into the reject bin.

You have to talk to the robots first, then the humans. Sad, but true. Even small employers may be overwhelmed with applications. A small creative agency in your city or region may get a hundred applicants. It’s unlikely they’re looking at them closely. I know, because I’ve been on this end of the equation a lot. The process works like this when you don’t have an ATS:

1. I skim the first sentence or two of your cover letter. If it sounds frilly, fluffy, or corporate, I glance over it looking for any interesting word that doesn’t seem boilerplate. I likely don’t read it at all.
2. Then I immediately look at your portfolio URL. No URL, off you go to the reject pile.
3. If the site looks amateurish, bad, doesn’t perform, doesn’t load, or just seems “thin” like a “Welcome to my website” and a few cursory words repeated from your equally dull cover letter: off you go to the reject pile.
4. If your site does strike my fancy, I’ll look at your resume.

Frankly, your resume isn’t that important if you’re young. College students and graduates have resumes that are virtually identical through no fault of your own. You’re young! You just haven’t had as much time to do anything interesting yet. So your experience at the pizza joint or working retail at the yarn store just isn’t that interesting. No knock against it. It’s just how things work. But to me, in a professional role, it isn’t worth much. It’s a job you had for money. We all get that.

One possible issue is if you have no work experience at all on your resume. If you’re graduating from a university and you have no experience in anything, not even at a hot dog stand, I’m liable to wonder why. Like, are you ill a lot? Are you lazy? Or were you just focused on something else for some good reason? That much of a gap may be conspicuous.

What not to do on your portfolio site

When I’m looking at your portfolio, I tend to get worried when I see:

• Only a few projects. Like, what were you doing for those four years at school? You have 2, maybe 3 things? That’s a red flag.
• No discussion or written text about the context of the assignment. I need to know what the constraints were, like, “We could only use shapes,” or, “We had to use these images.” That’s important!
• No context about if it was a group assignment. I want to know what you did, what your process was, and whether you worked in a group. If it was a group, I need to know what YOU did. Otherwise, I have to discount the whole thing because I’m looking at YOU, not your group.

I also get worried if the site looks bad. Taste is hard to teach, but I can separate, “I don’t like this design or these choices” from “This is just bad or ugly.”

Web developers and web designers pursuing careers in web development should avoid Squarespace, Wix, and other simple DIY site builders. They’re cheap and we don’t use those tools at our level. Pros use pro tools.

What to do on your portfolio

Mostly, I want to see three things:

1. Does this person seem to care about themselves and their work? Meaning the site shows some polish, it doesn’t have empty pages, or pages that are mostly empty. I’m sorry, but if your About page doesn’t have a photo of you and only says a couple of sentences, I’m inclined to wonder if you’re capable of being more interesting or not.
2. Can this person write? Students hate hearing this, but: most of your work life will just be emails, meetings, sales pitches, and Slack. 50-60% of your life will be these four things, sometimes all interconnected. Another 10-20% of your time is just waiting on someone else and the rest of the remaining time is when you actually design, code, or produce. You have to recognize 90% of business just boils down to, “I don’t like that guy” or “I like her.” The way I know I can put you in front of my clients is by how well you write. Can’t write? Off to the reject pile. Can’t write without sounding like a ChatGPT prompt? Off to the reject pile. Trust me, I can tell.
3. Does this person have a mind at work? Are you talking about problems and solutions, challenges and issues facing your work and industry, and are you explaining how you’ve evolved in your thinking? I want to know that there’s a mind at work.

What to do, try, and consider

So what tactical steps can you do? Try this and chew on these ideas:

• Focus your cover letter on ME, the employer. Tell ME how YOU are going to help ME make more money, or save time (so I can make more money). That’s business 101. It’s all anyone cares about. Focus on the c customer, and that’s ME. I don’t care about your passion or your time at whatever school or how much you loved this or that.
• Consider starting your cover letter with, “You should hire me because I’m one of very people who combines the [skill 1], [skill 2], and [skill 3] you’re seeking. Lift those specific skills or talents directly from the job listing to get past the ATS.
• You could also consider a radical approach with your cover letter by being slightly un-professional. What I mean is, I would have a hard time ignoring someone who said, “Look, I know you’re not really reading these cover letters. So here is a list of my favorite ice cream flavors. Do you like ice cream?” Wouldn’t work everywhere, but I’d notice that! Half *my* business is advertising and getting attention. That gets attention!
• Never put meters or gauges showing your expertise with various apps or software or language. It’s arbitrary and I don’t know what to do when someone says, “I’m 90% at CSS.” Like, is that an A? What’s the other 10%? You can’t Google documentation like the rest of us for that?
• Designers should have two resumes. A pretty one you hand to humans or email directly. And a boring one that’s formatted like a plain text document (or close to it) to get past the ATS robots.
• While you are in school, approach more than a few projects each semester with the intent of including them in your portfolio. I increasingly advise some students not to do final projects that are based on their favorite TV shows or artists or movies or whatever. For one, those are cringe and you’ll be embarrassed in no time. Two, I don’t care much about what you care about. Heaven help you if you’re talking to someone who is 60+ years old. Three, it’s just not applicable to much. I don’t often have clients ask me to “make something with Spiderman.” What I do have is, “We need a way to get people to attend our event/donate/buy something.”

Most importantly: try to stand out against your peers. You’re all working through the same or nearly the same program. AI tools are already better than young people at writing, research, communication, coding, and possibly some design-oriented tasks. You have to be able to justify the cost of a $50,000 starting salary against the $20/mo ChattyG sub.