What Should Be on a Personal Website for Job Searching?

Why a personal site helps a job search specifically

Recruiters and hiring managers search candidates' names as a routine step. What they find in the first minute frames the interview before it happens. A personal site works because it's the one result written by you, in full sentences, on your own domain — it answers “who is this person and what do they do?” in your framing instead of a broker's data merge or a namesake's story. It also quietly solves the confusion problem: a site that states your city and field separates you from everyone sharing your name.

The headline: one line that does three jobs

Your headline should carry your name, your profession, and your place — the three facts a searcher (and a search engine) uses to confirm they found the right person. “Jordan Rivera — Physical Therapist, Lincoln, NE” does more work than any clever tagline. In our draft builder, the headline literally comes from an approved bio fact and stays blank until you approve one, which is the right discipline for your own site too: no invented positioning, just your approved truth, up top.

The bio: short, human, verifiable

Three to six sentences: what you do, how long, where, and what you're great at — each claim checkable against your resume. Skip adjectives you'd need a witness for (“visionary,” “world-class”) and keep specifics a hiring manager can repeat in a room. If a sentence would embarrass you read aloud by the interviewer, cut it. Our fact system calls this the bio fact, and it requires your explicit approval because it becomes the most-quoted paragraph about you.

Career, work, and proof

List roles with employers and dates exactly as your resume states them — inconsistency between your site, resume, and LinkedIn is the kind of small crack that makes screeners suspicious. Then add proof: projects, publications, talks, credentials you're actually credentialed in, community work you're actually part of. Quality over volume; two real projects beat ten padded bullets. Sections with nothing true to put in them should be omitted entirely — an absent section is invisible, a hollow one is evidence.

• Career: roles, employers, dates — identical to your resume.
• Work: 2–5 real projects or pieces with what you actually did.
• Credentials: only licenses and certifications you currently hold.
• Community: volunteering and associations you're genuinely part of.

Links and contact: make verification easy

Link the profiles a recruiter will look for anyway — LinkedIn first — and let those profiles link back. That mutual linking (structured as sameAs data on your site) tells search engines these accounts are one person: you. For contact, use a professional route you're comfortable publishing; a simple form delivered to your email beats posting a personal address or phone number, which people-search brokers will happily harvest.

What to leave off

Leave off anything you marked private in your own judgment: home address, personal phone, family details, salary history, and the hobby you're happy for friends to know and no employer to weigh. Don't publish references' contact details, don't post a resume PDF with your full history of addresses, and don't let a template invent a single line — no generated awards, no borrowed testimonials, no “as featured in” that didn't happen. Our drafts render an explicit held-back list (every fact excluded and why) for this reason: what's absent should be a decision, never an accident.

Before you apply: the 10-minute consistency pass

Search your name once as a stranger would. Does your site appear with the right headline? Do your site, resume, and LinkedIn agree on titles and dates? Is your photo (if you use one) current and consistent? Is anything ranking above your site that you haven't dealt with — a broker listing with a wrong city, a namesake you haven't separated from? That pass, repeated when anything changes, is most of job-search reputation hygiene; our weekly update exists to do this watching for you, but the habit is free.

One page or a small site?

For most job seekers, one excellent page beats a sprawling site: headline, bio, career, selected work, links, contact — everything a screener needs in one scroll, on your own domain, kept current. Add pages only when they earn their keep: a projects page when you have projects with detail worth showing, a writing or talks page when you actually write or speak. Every extra page is a maintenance debt and a consistency risk; a thin, stale subpage argues against the professionalism the homepage claims. Our drafts start from exactly this discipline — sections render only from approved facts, empty sections are omitted rather than padded, and the held-back list keeps your private facts visibly private.

Finally, treat the site as a living interview answer. When your role, city, or credential changes, update the site, the resume, and the headline profile in the same sitting, before the search results drift into three versions of you. Consistency maintained in minutes is the cheapest reputation management there is.

What recruiters actually do with it

Picture the screener with forty tabs open. Your site's job is not to dazzle; it is to confirm, in under a minute, that the person in the resume is the person in the results: same name, same city, same work, links that check out, work that exists. Every friction you remove — a namesake they might confuse you with, an outdated title they must reconcile, a broker listing contradicting your location — is a small reason you stay in the pile instead of being set aside for someone easier to verify. That is an unglamorous theory of hiring, and it matches how screening actually feels from the inside: clarity is a competitive advantage precisely because so few candidates provide it.

How we build it with you

In our flow, your job-search site isn't written at you: confirmed results suggest facts, you approve or edit each one, and the draft renders only approved facts with the held-back list beside it. You review the draft — bannered DRAFT, visible only to you — and publishing is a separate explicit approval in a later step, never a surprise. Domain included in every plan; the draft comes first so you can see yourself clearly before the world does.