5 Reasons Why You Should Have a Resume Website

Sep 21, 2022

When you say or read the word “resume”, chances are the majority of people’s minds jump to the idea of physical paper resumes or digital PDF files as resumes. But what if your resume wasn’t a sheet of paper or a PDF file, but instead, was a unique and functioning website? While it may sound radical at first, you’ll come to find more advantages in it as you think about it more. Not entirely sure if a resume website is for you yet? Here are 5 reasons why you should consider having a resume website.

In this article, we’ll be covering:

1. Make Strong and Unique First Impressions

Practically everyone on the hunt for a job has paper and/or PDF resumes at the ready for their potential employers to see. When everyone’s resumes cover the same topics and look similar if not practically the same, how can you stand out from your competitors? The answer lies in having a unique standout resume, such as one that takes the form of a website. When your website acts as your introduction statement, sales pitch, and demonstration of competence, rather than just a one or double-sided piece of paper or PDF, you immediately make a stronger and more memorable impression on potential employers and interested parties.

For example, a hiring manager may be looking through hundreds of job applicants who’ve all submitted typical PDF resumes. After looking at countless resumes, the sights of a typical resume start to blend together in his mind from all of them looking and being formatted so similarly, making it difficult for any of the candidates to really stand out and define themselves. When he reaches your resume which links him to your resume site, however, his interest is immediately piqued by your more standout and unique approach to demonstrating your competence for a job, and after browsing your well-constructed resume site, he’s impressed by your work and adds you to the list of applicants who will receive replies inviting them to an interview for the position. With a resume site, you can stand out from the competition by having a bigger and more memorable canvas upon which you demonstrate your abilities and fitness in your industry or field of work. 44% of hiring managers want to see how creative and unique a candidate can be. This only makes it more important for you to have a resume website that sets you apart from your competition and proves your competence and creative originality to those who view it.

How can you link your employer to your website so that they can see your resume site? I’d suggest you prepare and submit a well-done standard paper/PDF resume as usual, since that’s what a lot of employers expect from job applicants, then include a link/URL to your resume site at the bottom of the resume, not in an overbearingly large font size but not in a small easy-to-miss font size either. Additionally, include your website link on your LinkedIn bio, so that anyone interested in your LinkedIn will also be able to find your resume site. This is so that its readers can know there’s more to you than just the typical resume they’re reading now, and those that have the interest and initiative to take a look at your site won’t be disappointed by what you’ve built for them to see.

2. Sharing and Usage Efficiency

With a resume site, sharing your content-packed resume with others is as simple as sending them a link for them to click on. In comparison, typical PDF resumes need you to send your file to another individual, and even with this file shared, the amount of content that can be shared at once with interested parties, and thus your ability to wow them with what you can do, pales in comparison to what a site can offer. The same can be said for paper resumes, where sharing a piece of paper as your resume needs you to physically give the resume to interested parties. With the convenience, ease, and amount of content that having and sharing a resume site offers you as a job applicant, it’s a no-brainer to have a resume site that you can share with your potential employers. For example, let’s say you’re at a job fair and you meet a representative for a company currently hiring for positions that might be suitable for you. After talking with him for a few minutes, this representative wants to see your resume on the spot while you two are still conversing. If you had a PDF resume, you’d need to access and send your resume to him while still speaking with him, which could impact the flow and natural feeling of your conversations so far, or you’d need to find a way to send him the file later once you can access your PDF resume that’s stored in your home computer’s files. If you had a paper resume with you that day, you’d be able to show him, but he might not be able to keep it to refer to later, since you’d need to keep it to show other potential employers that are also at the job fair. If you had a resume site, you could simply write down the URL for him to access and stay on your resume, or if he had a computer with him, he would be able to access the site immediately to get an even stronger impression of your fitness for his company.

3. Easily Update and Manage Resume Content

Depending on how you’ve made your resumes in the past, you might find that there are some disadvantages typical paper/PDF resumes face that a resume website on the other hand doesn’t. Simply put, the way typical resumes are made, shared, and used don’t lend themselves to being altered and managed quite as easily as a resume website does. For example, once a paper resume is printed out and dropped off at its destination, there’s no way for you to change it even if you realize you should’ve added some more content to it, or realized you made a typo somewhere on it. As for PDF resumes, if you need to tweak the resume, that renders any of your currently saved PDFs of your resume useless, since it’s no longer updated to the newest tweaked version of itself. For resume websites, you have the freedom to change your content at any time, with immediate updates going through and there being no need for you to change things like the link that people access your site through, which eliminates problems similar to the aforementioned examples. As an example, let’s say you’re a student nearing graduation that’s applying for a job which wants you to send in your resume, which, along with other content, details your education history. At this time in your academic career, you’re actually about to graduate, and are just waiting for confirmation from your university that you’ve met all your graduation requirements and are officially confirmed to have graduated. At this time, though, you haven’t received confirmation just yet, but you also need to send in your resume as soon as possible to the job. If you were sending in only a typical paper/PDF resume, your resume, which would list you as a future grad but not one who’s completed their education and is already eligible, would unfortunately be inaccurate once you receive official confirmation from your university that you’re able to formally graduate. However, if you were to also include your resume website in your application, you would have a location that you can update with new information at any time for anyone to see. With your resume website, all you’d need to do once you receive official confirmation of your graduation eligibility would be to change a small section or two on your site, and you’ll now have an updated resume that accurately reflects your situation and can contribute to your appeal as a potential hire.

4. Convenient Access and Saving

With typical paper/PDF resumes, chances are that accessing them quickly might take you a brief period of time, or might take a few more quick but cumbersome steps. No matter if your resume is hosted in a cloud storage system like Google Drive, or if it’s a file you need to dig through your computer files looking for, access to your resume might not come as quickly and easily as some potential employers of yours would like it to. With a resume site, this medium of hosting your resume can be accessed in as little time as it takes to type in a URL. Having a resume site makes your content-packed resume available anytime, anywhere as long as someone has an internet connection, which grows increasingly more widespread and affordable around the world every day. You won’t need to worry about getting access into your cloud storage account, or digging through your files, to be able to send a resume to people like recruiters and hirers at a moment’s notice.

For example, let’s say a potential employer finds your profile on somewhere like LinkedIn and wants to learn more about you, but is in a different timezone from you and thus you aren’t immediately available to respond to their inquiry message that they’ve sent to you. They could almost immediately find your resume site that’s linked on the platform they found you on and proceed to learn all they could want to know about you from there, which is undoubtedly more impressive of an introduction about you as a potential hire than a typical PDF resume is. There’s no need for you to do much with helping or allowing these potential employers to access your resume site: simply leave the link to your site in a visible place and it should be openly visible to those who click or enter the link.

5. Put Yourself on (New!) People’s Maps

By having not just a typical PDF and/or paper resume, but having a resume site, you put yourself on the maps of many people and groups that you otherwise wouldn’t have been known to. Whether it’s through being discovered by a lucky Google search, or it’s because your resume site link was shared to someone who normally wouldn’t have ventured to your site, the number of people who would know of you and consider you for job positions only increases once you create and flesh out a well-made resume site, meaning you have the potential to access positions and opportunities that you otherwise wouldn’t have. For example, let’s say you’ve created a pleasing and fleshed out resume site and have shared your link with employers in the past. A hiring manager at a company who had previously considered you due to your fitness for his company, but ended up giving the position to another more experienced candidate, had left a link to your resume site in a document detailing shortlisted candidates for the position. When another manager at the same company is going through documents looking for potential job candidates for a new position that’s opened up, she comes across the link to your site and is intrigued by it. After arriving at your site, she’s impressed by your site’s maintained quality, your well-made content, and your overall demonstrations of competence, and decides to call you in for an interview for the newly-opened position. Normally, for one reason or another, you might not have been considered for job positions like this, but your resume site allowed you to make a strong impression that helped you become a candidate for what could be a great career opportunity that you’ll benefit from in the short and long term!

Closing Thoughts

After reading this article, are you curious about how to create a resume website or portfolio website after reading about their importance? If you are, take a look at this article which offers an in-depth step by step guide about how to create a resume website/portfolio website. Not sure where to start with creating and running a website? I’d recommend you check out online website builders, which let you construct your own website and all offer different functionalities and features that can really help you along in the website building process. My personal recommendation is the Website.com Site Builder. When you use this website building service, you can take advantage of their easy-to-use drag-and-drop site building process, which gives you great customizability and flexibility with what you create on their site. Their elements and functionality are designed to enable you to create presentable and professional-looking sites, which is why I’ve found them great to use. Additionally, their in-browser site builder allows for you to edit both the desktop and mobile version of your site concurrently in the same session, so you can finetune your desktop version while also ensuring your site’s mobile version is presentable. This can save you a lot of time and hassle, which is why I recommend this site builder to those looking to create a presentable professional website with convenience and accessibility in mind.