Professional portfolios are becoming a more visible part of career presentation. In a 2023 Canva survey, 65% of hiring managers preferred receiving digital portfolios, while 86% said a candidate’s digital professional brand influenced hiring. A separate 2024 Canva survey found that 72% preferred candidates who presented a portfolio through a website, presentation, or social-media page. These figures describe survey responses, not a universal hiring rule, but they show why portfolio strategy matters in personal branding and career development.
Contents
- Hiring-manager demand for digital portfolios
- What job seekers put in portfolios
- Visual and interactive formats
- Personal-brand and portfolio-tool adoption
- How employers evaluate work samples
- Online and early-career recruiting
Hiring-manager demand for digital portfolios
Digital portfolio preferences were already substantial in Canva’s 2023 survey. Sixty-five percent of hiring managers preferred receiving digital portfolios, and 37% said digital portfolios had become much more common during the preceding year. The same survey reported that 86% considered a candidate’s digital professional brand influential in hiring.
These results come from Canva’s 2023 survey, published in January 2024, and should be read as reported survey findings across global markets. They indicate that the portfolio is not only a place to store work. It can also act as a public expression of a candidate’s professional identity, positioning, and communication style. Source: Canva, “New year, new job? Here’s Canva’s template for success”.
The later Canva survey points in the same direction. In its 2024 survey, published in January 2025, 72% of hiring managers preferred candidates who presented a portfolio through a website, presentation, or social-media page. The survey also found that 35% of job seekers were already using portfolios to stand out. The employer preference and job-seeker adoption figures are not identical measures, but together they show a gap worth noticing: portfolio presentation was preferred by a larger share of hiring managers than the share of job seekers reporting that they used portfolios to differentiate themselves.
| Measure | Reported share | Measurement period |
|---|---|---|
| Hiring managers preferring digital portfolios | 65% | Canva 2023 survey |
| Hiring managers saying digital portfolios became much more common | 37% | Canva 2023 survey |
| Hiring managers influenced by digital professional brand | 86% | Canva 2023 survey |
| Hiring managers preferring a website, presentation, or social-media portfolio | 72% | Canva 2024 survey |
| Job seekers already using portfolios to stand out | 35% | Canva 2024 survey |
Source: Canva’s 2023 survey and Canva’s 2024 survey.
What job seekers put in portfolios
The 2023 Canva survey shows that professional portfolios commonly combine conventional career documents with broader personal-brand assets. Resumes were the most frequently reported item, included by 71% of job seekers. LinkedIn profiles followed at 61%, while 45% included bios and 42% included professional websites.
The remaining portfolio elements were more visual or project-oriented. Original photography appeared in 35% of job seekers’ digital portfolios, video resumes in 33%, and imagery in 32%. Creative campaigns were included by 27%, while 24% included Twitter profiles. These categories overlap: a portfolio can contain several of them, so the percentages should not be added together.
The pattern suggests that adoption is not limited to creative occupations. The resume and LinkedIn profile provide recognizable professional context, while the bio, website, images, campaigns, and video can show voice, judgment, execution, or communication. For a personal brand, the practical implication is that a portfolio can connect evidence of work with the story surrounding that work.
All figures in this section are from Canva’s 2023 survey, published in January 2024. Source: Canva, “New year, new job? Here’s Canva’s template for success”.
Visual and interactive formats
Hiring-manager preferences in the 2023 Canva survey extended beyond plain text. Fifty-seven percent preferred resumes with visual elements such as images and graphics. Fifty-five percent liked interactive, clickable content and color in resumes. At the same time, 39% said their biggest resume grievance was excessive text.
The 2024 Canva survey reported a similar preference for richer presentation. Sixty-five percent of hiring managers preferred resumes with interactive features such as clickable links or embedded videos. Sixty-two percent preferred colorful resumes over black-and-white resumes, and 50% favored video cover letters.
These statistics do not establish that every portfolio should be highly designed or animated. They do establish that visual hierarchy and usable links were common preferences among the surveyed hiring managers. A portfolio can therefore make its evidence easier to inspect by pairing concise explanations with relevant images, project links, or embedded media.
Canva’s 2024 Visual Economy Report adds two broader employer-side figures. Eighty-nine percent of surveyed HR leaders said visuals in recruitment shortened hiring cycles. Ninety-two percent of surveyed business leaders expected non-design employees to have at least some design acumen to communicate effectively. These are report findings for 2024, not forecasts of every employer’s process. Source: Canva’s Visual Economy Report 2024.
Personal-brand and portfolio-tool adoption
Resume creation and portfolio presentation increasingly overlap with AI-assisted design. In Canva’s 2023 survey, 45% of job seekers said they had used generative AI to build, update, or improve their resumes. Among those users, 71% said AI made the resume-building experience easier, 68% said it saved time, 65% said it made them feel more creative, and 61% said it made them feel more original.
Appearance satisfaction also differed between the groups: 56% of AI users were very satisfied with their resume’s appearance, compared with 33% of non-users. These are self-reported survey comparisons and do not show that AI caused the difference.
Canva reported two platform-use figures for 2023: Magic Write was used 5 million times in resume-template designs, and Canva portfolio templates were used 900 million times by its community. Those counts describe usage on Canva and are not estimates of the number of unique portfolios or job seekers.
In Canva’s 2024 survey, 57% of job seekers said they used AI to create their resumes. Ninety-six percent of candidates who used AI in their applications received interview callbacks, according to the survey. This is an association reported by the survey, not evidence that AI use guarantees an interview. Seventy-three percent of hiring managers believed candidates should disclose generative-AI use in application materials.
The Visual Economy Report also found that 82% of surveyed business leaders had used AI-powered tools to produce visual content during the prior year, while 73% were investing more in visual-communication platforms than in the previous year. More than 1.7 million people listed Canva as a core skill on their LinkedIn profiles. Source: Canva’s 2023 survey, Canva’s 2024 survey, and Canva’s Visual Economy Report 2024.
How employers evaluate work samples
Historical LinkedIn research provides useful context for interpreting portfolio adoption. In a 2014 survey of 515 small-business owners and operators, 58% ranked resumes as their preferred screening input, while 17% ranked work samples as their preferred input. The same research reported that 73% considered resumes and work samples the most important screening tools. Fifty-seven percent ranked the resume first in importance among six candidate-information types.
Online presence was less dominant in that historical benchmark: 9% considered it the most important source of candidate insight. Still, 73% considered a candidate’s LinkedIn presence more valuable in hiring than profiles on other sites, and 57% of candidates were comfortable sharing information on professional sites such as LinkedIn.
The study also measured the role of experience. Eighty-seven percent of surveyed small businesses considered functional work experience important when screening candidates, and 50% considered past employers important. These measures help explain why a portfolio works best when it supports claims made in a resume rather than replacing basic evidence of relevant experience.
Because this research was conducted in 2014, its figures are historical benchmarks, not current adoption rates. Source: LinkedIn, “Insights Into How Small Businesses Hire”.
Online and early-career recruiting
The same 2014 LinkedIn survey described an online recruiting environment in which small businesses frequently used digital channels. Eighty percent of surveyed small businesses hired graduates, but only 12% had formal graduate-recruiting programs. Sixty-four percent used online job postings to find candidates, and 49% cited online channels as a successful source of hire.
Candidate behavior also showed active online research. Twenty-nine percent of LinkedIn professionals had explored a position with a different company during the prior month. Forty-six percent had updated their LinkedIn profile or resume during that month. Sixty percent of candidates used LinkedIn to research companies, while 51% used it to view profiles of employees at companies they considered.
For early-career candidates, these figures support a portfolio approach that connects a resume, profile, and selected work. The data does not quantify how many graduates had portfolios, and it does not show that a portfolio was required. It does show that online job discovery, employer research, and profile maintenance were already connected behaviors in the 2014 benchmark.
Taken together with the newer Canva findings, the evidence describes a shift in emphasis rather than a single adoption rate. The historical LinkedIn research placed resumes and experience at the center of small-business screening. The newer Canva surveys measured stronger interest in digital portfolios, visual presentation, interactive features, and digital professional brands. For a personal brand, the portfolio’s role is to make relevant work easier to understand while keeping the underlying career evidence clear.
Source: LinkedIn, “Insights Into How Small Businesses Hire”.