Your personal resume website is a digital version of the traditional paper resume. It shows your education, skills, and previous positions or projects you’ve worked on. … It allows you to display photos and images of your projects or share links to articles you’ve written or had published.
These days, creating a personal website is pretty easy. You don’t need to know about web hosting or code—the newest kids on the block are hosted profile pages with templates you can fill in with photos, links, and text about yourself. You don’t even have to have tons of content for subpages—just one landing page is all you need to stake out your spot on the web.
1. You Control Your Branding
Most personal website services allow you to customize everything from background photos to fonts and text placement—so, unlike LinkedIn’s uniform profile, your personality and brand can shine through. When someone finds you, they’ll have an instant, visual representation of who you are. (A couple ofmy faves: product designer Liang Shi and marketing strategist Lindsay
Kaplan.)
2. It’s an Instant Portfolio
People are visual, so the more you can show (rather than tell), the better. Your resume may say that you “built a company blog following of 15,000 engaged readers,” but with your personal site, you can take someone straight to the blog and show why it’s so engaging and what sets your work apart. By featuring work samples, sites you’ve worked on, articles you’ve written,
whatever, your personal homepage can act as a digital portfolio of your online work and identity.
3. You Point Recruiters in the Right Direction
Though only 40% of companies use social media as part of their screening process, many more use it informally (and in my experience, hiring managers and interviewers who may not be on the HR side usually do their own research, too). So consider this: If a recruiter sees your resume and tries to find you on LinkedIn or Facebook, you could get lost among the other professionals who share your name. But if you have a personal website aggregating your various networks (and put that URL on your resume), you take all the guesswork out of finding you.
How to Get Started?
Convinced? There are plenty of easy (and free) services you can use to put up a quick profile, such as About.me, Flavors.me, DooID , and Zerply . Some of these sites allow you to create subpages or pull in your social media feeds, while About.me is a great choice if you just need a basic landing page. By and large, your URL will be the website name + your username (for example, about.me/davidklee), though most services will let you point a custom domain (i.e., yourname.com) to your profile.
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