Portfolio Projects that Get you Hired

all right so today i'm going to talk about the portfolio item and the things that i put on my resume when i was going into this interview process and i had some of you guys send in your portfolio projects your resumes your websites and i reviewed these so what i'm going to do is talk about my resume review some of your guys's and i'll talk about the projects that stood out to me so the reason why this is going to be interesting is because i've been on both sides of this so i've been the one interviewing candidates and i've also been the one going to these interviews so i'm going to be able to give you both sides of this and this also isn't going to be a normal portfolio review video there's a lot out there i'll leave that up to other people to review those what i want to do is just take the projects that stood out to me so i had probably over 100 sent in and i'm gonna give you the back story of how this filtration process works and how these projects stood out to me so the first thing is my personal portfolio uh resume or website so i didn't have a portfolio website i got my first job just by working at the company proposing an idea and i ended up building that so a lot of you guys know that story if you don't i'll link that video up in the video description and you can also see the product that i built so i won't show it here so after about two years of working i had this job experience under my belt and i also had this project that i worked on so when i started applying before i decided to go to youtube and what i wanted to do with my life i started applying just to see what was out there and i went to these interviews and i started showing my work and at this point i didn't have a i didn't have a portfolio website i really didn't have my resume because i was working for four years prior and then i had my own company but what i brought to the interview was this story of my project that i worked on for two years so i only had one item on my resume so right away i just want to make that really clear it doesn't matter how many items you have on your resume now if these if these items are let's say they're not great then it might help to have more work under your belt but if you've worked at one job or on one project this one project is what stood out to these employers and i went to a lot of interviews got a lot of offers and some of these interviews were actually four companies that required a computer science degree now i still applied i didn't have that degree but by the time we got to that point in the interview where they asked about it and they noticed that i didn't have it they were so captivated by the project that i worked on because it had it had everything you want in a candidate for a lot of these jobs that i was applying for uh there was that self-motivation there was the the creativity the ability to be motivated and create something because i designed it i built it they saw the stack that i worked with all these things that i was able to put together and right away that one item on my resume stood out to them and that was enough so it wasn't about the amount of items it was about what the work i actually did was and obviously connecting with them so that's the project that i had on my resume so remember i didn't have a portfolio website i just brought that resume i just left one job after working for for years and then again my own company so that was all i brought to the table and that was enough now going through your guys's project so we're just going to jump right into that and i'm going to pull up an excel sheet and i'll talk about how i put this together so right away again getting over a hundred websites portfolio items uh you're gonna see how an interviewer thinks you got to remember a lot of people when they send this in they expect the interviewer to or the interviewer to do their due diligence to do all the research on them and then make the best decision i hate to tell you that's probably not how it's going to work in in many cases they're going to get a lot of applications now it's not always going to be the case in some cases you may be the only person applying but right away i'm creating a filtration system so any projects that don't jump out to me they they get scrapped out away i created a rating system and some of them i didn't even rate not that they were horrible but they had nothing in them they had nothing in them that jumped out and caught my attention now anytime i got a github repo they uh if the github repo forced me to download the project or have to look through the code me as a interviewer that doesn't have the time to look for or look through all these resumes i don't have time to look through your code that one's going out the window unless something catches my eye unless i have extra time i'm not looking into it so right away you got to understand you need to catch attention right away so a github repo if there were images in that github repo let's say in the readme you had screenshots of your project that might work that's something that i don't have to really look for that stands out to me so i filtered these down and in my excel sheet now i created a grade for uh for each project and i hid the person's emails i hope i did at least and this grade doesn't necessarily represent the quality of the portfolio but this represents how much that project stood out to me or that resume stood out so if you're one of these people that made it to the list don't worry if you have a low grade that just means that it didn't jump out to me in a different way but it doesn't necessarily represent the quality of your portfolio so right away if you notice the tens and nines not all of them but if i see that you worked on something personal that you built something personal that's going to jump out to me right away and i'll usually grade you a 10 if i see that you built it even if it wasn't the best project so if it was a real application those people most likely got a higher grade so just want to make that clear and to anyone else that didn't make it here it means that i just didn't give it a higher rating something didn't jump maybe it was a replica so it doesn't mean that uh you didn't make the list so i still thank you for sending that in i really appreciate that but we're going to review these for the sake of time so the first one is alexander grayton so i can't remember all the notes that i took for these so let's just kind of go through it and see what happens and i put a few descriptions here so college planner good portfolio side and design skills so alexander right away i can see that your you have some design skills i like this this could be a template it depends on what i'm hiring you for now if you're if i'm hiring you for front-end development i probably expect you to build it yourself but i think it's a pretty neat website and it's pretty clean so i'm not trying to review the website but what stood out to me here let's see um this new york times thing so you're working with an api i can see you're pulling some data and also i thought there was another project it looks like you're working you're doing some real work for for companies so right away if i got this right i didn't get a chance to interview you but it looks like you're actually doing some real work so right away it shows me that you're putting things together so this is actually what stood out to me this is the the one that i really like so this is a college planner so you write in your and i believe it's just tapped into an api but you select the university you want to go to the amount you can afford i believe yearly to pay or yeah that's yearly and then you get the rating on the university you want to go to so let's say i can pay 30 000 a year i want to go to the university of alabama get your rating so this is pretty neat you have really good design skills uh this jumped out to me because of the backend or the api so there was an input error with the input let's just say in state and this this is something that i would start asking you about i'd be really curious on what you used um it looks like you used react and you're tapping into yeah it looks like you're tapping into an api so it looks like you didn't build out the back end but i would ask you about that that would stand out to me i like that pretty clean portfolio let's go to the next one so i don't know how to pronounce that name so i'm not going to try sorry about that and let's see this one so the reason why i like this one is i can tell your design skills are they they're not great i'm not gonna i'm not gonna grade the design skills uh because i can't see everything but this looks good it looks clean so you might be great i don't know uh but i approve of the design i can see you know what you're doing and i'm also going to assume that most of these are full back-ends so if some are wordpress that would completely change my opinion depending on what i'm hiring you for but this i'm assuming if this is django this is pretty cool so it looks like it's a sports tryout website you can apply for these i can see that you know you know basic crud functionality you know how to authenticate a user there's a lot of django skills you have and i also gave you a high rating because i haven't seen this in in another tutorial so i'm assuming you built this out yourself if you did that completely changes my perspective and i also want to know i guess it doesn't look like you're using this in a real example but it's still a cool project i would definitely want to sit down and ask you some questions about this and would ask you back for a second interview so let's go to andrea now so good portfolio machine learning so this one stood out to me again it depends on what i'm hiring you for but the portfolio is clean and it looks like you're into a lot of ai data visualization what jumps out to me right here is is that data part the the data science part of things the machine learning part now if i needed that it doesn't mean that you're automatically qualified but it looks pretty cool looks like you know what you're doing and something about it just catches my attention so this is based on the portfolio alone so i didn't really look in the projects and i don't think you're really leaning or linking any up but it's neat to see so let's go to this next one so clean website i can see all your skills here and what stood out to me here i think it was a school management platform social media ecommerce whatsapp clone so there's a few items that you had here i'm just going to open up some links and i'm assuming they're going to take a while because you have them on heroku i think and it looks like they load slower because you're not paying for the service but let's go into that looks like a broken link so you have a social platform now it's not it has some broken stuff on it and i can see that you probably understand basic authentication so nothing nothing pops out here this ecommerce platform nothing that really stands out but i can see that you know how to build out this kind of functionality which is cool when i click add to car i can see oh so i have to register so that must have been a different platform this is kind of neat i would ask you some questions about it to see maybe if you've built out a real application and what you're capable of so let's close that out so that was probably just a portfolio site and just a variety of some work here so let's jump to joseph so i okay so here are the notes for that so social media ecommerce and whatsapp clone so the whatsapp clone uh this is kind of cool so we're not going to jump into the actual project but an instagram clone i see you work with a mirn stack you have a social media site which looks kind of neat i'm not going to go into that now that's something that's kind of cool too something that you should do is create pictures or a video demo for a product now a lot of these like somebody had an instagram clone and i had to register and create an account when i'm looking through through 100 projects or more than that i don't want to have to sit there and try to create all these accounts and give a bunch of emails have some pictures for me prep something like that make it easy to find so some of those i did sign up for other ones it was late at night when i was looking through these i'm not going to go through that so this whatsapp clone looks pretty cool i'm going to ask you about that if i interviewed you and it looks like we have an ecommerce site good functionality i like both of those an instagram clone so it doesn't look like you've built anything of your own just yet but i definitely want to know about the back end to this netflix clone but this is pretty cool this this stands out the website itself um it's pretty it's clean so let's go to the next one joseph abu here so this one i rated a perfect 10. so the reason why i got this this wasn't even a portfolio site this was just an email showing their website now in the email they mentioned something about how once they learned they went and tried to build out a real website here's kind of the neat thing of how an interviewer thinks right now so or at least how i would go through this process because i see that this is your own site i don't even care about your portfolio website i'd like to still maybe see a resume but they're working on a real platform i don't even know what it is but i have a lot of questions i'm really curious about the database you use what the what the stack was what you use on the front end because you didn't give me any for any information about this you just sent me this link but it already looks cool and it looks like you even have a mobile app i believe and it looks like you have real users on it there's a video somewhere on here about this platform and if i try to read about this portal for telecom needs now that can mean anything i'm not sure what that is but it looks cool i would definitely want to ask you some questions about this you have design skills that's for sure and everything looks good so here i see a picture this is what i'm talking about try showing try showing pictures like this right here so if i can see into it without having to create an account because right now i don't have the time to sit here and register but if i can see in here i'm able to see that you have a dashboard you have stats it looks like you're typing into different apis definitely some kind of database here this is a perfect 10 for me just because of that and there was no portfolio site and no resume with that so right away this is kind of how my experience was when i had that project they were so obsessed with what i worked on and wanted to know more about it that everything else didn't really matter at that point it looks like i just broke the link to that so this is uh right away this portfolio site stands out i think i mean i don't know if this is or not i'm sure i've seen this website looks like a theme that you've used um but what stands out to me here is the fact that this is clean so you at least understand some design and this uh if i was hiring somebody for javascript maybe for some front-end work it looks like you know what you're doing i like the flappy birds uh looks like there's a few other projects so to me this shows that you enjoy working on side projects that you're really trying there's not just one product up here and it's not just some to do app you're really putting things together so some php it looks like you have here and i would probably start looking through the github repo i want to know more about you depending on what i'm hiring for so that was our jeet i believe is the name so i don't want to mess that one up and let's go to this next one so this is kenny so the funny thing is i don't remember what i'm looking through right now this is just after i filtered everything down so while that's loading let me pull up the next site and this is going to be for medi i believe is the name so kenny okay the design is clean and i honestly don't a lot of people have publicly shamed these progress bars i really don't have too much of an issue with it i don't think it does anything great but it tells me where you feel strong like a lot of people say well what are you grading that 50 against now it might not be an accurate reading but it tells me that you're strong in python you are probably more than comfortable with javascript but you don't really care for html and css so that's how i would interpret it i don't think that's that bad of a thing now the reason why i saved this one so outside of the website it looks pretty clean this music player looks good so there's an api here for a weather app some kind of landing page but this right here i'm really curious to see if you actually have a database or if you're tapping into an api somewhere i think that's a really neat project and i would ask you for a second interview or at least a second phone call just to review that and see what you know because that has my attention while that's loading i guess it's loaded now so it looks like i can actually play music from here and i won't play it right now because i don't know what that's going to do to the audio but it looks like we have a whole library of songs and that's pretty neat definitely want to know more about that does it say what you used let me see no it doesn't say anything i would love for you to have some kind of description on what's going on here okay music player built on react.js so i'm assuming you're tapping into some kind of api here okay so i think it's medi so what was it that i liked about this one okay so the site itself looks clean so you have your resume embedded and what i liked about this so what did i grade this one so this is a seven so i guess anything under a five or anything under a six which i would consider like five is like my average um i just removed but the reason why i graded this one a little lower but i still liked it was because i can see that you're really trying you have an ecommerce site that's actually from my course i believe this is also from my course this is from another project that i did and this one i do not recognize so what i'm recognizing here is that you're doing you're trying out a lot of projects so you maybe you didn't find something that you want to actually work on anything that you um you're didn't find a need for a project but you're really trying and you could you clearly understand um most of the basics that i would require for a django developer now this isn't including the rest framework but i can see that you're putting work into it and you're putting some projects together so that's cool so this is yeah this is from my project so let's go to that cart yeah so i see i understand the functionality i see what you're going for i like it because you're putting in the work so that's clean so good job medi so maxwell maxwell is a college student i believe yeah he sent me an email explaining a little bit more why did this one stand out to me so we have a finance application it's checking stock prices book fox so it's a book review website so i would ask questions on where what your stack was what you're doing let's actually see the languages if this is something that i need oh and by the way this is what i'm talking about right here so when i go to your github repo i don't want to have to look through all your code it takes a lot to to to refu to review code if i'm looking through a lot that's going to be a major turn off so something like this this gif is really cool that's even better than a picture but you have a description you're telling me what it does and you're showing me in the readme what this application looks like so i don't have to look at it maxwell i'm gonna i didn't even notice you had that gift there i'm gonna push you up to a nine so that looks really good this probably should be a ten but let's see our next one okay perfect you have a gif it's a book application let's see let's go okay so let's see the stack so we have python sql html css javascript vba the language not many people know about i actually know that so that's kind of interesting flask django bootstrap and let's go back to projects let's see laying lab that looks pretty cool see this is awesome like i didn't even notice this in the in the original process of filtering uh i'm sure there might have been some that i filtered out without even noticing their github repos but maxwell you deserve a 10 for that that's perfect i love that okay so i think i just jumped to jump backwards here and close these out so we have rafi see if i'm saying that right so while that's loading let's check out stanley's okay so stanley's loaded quick what jumped out here so it might work it's very clean so the reason why this jumped out is it looks like you're actually doing work for clients and i would put that in the category of you've built out your own projects so looks like this is somebody that's self-motivated it looks like if i give stanley a task he would figure it out even if he doesn't know the languages this this is the type of person that that i want to hire somebody that i say hey we need this feature this implemented even if it's not a framework or language that they understand they go and do their research and somebody that's working on their own projects is usually somebody that understands that and does things like that so rebuilt a company's website from scratch now averaging 250 monthly 250 000 monthly users wow so you're doing real work stanley what did i grade you i need to put you out of 10 for that i would love to ask you more questions about that this api package scanner so i actually had to work on that so for that that's another bonus i'd love to ask you about that really cool love it good job stanley and we go back to muhammad so muhammad is using my website design so you can i can see you followed my tutorial so you understand the basics of design you follow the tutorial what stood out here so you're following uh this is a lot like i believe it was kenny that had that somebody here i just reviewed it was working on my project so that's my e-commerce customer management platform so it looks like you extended my customer my crm tutorial or course into an ecommerce website now if you did that what did i grade you out here muhammad let's go down here where is that looks like the names got got mixed up here so oh it's right here rafi i'm not sure what happened with the name so if i mix up the names there sorry about that so it looks like okay the fact that i'm logging in right away that's uh i'd like to be able to see something else maybe some images but that's fine because you have it here maybe if i go to this article if i can go to it to an article see some more about it obviously i know it because i built it but you have an ecommerce site if you extended that again you get a better grade for that and you're working on a lot of projects so i like that that shows me that you're really trying to learn you're probably really picking up a lot of information you look really motivated so resound it looks like you're really motivated i don't know what i'm trying to say there so while that project is loading i'll close that out so we have a clinic i don't know i don't know if that's for a real a real uh customer there so actually doesn't look like it because you have your name there so i'm assuming you just built that out as a side project okay so yeah it looks like i'm if i skipped you i'm sorry if you're on this list i went from maxwell to this one to stanley okay so this is kind of cool um it doesn't uh i don't remember what the portfolio was about but the fact that uh this is a javascript application that stores information in the in the console that's pretty cool to me so we can save that and then you can actually add more notes so this looks like something that floor and pop actually did in his 50 projects but i'm assuming you did this outside of that video because he just released that so this is pretty cool and when i looked in the browser i was trying to figure out if you had a back end to this i can see that you're storing information in local storage so for anyone curious about that here we go we have the notes and that's stored right here so if i refresh this the notes are going to stay now one downside is the formatting gets lost so if i add another item like that the formatting gets lost so that's a downside but i would be curious to i'd want to ask you some more questions about that that's pretty cool okay that's a no taken app and then joules i believe i want to make sure i've pronounced your name before in another video i'm sorry if i got that wrong again so you also followed my portfolio website video so for those of you curious about that that is on traversing media on his youtube channel as a collaboration that we did so and i told people to steal my design i i i'm totally okay with that if you're not looking to be a front-end developer it's okay to use a theme and that's why i put it out there publicly and it's still the website that i use i don't know if i'll change it but so jules i'm gonna give you credit for using my design i like that um i don't know if you have a back end to this yeah it looks like you built out a back end so good job you looks like you've watched my time lapse video and extended that so let's see what stood out here so the chat application really cool we have stories so it looks like a blogging platform i like the fact that you have a picture in here you explain the technologies what you're using here that's pretty neat you have authentication i like that and i just closed out your website so let me open that one more time up or open that up one more time and we have a news application and let's see if you have more here so yeah nothing nothing too special but i can see that you're you're working at it and uh you're following along so it's in one of those categories where i can see you're working hard and i would want to give you a chance so it definitely stands out okay we have ikram here let's see what this one was and we'll pull up this full student app so code with tommy so code with tommy the reason why would i give him an eight i probably should give him i'll give him a 10. so the reason why i like this is we'll jump to tommy then we'll go back to ikram so tommy actually has a youtube channel so i'll pull that up just to give him a shout out but he's filming tutorials and that can go either way honestly in an interview so for me i would consider that let me just try to write this out without hitting my mic so the reason why that jumps out to me is because i understand it and i can see tommy's putting in a lot of work so he has some videos here he's just getting started but it shows me that he's he's passionate about it he's working he's going on beyond or he's working beyond the basics and it's also really hard to teach so tommy's really working at it and i'll give him a big thumbs up for that now this can also be a downside of an interview so i did an interview with the company they loved me they wanted to hire me but the fact that i had a youtube channel was actually a turn off for them and that was because they didn't like the commitment they wanted more commitment than that so that's really up for you to decide how much you want to go into that what you want to do there in my case they saw that this is something that i wanted to eventually transition into but in tommy's case i don't know if he's trying to become a youtuber or he's just trying to show some projects so you can play that card uh whichever way you like but sometimes it can be good and bad so this is also tommy's website so full students tools.heroku app so right away it looks like tommy's working on his own project here and i can see a lot of a lot of cool projects right within here within here even though it's not a portfolio site it looks like it changed cat to car but i see the idea behind it and i like what's going on then we have a dictionary a plagiarism checker i would love to know the back end if you're using an api if you wrote something yourself there math solver and quadratic equation calculator i don't even know what that is but yeah tommy um if you were applying and i was looking i would definitely consider you here so we have i'm not sure if i yeah so it looks like ecrum yes that's the right one so this one i put on here this is just a i don't know if this is designed in wordpress or if it's hand coded the reason why i like it if you had if i was looking for a designer or somebody who's doing some front-end stuff my wife's a designer so that's why i resonate with this one i can see that i like the icons i don't know if those are designed by you or not i would ask you about that but i might put you on the design team if i were hiring here so i like this i see that you have your personal blog here and would have some questions for how this was built i'm actually curious about that so that's why i put it there and i gave it a six the reason why i gave it a six is because it's not something that popped but i wanted to notice so that completely depends on what i'm hiring for so let's go to a mod here and i'm going to try to find the name to these last two looks like i didn't find it hopefully those are on the portfolio so let's go to project so here we just have a bunch of little projects so probably some javascript css here doesn't look like any back end stuff tic-tac-toe so you can play a game i can see you understand the basics of interacting with this website i see what you're doing and depending on what i'm looking for that's when i would change up how i'm considering this one but this is kind of cool i liked it so we have a dictionary and a scientific calculator okay then we have another youtube channel so the reason why this stood out to me this is pretty cool i'm actually curious i might reach out to you oswald if you want to share this this is a project where you can put in a youtube video i believe and what it does is it translates into translates words in a video into text now i definitely want to know about that that's pretty cool it looks like you just sent me the youtube video that's pretty neat i would want to know about this so it looks like it's searching the words or for a certain word wow even cooler um yeah that's that's me i want to ask you i probably will reach out to you actually so really cool project okay so my camera cut out so i'm gonna have to re-film this uh closing statement so uh one thing i wanted to leave you guys with or i guess two things is the first thing is i was on a live stream with caleb curry today and we were talking about uh this interview process we ended up referring to it a lot and uh danny thompson who also joined the stream who's another youtuber who talks about interviews and getting employment uh getting a job he talked about how when you're in this process you are you are a liability and an asset to the company so you have to sell yourself you have to prove to the company why they should hire you so when you start looking at people or looking at this interview process from the company's perspective you got to understand they're investing a lot of time and money into you and you're the one they're the ones taking a risk not you in this case because they're the ones putting the money if you want to quit the the next week you don't like the job you can leave but now they have to restart this interview process and they have to keep going through it until they fill that seat so give the company a reason for you to stand out now if you don't have a computer science degree well then you have to do better work you have to prove to them that's okay not to have a computer science degree in many cases but you have to prove to them why you're still a good fit if you're up against a lot of competitors you're gonna have to do a lot of stuff here if you don't have the greatest portfolio but you have one project then make sure you highlight that project and the next thing is uh really the purpose of why i wanted to make this video was to show you this process in how i filtered uh filter these projects and these portfolios out you gotta understand i'm getting a bunch of them i had this with this video when i was hiring people when i was interviewing people for uh the job that i worked at when i was in charge of doing that i got a lot of resumes and this filtration process you need to do something that stands out something that pops grabs my attention if it's showing projects and images show them if it's giving project details you don't have to you don't have to give crazy write-ups but do something that catches the the interviewer's attention you don't have to have everything perfect but you need to do something that stands out in many cases you might not be one of hundreds of candidates you might be one of five that and that's going to be the case in many situations but depending on what it is you need to act like you're fighting for fighting with a bunch of people for this same spot give them a reason to hire you so look at it through their perspective and you might change your thought process again that was the goal behind this was to give you the thought process behind a candidate and also what catches my eye and what i see so hope you guys enjoyed this video i might do a few more of these i'm not sure might do them in a live stream so we'll we'll change things up a little bit i'm a little bit nervous about that but we'll see you guys in a live stream or in another video like this thanks for watching hope it helped

Channel: Dennis Ivy

Views: 45,754

Rating: 4.9535375 out of 5

Keywords: Programming, Software Developer, Dennis Ivy, Dennis Ivanov

Id: SvtSza13sk8

Length: 31min 57sec (1917 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020