Your resume and a cover letter aren’t the only mediums for conveying your professional value to prospective employers. The proactive job-seekers set up professional resume websites and use them to attract the recruiters and get found online with ease. An attractive personal website allows you to share more information from your professional history and add social proof, giving the employers a breadth of reason to invite you for an interview.
To get noticed in the competitive world of work, career consultants recommend that you accompany a traditional resume with a resume infographic, a video resume or a resume website.
• Why every professional need a personal website in 2020
• How and where to create one (even if you don’t code), and
• How to make your website a powerful marketing tool.
Get a custom resume website created for you
An expertly designed and content-rich professional website can make a world of difference to your job search. If you want a great website created personally for you, contact us. Our resume expert and a web designer will create an attractive website designed uniquely for you. We will highlight your professional background and successes through visuals, graphics and charts.
The benefits of the creation of a personal website for resume
A personal website is not mandatory for your job search. Yet, there are strong reasons why you should consider creating one this year:
• To be one step ahead of others. According to the stats, less than 10% of job-seekers have a personal website. This means that using one will set you apart from your counterparts and will evoke the interest of the hiring person.
• To boost your online visibility. It’s not a secret that over 70% of recruiters look up for candidates online. A perfectly designed and informative website will answer the recruiter’s underlying questions about your breadth of experience, projects you’ve worked on, and what you’ve accomplished.
• To reveal your personality. The only way to show some personality on a resume is to list a few hobbies. A personal website lets you give broader information about your personality type, soft skills, and working style. Recruiters will appreciate the opportunity to see your personal side in the About section or testimonials on your site.
• To show you’re tech-savvy. Any digital and tech skills are a big plus for any industry. The fact that you have a personal website subtly implies that you are a tech-savvy, creative, and ambitious individual who is ready to introduce the innovative methods in the daily work.
Have we convinced you to roll up your sleeves and promote yourself through a brand-new, fancy website? Great! Below, you’ll find the tips on what to include on your personal site and where to create one without any coding skills.
7 Tips for creating a stellar professional website
The structure of your professional website, as a rule, repeats that of a traditional resume. It should contain your photo and contact details, professional and educational history, and skills, with the major difference in adding multimedia, graphic elements and additional information that a traditional resume isn’t suited for. In particular, here’s what your professional website should contain:
- Career summary (or About page)
Unlike your paper resume, a resume website is created with no particular job in mind. Hence, it should give the occasional visitor a clear idea of who you are professionally, what sorts of tasks and projects you excel at, what your strengths are, and where you are headed. Create a block of text on the front page or a separate About page, and craft a 150-200 words message where you would provide the essentials about yourself. This section might be less formal than the Summary section in your resume, yet avoid adding too many personal details. - Your resume in .doc or .pdf format
If the recruiter or HR manager likes your website, they’ll inevitably want to learn more about you, and here’s when a paper resume will come handy. A resume website shouldn’t be text-heavy, so be sure to attach a downloadable traditional resume so that everyone could evaluate your professional background in further details. This tactic keeps you open to attractive offers from recruiters even when you’re not actively job-hunting.
- Portfolio of your most fabulous work
Resume accomplishments sound great, but it’s always best to show, not tell. Be sure to create a section and demonstrate the samples of work you’re proud of. This is especially important for authors, copywriters, graphic designers, programmers and other professionals whose results of work are easy to display. However, if your work doesn’t allow showing tangible results (such as that of a financial consultant or office manager), you can present the outcomes of your work in the form of a case study and explain how your contribution helped the organization achieve their goals. - Links to your web presence
A personal website probably isn’t the only online resource you’re using or are featured in professionally. So, it’s a good idea to use the website to collect links to your professional social media, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and more (provided that those are your business pages and you don’t share personal pictures and content there). Also, add links to your articles published on other resources, any press coverage or interviews with you, and other work-related content. Anything that builds your professional image, proves your professionalism or skills, is worth being mentioned in the Links section.
- Multimedia content
Multimedia content will bring your static resume website to life. Moreover, we are suited to pay more information to images and videos rather than text on the internet, thus, adding graphic content will keep the visitors of your website engaged. What kinds of media content to use? Photos from conferences, charity or professional events, videos of you presenting, teaching or giving a lecture will work great. You might also want to add a career timeline, a chart that graphically presents what you’ve accomplished, and more. However, don’t forget to explain those graphic elements – pictures and graphs without any context won’t give the reader the desired big picture. - Your professional blog
Are you excited about your job and can speak up about your emotions, share insider tips or discuss working situations for hours? Then, add a blog feature to your website and update it regularly (no less than bi-monthly). The blog opens you even more professional opportunities than a website alone – it helps you expand the professional network, proves your expertise and passion about your field, and maybe even become a thought leader in your niche. Blogging itself is a rewarding experience, and can be transformed into your hobby. At the very beginning, writing posts on the topics of your professional interest and sharing them on social media will suffice.
- Add a strong call to action
A call to action isn’t mandatory to your website, but it’s strongly recommended that you have one. Otherwise, your career goals and expectations might not be clear for a visitor who has just found you through Google. If you’re job-hunting, what kind of job are you after? Are you open to volunteering projects, would you like to teach, give lectures or consult on a freelance basis? You might want to add this call to action at the end of the About section, or at the bottom of the front page of your website to encourage the visitor to get in touch with you and discuss possible collaboration once they’ve learned your credentials in detail.
Pro tips on creating a personal website
• Use the text sparingly. Unless you’re in academia or politics, your professional website isn’t meant to be text-heavy. You needn’t copy and paste the entire Work Experience section from your resume neither. Use small paragraphs of text to explain graphic elements and to give a broad idea of your experience, achievements, and skills.
• Be careful with the design. Once you get busy designing your website, it’s easy to get carried away and end up having an overly bright and totally unprofessional design. The best idea is to use calm, reserved colors or to use a color scheme offered by personal website builders (we’ll talk about them below).
• List your skills. In a professional website, you can list all relevant professional skills and even show your level of proficiency in them graphically. For skill-based jobs, the level of proficiency is important, and you will give the recruiter a bigger picture than if you had simply listed skill names.
Resume website for a web developer
Creating of a software developer website has its specifics. Just like with any other website, you need to include a picture, contact information and tell a brief professional story. After that, you are expected to show off your tech skills such as programming languages, frameworks, networks, etc., as well as indicate your level of proficiency in each skill that is essential for the job. Attach the links to your projects on GitHub, Codepen, and other resources. And if you’ve achieved any tangible results, show them as well.
Building a student’s resume website
The biggest challenge with building a student website is the same as that of writing a resume – you lack the professional experience to talk about. If that’s the case with you, focus on your volunteering, internships, and community projects to give the recruiter a big picture of your personality and potential. Take your time to make the website simple to browse and easy on the eye: being tech-savvy is expected from younger candidates. You might also want to add the testimonials from previous employers, professors, or supervisor – social proof is important for professional websites.
Where to create a professional website?
If you don’t have any coding skills, you can still create a good website on your own using the resources below:
• Wix.com offers ready 500+ templates for any kind of website, including professional ones. It allows you to customize an offered template, and will make your newly-created website mobile-friendly.
• Jimdo.com allow the beginners to set up a personal website with no coding knowledge. It offers customizable templates, social media integration, custom domains and also offers you the stat tools to watch your Google rankings.
• Wordpress.com is the most popular platform for creating online websites. Its benefits include variety of themes offered, plugins that can extend functionality of your resume website, and an in-built blog.
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