196: What a Shopify design recruiter looks for in a senior UX portfolio
A senior UX portfolio gets read differently than a junior one, and most people never find out how until they're already in the rejection pile. Jared Tredly has spent around 15 years in recruitment, most recently as a design recruiter at Shopify, where he was hiring for roughly 30 open design roles at the time of this conversation. Before that, he worked agency side, where a single role could pull in 700 applicants a week. He's blunt about what actually happens to a UX portfolio once it lands in front of someone like him. At Shopify he sees 50 to 100 new applications come in on a given day, and he says UX recruiters broadly can see anywhere from a hundred to a thousand portfolios on a busy stretch. He'll often look at the work before he even opens the resume, because for UX design roles the portfolio carries more weight than it does in almost any other hiring process. He describes reviewing one like peeling back the layers of an onion. This episode gets into what actually earns a second look at that volume. Where seniority shows up in a case study and where it doesn't. Why he thinks ATS systems are mostly useless for screening portfolios, and what he actually uses them for instead. Why "impact" metrics carry less weight than most candidates assume, and what he listens for instead. If you've ever wondered what happens to your application after you hit submit, or why a UX portfolio that took you weeks to build didn't get a response, this is a rare look from the other side of the desk. Topics Discussed ✅ Why a UX design portfolio carries more weight in hiring than it does for almost any other role, and why that makes it the first thing reviewed, not the resume ✅ How many UX portfolios get looked at in a single day at a company like Shopify, and what that volume means for how quickly a decision gets made ✅ Why ATS systems are mostly unreliable for screening portfolio quality, and what they're actually useful for in the UX hiring process ✅ What causes an instant "hook" or an instant bounce in the first few seconds of a UX portfolio review ✅ Why inconsistency between a resume, UX portfolio, and LinkedIn profile raises suspicion instead of just looking sloppy ✅ What separates a senior level UX case study from a mid level one, including project complexity, recency, and evidence of influence over simple execution ✅ Why cramming a UX case study with slides or over explaining a process can actually work against a candidate ✅ Why raw impact numbers matter less than being able to explain why a UX design decision was made and what it actually changed ✅ Whether portfolio format (website, deck, or PDF) matters, and what actually causes friction for a reviewer regardless of format Links & Resources 🔗 Connect with Jared Tredly on LinkedIn 🔗 Explore open design roles at Shopify 🎯 How I can help with your UX job search 📋 Get my UX case study template 👋 Follow me, on LinkedIn , Instagram , & YouTube




