Why Your Portfolio Project Isn't Getting Callbacks

It's almost never that a recruiter thinks your tech stack is wrong. It's usually that they can't quickly tell what the project does, why you built it, and what was hard about it — because that's all they're actually scanning for in the thirty seconds they spend on your GitHub link.

The five gaps we see most often: no live deployed link (a screenshot is not the same as a working demo), a README that lists tech but not decisions, no mention of what you'd do differently now, commit history that's a single 'final commit', and no tests or error handling visible anywhere in the code.

None of these take long to fix, and fixing them changes how the same project reads entirely. A deployed link with a two-paragraph 'why I built this and what I'd improve' section does more work than adding a fourth framework to the stack.

We review every student's portfolio against this exact checklist before placement drives begin — it's a fifteen-minute fix that changes a real number of callbacks.