How to Land an Interview with Your Interior Design CV

What Do Interior Designers Hate Most About Job Hunting?

Who You Need to Impress with Your Interior Design CV

To get a different response when you send in your application, you need to change your CV and portfolio. Before you do this, it’s important you understand who in the recruitment process you need to impress.

And your interior design job application needs to impress them both. More importantly, you need to impress Recruiters and Hiring Managers in different ways.

What Interiors Industry Recruiters Do and How to Wow Them

1. Realise that Recruiters spend 8-10 seconds on an interior design CV (yes, that’s 8-10 seconds!). So make it short; 2 pages is good.
2. Because they spend so little time on each application, they skim-read your interior design CV. Put another way, they conduct a keyword search.
3. The keywords they look for include technical requirements. To give you an idea, software such as CAD. Or interior design abilities such as space planning.
4. Keywords include professional requirements. For example, collaboration. And team working.
5. Most importantly, Recruiters include the keywords they want in the interior design job advert. So change the abilities you show in your CV to match the job advert keywords.
6. Next, Recruiters are impressed by what you’ve achieved. So tell them that. Not what your previous job responsibilities were.
7. Finally, use short, punchy sentences to show them you have what the job demands. By this I mean, describe in less than 20 words how you achieved an outcome with keywords. To illustrate with keywords shown in bold, ‘Presented an innovative range of mood boards to persuade an indecisive client to enter next design process phase’

Accomplish this, and your interior design CV and portfolio will be on its way to the Hiring Manager. But how to grab their attention?

Interior Design Hiring Managers: How To Grab Their Attention

1. Recognise less is more. In other words, a 10-page portfolio is more likely to impress (and be read!) than a 40-page one.
2. As such, limit your portfolio to 3 or 4 relevant projects. And each project to 2 or 3 pages.
3. Remember the interior design portfolio’s purpose is to highlight your abilities. Not to describe your entire professional experience.
4. Use each project in your interior design portfolio to tell a story. For instance, what inspired your concept design. Or how your renders helped a client visualise a project outcome. And include keywords from the advert in your stories.
5. Your interior design portfolio needs to show your capability across the design process. Concepts, sketches, CAD drawings, renders, etc.
6. But, and it’s a big ‘but’, that’s different from detailing the entire design process for each project. Instead, focus each project on a couple of different aspects of the design process.
7. Almost finally, you’re an interior designer hoping to impress another interior designer. As such, aesthetics really, really matter. So choose great images, use a well-thought through colour palette.
8. Even though Hiring Managers don’t spend much time on them, they notice if your interior design CV and portfolio don’t match. Not least, visually. So keep your colour scheme, font choices, etc consistent.

In summary, that’s how to land an interview with your interior design CV and portfolio. But as with all things in interior design, details matter.

How To Nail The Details and Land an Interior Design Interview