Portfolio and Work Sample Curation for Applications

Portfolio and work sample curation for applications is the strategic process of selecting, framing, and presenting past work artifacts — reports, designs, campaigns, code, writing — so they directly address the competencies and concerns of a specific employer. It goes beyond simply having a portfolio by tailoring which samples you lead with and how you contextualize them for each opportunity.

A poorly curated portfolio can actually hurt a candidacy by showcasing irrelevant work or failing to explain impact — but most professionals don't know how to match their samples to job requirements without extensive experience in that industry. AI can analyze job descriptions and recommend which existing samples to highlight and how to write the framing narrative around each one.

How to apply it

List your available work samples in a message to Claude with brief descriptions of each, then paste in a target job description. Prompt: 'Given these work samples and this job description, recommend which three samples I should lead with, explain why each one is relevant to the employer's priorities, and draft a two-sentence contextualizing caption for each sample that connects it to the job requirements.' Use the output directly in your portfolio introduction or when emailing samples to a hiring manager.