Portfolio framing without hype adjectives

Career week always surfaces the same awkward truth: recruiters skim for receipts. They want repo links, build notes, and a two-minute capture that shows input handling — not a manifesto. We push learners to pair each project card with a constraint sentence: "Shipped under 2 ms audio budget" beats "immersive audio masterpiece." Specificity invites questions you can answer. We also ask for a failure bullet. Not self-deprecation — a single honest trade-off signals maturity. Teams remember the candidate who explained a cut list. None of this replaces networking or timing. It does reduce the number of portfolios that sound interchangeable.