I spent weeks over the last year going through portfolios for open roles and by the end of it each time I had a difficult time honestly ranking them compared to years past. The problem was not that the work was bad, it was good. The thing was it was good in exactly the same way, portfolio after portfolio, until the differences between them stopped honestly registering, they started blending. It wasn't like it was years ago when I could go through a list of portfolios and easily have a standout or two that I remembered.

Now, the case studies all have the same shape. A problem statement, a photo of a wall of sticky notes, a few personas with a name and a stock headshot, a journey map, and so on. You know, similar typography and colors, similar grid layout, cookie-cutter (and I'm guilty of this as well).

A portfolio has never really documented the work. It documents the presentation of the work, and the way it's presented is part of design that has been quickly commoditized.

This movement or convergence isn't a "scandal" and that's what makes this kinda hard to talk about. Honestly, most of what caused it is good.

Design systems did some of this. Two designers at two different companies now ship screens that look like cousins because they are both assembling them from component libraries built on the same handful of well-reasoned decisions. That is the system doing it's job! The visual craft and in ways, innovation that used to separate a strong candidate from an average one got absorbed into tooling, and for better or worse it's not coming back out.

The case study itself became a genre of sorts. It was taught in bootcamps, and school, rewarded by people like me. I did exactly that when I taught a senior portfolio and graduation prep course. As hiring managers over the years we've asked candidates to show their process, so they showed their process, and process docs tend to look the same everywhere. Discovery, synthesis, divergence, convergence, test, iterate. I have run that sequence for nearly my entire career, and so has everyone else applying.

AI finished the job by making the last expensive part cheap. Writing a case study used to take a weekend or longer to assemble. Thinking through the narrative by hand, cleaning it up and having it reviewed by a copywriter friend if you had one. Now it takes an afternoon at most. A designer with a real judgement and a designer with very little can produce artifacts of sometimes indistinguishable finish. Craft under time pressure was quietly one of the few signals the portfolio actually carried previously, and that signal is now gone.

Underneath this sits a more permanent problem, which is that the portfolio was never able to show the thing worth hiring for. It was always a signal but that was it.

A case study is written after the fact by the person with the strongest incentive to make the path look straight and impactful. Dead ends get relabeled as pivots or constraints imposed by some outside force. Resulting in what's seen in the portfolio as the intended final product, but there's so much more below that top layer. This isn't lying, it is what happened when anyone narrates their own past work, I did it too.

The questions I actually care about have no slot in this. What did you argue for and lose, and what did you do the next day? Who did you have to convince, and what did you trade away (if anything) to convince them? What did you ship knowing it was wrong but for whatever reason your hand was forced? Which of these screens did you actually make, and which did you review in a meeting or collaborate on? How did the project go sideways (they all do at some point)?

There's a similar dissection to what I wrote back in Vol. 19 between being a designer and a design thinker showing up here in the hiring loop. The artifact is not the practice and it never was but it's becoming that. We had a long long stretch where artifacts were expensive so they could serve as a proxy for the practice, but again that has ended.

So the interview has to carry weight the portfolio used to, which for me means shifting how I think about the interview.

Ask about a decision the candidate lost ... not a failure, because everyone has a rehearsed story about their failures with redemption arcs, but a specific call they argued for and did not get. The answer can tall you how they hold a position, whether they can describe an opposing view without flattening it, and what they do when they lack authority in the room or conversation.

Put something real in front of them and ask them to critique it live (if your company allows this). Ideally something of your own or made for this very purpose with a genuine flaw in it. You are watching for whether they find the actual problem instead of the surface one, and whether they will say a hard thing to someone who has power in the conversation. A candidate who only offers safe critiques is telling you how they will behave in the workplace.

Ask them to tell you about the version of the product in their case study they came up with prior to the one that shipped and why it's changed. They might have covered some of this in the case study but usually again just the good parts. Anyone who genuinely did the work will either have the artifact or will remember in detail their early iterations. For my keystone projects I can remember most if not all early versions, because they honestly became a part of me as a designer. Their evolutions marked moments in my evolution as a designer. This answer can't be practiced or generated in advance.

My take away here for you. Having a candidate walk you through their case study is fine, but find ways to ask them what the case study left out.

None of this makes hiring easier. Honestly I'm not even touching the other side of this that is the candidate. The pressures and things they are battling are real and I acknowledge that. Using a portfolio as a filter is weak now, but it was cheap and it can run before you have to spend anyones time. Taking it out of the first position though moves the cost onto you, onto your ability as a hiring manager to read people in real time without a rubric to hide behind. That is harder to audit than a pdf or website, and I'm not confident every hiring manager I know would come out well on it, myself included on a bad week.

There is a second problem I have no genuine answer for. If portfolios no longer separates anyone, then much of what we have told early-career designers to spend their nights building is an investment with little return ... and I don't know if anyone has the answer on what they should build instead. They have the most to lose from this shift and frankly the least amount of power to change what hiring managers ask for.

All of this to say, I still ask for portfolios. I try to see where someone spent time and look for those little areas of craft that might shine through. I read them a bit differently now, mostly as evidence that someone can finish something and present it clearly (even if AI helped at little or a lot along the way). This clarity and evidence is worth knowing and is not what I used to think I was measuring in that moment. The stack of portfolios doesn't sort itself anymore and perhaps it never really did.