Your Résumé, for All to See

By PATRICIA R. OLSEN

YOU think you have a serviceable résumé. Maybe you have worked with a professional résumé writer, or at least have had someone read it over and give you feedback. But you still haven’t gotten a new job. Should you start a Web site, solely for job hunting, that features your résumé?

 Maybe — or maybe not. If you are currently employed, be very wary about setting up a Web site that announces you are job hunting. If your employer happens to find out about it, you could be dismissed, says Kim Isaacs, director of ResumePower, a résumé-writing service in Doylestown, Pa.


To some job seekers, a profile on LinkedIn, the business social networking site, is the only Web presence they need.


Jeff Neil, a career counselor and owner of Be Your Best Coaching in Manhattan, says LinkedIn is “the primary source for employers looking for candidates online, and a fabulous way for most job seekers to inform colleagues and potential employers that they’re job hunting.”


But LinkedIn has limitations for job seekers, Mr. Neil says, including limited space and a rigid format for listing past jobs.


“So setting up a Web site strictly for job hunting,” he says, “can be an especially good idea for consultants and people in creative fields like advertising who want to describe numerous projects they’ve worked on.”


Even if you’re not in a creative field, the résumé you post on your job-hunting site should be different from the one you might hand to a manager during an interview, says Ms. Isaacs, who is also the résumé expert for Monster.com. “You still want short bits of information, where you get to the key points quickly, but you can create a multipage, online portfolio on the Web and include case studies, a page of references, and testimonials,” she says.


It’s also a good idea to provide your résumé in several formats, including Microsoft Word, ASCII text and a PDF file, Ms. Isaacs says. “Companies have different applicant-tracking systems,” she says, “so you want to accommodate various requirements and give prospective employers the option to choose how they want to download your résumé.”


When posting your résumé, be more cautious about privacy than you would if you were submitting it to an interviewer. More job hunters are omitting their street address and city these days, Ms. Isaacs says. Some list a post office box for privacy and use a Google Voice phone number, in part to keep their actual phone number private.


“I’ve heard of an employer Googling a candidate’s address before deciding whether to interview the person,” she says. “You don’t know what a hiring manager might deduce from a street location, and it might just take two clicks to find that information.”


Richard Deosingh, a regional vice president of the staffing firm Robert Half International, suggests making your e-mail address or a phone number easily accessible.” Put it on every page of your Web site; don’t make a recruiter work to find it,” he says. He also advises including a brief biography and updating your site regularly.


When he wanted to change jobs last June, Jared Kreiner, a public relations account supervisor in New York, designed his own job-hunting site, www.jaredkreiner.com. Shortly afterward, a former colleague who was about to leave the public relations firm G. S. Schwartz & Company recommended Mr. Kreiner to her manager as a possibility to replace her — and mentioned his Web site.


“I think my site helped me get the job,” Mr. Kreiner says. He removed his résumé when he started work, but reposted it when he was laid off last December because of cost cuts. He is now actively promoting the site.


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