given meeting, only you will know that you have changed its contents
from one meeting to the next.Presentation Issues
When you create a Web-based portfolio, you can specify the general look
and layout of your Web site, as well as what’s included, what goes
where, the “tell me more”buttons, and the multimedia enhancements.
In these ways you have a considerable amount of initial control over the
presentation of your online portfolio. But, unfortunately, there are two
very significant ways you do nothave control over the presentation of
items from your portfolio.You can’t selectively show the items within a Web-based portfolio.
You can select what items to include in your online portfolio, but once
these are posted, the viewer of a Web-based portfolio can choose to look
at everything or nothing. Giving your interviewer the freedom to roam
through your entire targeted portfolio significantly reduces your abili-
ty to control how it is used in an interview.
As we explained in Chapters 6 and 7, your targeted portfolio is not
something you will typically want to show in its entirety in most inter-
view situations. Your targeted portfolio is best thought of as an arsenal
of different kinds of weapons that you might want to use to hit the
mark, if the moment is right. You want to have many different weapons
on hand, because, until you find out exactly what kind of a situation
you are in, you can’t know which weapon you will need. You don’t know
for certain going into an interview which items will prove to be most ap-
propriate to show. The nature of the questions you get and the points
you want to make in response to something that is said will largely de-
termine which of the items in your portfolio you will want to bring to
the interviewer’s attention. It is unlikely that you would want to show
all of the items in your portfolio, as doing so would be overkill. When
you show everything, you are selling too much, and you run the risk of
putting the emphasis on the portfolio rather than on you. If there is one
rule we have emphasized for showing a portfolio, it’s the oft-quoted ar-
chitectural adage that applies to many successful strategies in life:
Less is more.
Once you have posted a Web-based portfolio, those who have access
to this Web site decide what they will look at. It is true that during a
phone interview, if your interviewer has access to your online portfolio,
you can refer her to particular items that she can view. But once your
portfolio is onscreen in front of your interviewer, there’s no telling what
she will be looking at during the rest of the interview. For all you know,
your interviewers will be idly scrolling through your entire portfolio
while you babble on about a particular item they are no longer looking
at. Or your interviewers might start grilling you about other items they
happen to find that, given the direction that the interview has taken,
you would rather not bring to their attention.
In sum, once your portfolio goes online and people have access to
it, you’ve lost control not only over which items they will look at but
also over how the portfolio will be used in an interview.Chapter 9: Digital Options for Your Portfolio and Resume 131