A couple of months ago I told a design recruiter in the region that the more senior you get as a designer — staff, lead, head of design — the less recruiters should care about the portfolio and the case studies.
He partially agreed. Said it’s something he had to sit with, especially thinking about the head-of-design searches he’d run.
Here’s the thing. At that level the question is not really “can this person design.” That is table stakes. The actual question is “can this person operate.” Can they walk into an environment where the problem is not clearly defined, the data is incomplete, stakeholders have different agendas, technical constraints are real, and the business still expects progress — and move things forward.
A case study is a terrible instrument for measuring that. By the time something is in a deck, it has been cleaned up, narrativised, and stripped of the messiness that actually showed the judgment.
What I think should carry more weight at senior levels:
- The environments someone has operated in
- The level of trust they were given
- The complexity they handled
- The outcomes they helped shape
- The kind of people who chose to work with them again, and would vouch for them
I’m not saying portfolios are useless. They’re a reasonable filter earlier in a career. I’m saying that at a certain point the signal moves elsewhere — and most hiring processes have not caught up.