Why You Need a Creative Online Resume Website

Are you looking for a position with a new company or looking to collaborate on big projects as a specialist? You’re going to need a resume!

To stand out in today’s marketplace with a memorable first impression, you’ll need a resume website.

A whole website just for your resume? Yes.

A Resume Website

If you’re a creative working in one of the many (and expanding) digital fields such as web design, graphic design, web development, coding, animation, photography, or music production, among many others, then the necessity of an online resume should be pretty self-evident. You can’t form part of the digital workplace without a digital identity card. That would be like a journalist trying to gain backstage access to an exclusive event without a press pass—not going to happen!

Web resumes, however, haven’t quite substituted a traditional paper resumes (yet!), and it’s important to understand their use and role in today’s marketplace so you can select the right resume website service for your needs.

Web resumes are versatile tools that can serve many purposes:

1. Showcase Your Work

To begin with, you can place the link to your online website on your regular resume that most employers ask for. But not to showcase the same resume in HTML format rather than Word or PDF. That would be pointless. The reason to add the link to your resume website would be to showcase things you can’t show on your regular resume.

For example, if you’re a web developer, web designer, or video editor, you can’t really showcase your work on a traditional resume. But on your online resume you can include screenshots, live links to websites, and even videos you created for easy and direct access.

2. A Stand-Alone Addition to Traditional Resume

There are, moreover, employers who’ve already started requesting that applicants submit online resumes. That means your resume website shouldn’t simply be an addition or an afterthought to your “regular” resume. It should be a stand-alone piece containing all the information that a proper and complete resume needs to convey in order to get you hired.

3. Control What Employers See When They Google You

But there’s an even more important reason why you need to create a resume website today. And it’s called Google. What do you think is the first thing a future employer or an HR manager will do once your name makes it passed the first slush pile of resumes and into the shortlisted candidates? Google you, of course! 

And no, they won’t (simply) be looking to see if you've got any “inappropriate” photos on social media, or if your name comes up in relation to any suspicious activity. They’ll be mostly looking to get a glimpse of you—trying to better understand who you are and what you do and whether you may be a good fit for their company culture.

But letting the fragmented representation of yourself on social media and other online resource do the talking means taking a big risk. Because that haphazard pastiche of yourself that Google turns up probably doesn’t correspond to the real and professional you. The best thing you can do, instead, is taking things into your own hands by creating a creative resume website for yourself containing all the right information in one place.

Watch this video. Create your own online resume website here.

culled from business.tutsplus.com