The Visibility Gap

A few weeks ago, a designer I coach was at an event talking with someone about her work. Their reaction was, “This is much better than a lot of the portfolios I've seen.”

She told me she hears this a lot. She also told me she's still struggling to land interviews. She's not unusual. Good work going unseen has quietly become the new norm.

The job market has changed in many ways that people haven’t fully adjusted to yet. AI has made it drastically easier to apply for roles. You can tailor a resume, generate a cover letter, rewrite your LinkedIn profile, and submit dozens of applications all in a day's work. 

Every company's inbound pipeline is flooded with them, and the real problem isn't just the volume. It's that most of those applications now look the same, built with the same tools, the same prompts, often trained on the same data. 

It’s Where’s Waldo for every applicant pool, and recruiters and hiring managers are more overwhelmed than ever.

That's the visibility gap: the distance between how good your work is and how many people who'd actually value it ever encounter it. You close the quality gap by having better materials. In a noisy market like this, you close the visibility gap by getting seen.

So we shifted our focus to getting her portfolio directly in front of more people. She reached out to a dozen people weekly. Went to industry events and networked. Followed up instead of letting a conversation end at one call. Posted her own work on LinkedIn. Applied to more roles without over-customizing each one.

At one point I reminded her that awareness, not perfection, was the bottleneck. That meant not optimizing her materials for every single role. If it wasn't a strong fit for what she already had, it likely wasn't worth the extra time. Five strong-match applications beat one perfect one.

Applications were still the noisiest channel she was using. Every other candidate is throwing their resume into the same pool, competing against the same AI screening algorithm. The other channels she'd added, direct messages, emails, events, her own posts, were quieter, more personal, and less competitive. 

Within a few weeks of leaning into the other outbound channels, she went from a couple of conversations a month to several a week. Not all of them went anywhere. But a few turned into real introductions, and a couple of those turned into interviews, more than her applications alone had produced in months.

None of that came from gaming the ATS or applying to hundreds of roles. It came from more people simply knowing she existed and was looking for her next role. She worked outside the box and networked her way through. Getting your work in front of one real person, even through a single genuine LinkedIn message, still works.

AI has made it easier than ever to produce polished materials. It hasn't made it any easier to earn someone's attention.

Get the materials good enough. Then spend your time creating more chances for the right people to actually see them. 

We often ask "how do I make my portfolio better?" 

The better question is "how do I get twice as many of the right people to see it?"

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