you have a particularly strong portfolio item, it is appropriate to ask,
“May I show you something in my portfolio that illustrates this?”
If you know that your interviewer is interested in seeing items
from your portfolio, rather than asking for permission to show your
portfolio, you can simply open your portfolio and hand the interviewer
the relevant document. You will know pretty early on in the interview
whether or not the interviewer is receptive to seeing entries in your
portfolio. But even if the interviewer is excited about documents in your
portfolio, don’t overdo it. It’s a rule of show business: You always want
to leave ‘em hungering for more!
Most of the time, use portfolio items as confidence builders that you
don’t actually show. If you spend too much time during the responding
stage waiting to pounce with portfolio items, you run the risk of not
being very responsive to the questions you are asked.
The fact is, if you have done a good job of researching and putting
together a well-targeted Can-Do Portfolio, you don’t really have to show
portfolio items to get good value from them. Just knowing that you can
produce documents that verify claims you make about yourself will en-
able you to talk about your P.E.A.K.S. in a very confident and convinc-
ing manner.
Be sure to explain the portfolio items you do show. When you do
show something from your portfolio, you need to point out why this doc-
ument is important. Tell the interviewer quite explicitly the relevant
P.E.A.K.S. that this document illustrates or verifies. You don’t have to
be a big boaster. You can say something like:“This illustrates, I believe,
my ability to take responsibility and accomplish a big job in a short pe-
riod of time.”
Use portfolio items to demonstrate desirable personal characteris-
tics.Personal characteristics that are desirable in candidates but are
hard to prove when discussed in the abstract can be nicely illustrated
with your portfolio. When asked to describe some of the personal qual-
ities you bring to the workplace, it’s okay to say,“I have a lot of initia-
tive.”But it’s far more impressive to be able to say,“I think I show a
considerable amount of initiative. For example, here’s a letter of appre-
ciation I received for a project I initiated.”Use your portfolio to give
tangible evidence of these hard-to-measure intangible qualities that
can make all the difference in the hiring decision.
The responding stage is typically the longest phase of the inter-
view. As noted above, this is the stage when interviewers typically ask
the questions they believe will get at whether or not you are a strong
candidate. But this is notyour final chance to make a good impression.
Once interviewers have finished asking the questions they intended to
ask, the interview is certainly not over, unless, of course, one or both of
you decide there is an obvious misfit between you and the position for
which you are interviewing.Stage 4: Opportunity Finding
Opportunity finding can happen at any stage of the interview.
However, a particularly good moment to pursue opportunity finding oc-
curs when the interviewer has finished asking his or her list of setChapter 6: Using Your Portfolio to Get That Job 89