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What are your thoughts on using a website/blog as a resume?
Like the title says, I'm curious if anyone has experience encountering digital resumes. Whether you're an employer or you've used a digital resume yourself how well did it work? Were you more likely to hire a candidate because they had a well-rounded website that showed off their skills or was it an immediate discard because it didn't conform to normal practices.
I'm graduating with my MS in organic chemistry this May, and I'm trying to work my way in the job market. A website/blog sounds appealing to me because I can show off data annotations and analyses from failed reactions that normally aren't discussed in papers, so I think it would be a good fit.
I'm a privacy enthusiast, so I would never do anything like this because it exposes far too much of my life to the entire world. I begrudgingly created a LinkedIn on the advice of a recruiter, but I regretted it and soon deleted it. I didn't have to submit a resume for the web dev job I'm about to (hopefully!) get, but that's because I've got a connection. However, I do have a normal resume (written in markdown, which I highly recommend) and a GitHub profile. Perhaps consider GitHub for your scientific research. If you wanted to go the GitHub route, you could also upload a markdown resume there. GitHub also allows for you to create a static site with Jekyll, if you did indeed wanted to do that.
The purpose of a resume is to obtain a phone interview.
A website won't help you, and it hopefully won't hurt you either.
Think of it from the perspective of the hiring manager.
You or HR have to sift through 100-1,000 resumes.
When I am reviewing resumes, I read the job titles/ companies/ dates. If that looks interesting, I might read a paragraph or two. If that sounds interesting, I will read the entire resume. If that is interesting, I will email the candidate. I wont even look at LinkedIn until I have talked to them, there is too much variability.
And when I sent out my resume, the same was true of hiring managers who looked at my resume. I know because I have had a personal domain name on my resume for years now, and it tracks who clicks on it (almost no one, that is who.)
All the best.
I did this years ago. Just a sleek HTML/CSS page to handle layout and add some color that I could print to PDF and submit wherever.
A few months later, I was quite emphatically told by someone I know who has worked as a senior tech recruiter for decades that it wasn’t a good idea and would only hurt me. His advice was to go with plain black and white on color, with basic MS word formatting. While I didn’t keep detailed stats, I did see a dramatic uptick in the number of callbacks that was quite noticeable.
These days, I occasionally screen a few resumes myself - and let me tell you, he was right. I’ve never seen any resume styling that made me like a candidate more. The content is what counts; keep the document simple and you’ll have the best results.
As somebody in the web development industry, it’s pretty standard for me. Mine is my blog + links to websites I’ve worked on. I didn’t even write the blog engine or theme, and the blog is not about my work, but it has worked well. I’ve always put simplicity and accessibility over “unique,” which you may want to keep in mind.
I don’t see harm it in, but I would also caution how much effect it will have. If you were a very senior position (and therefore worth a very in depth talent search) or if it was a smaller company, it could help.
But the reality is that on average, recruiters spend about 6 seconds on the pdf resume you send in - certainly not enough to click on links.
Additionally, recruiters are not technical.
Occasionally I do interviews as an IC, but by the time your resume gets to my eyes, you’re already well in the pipeline and my feedback will be mostly on what happens in the interview itself. The recruiter who processed the application up to the point where it got to me, will have no idea what your graphs and diagrams mean.
So feel free to do it, it can be fun and if you ever want to show off your work in general it’s nice to have, but I would not expect much uplift in raw applications.
I created a website for my personal work, which serves as a resume.
I work in the creative field, so when you apply for a job, they want examples of your work. Being able to just point them to a website that has all of your work is a big plus. In addition, the site itself can also serve as a great example of your work if you want to put the effort in.
I would also say that there's really no negative consequence of having your resume as a website. The only thing you lose is the time to create the site and the minuscule amount of money that hosting would cost.
I'm guessing that for a hard science field, 99% of employers are just going to want you to put your resume into a field on their website and it will get processed by automated software. But if you make it through that first round, have a website that shows off those extras that you mentioned might make you stand out.
I built my resume as a website, just because it was the only sane way to be sure I had consistent styling/formatting for everything. It just looks like a normal resume, but available at a URL. I link recruiters / hiring managers to it, but I'm not sure anyone's visited. So mostly I just print to PDF.
It's been a mixed bag. Debugging print styles is awkward, and some online application portals demand a Word doc, but that's uncommon. But restyling is super easy, and my content is just a data structure that's trivial to make large changes to. I can also trim/truncate/drop job entries without fear, because git has the old stuff if I need it.
Lots of job pipelines assume you have a PDF resume, so you'll likely need that in addition to your snazzy website. And this assumption raises the chance that your website won't be seen.
I've been on the hiring side a number of times. It's uncommon for a candidate to have a website, but it's also unusual for a candidate's website to show anything notable enough to affect the decision. On most of my teams, nobody but me put any weight on enthusiast signals. This likely varies widely across teams.
The more strongly your website makes a statement, the more polarizing it becomes during hiring. That's something you can use to self-select for environments you want to be in. For example, a recent submission to Hacker News is exactly the kind of thing that will resonate strongly with some hiring managers and make them fall all over themselves trying to hire you. But for many managers, it's either taken as a neutral signal, or a sign that you don't understand "professional" environments since you submitted a game during a job application.
On the other hand, a humdrum website with unremarkable blog posts is likely to carry no weight at all during hiring.