Second, does it matter to recruiters/hiring managers? (Speaking mostly for junior SWE and college students like me.)
Basically, it lets you control what people see when they Google search your name -- and it can give you a professional non-Gmail email too.
Here is mine: http://danwilhelm.com (Unfortunately, I haven't updated it much since college!)
I think it does matter early in your career, but later on LinkedIn and GitHub suffice.
I recently rebuilt my website to be simpler, and more personal. I don't need to look for work, so I don't need an online resume. I made room for the things I do outside of work instead.
The purpose of the website for me is a combo of few objectives: 1. Write/publish on Azure/Dynamics 365/Power Platform etc., 2. As my one pager profile with links to other side projects, ..above two is already happening, I’m going to work on below soon: 3. To serve as a repository of notes (some call it ‘digital garden’) where I publish excerpts of the best I read/watch and reflections on them 4. To host curations on the topics I’m interested in and on which I’ve collected the useful ways, tips and strategies from various books etc. Eg 1:1 meetings, Consultancy notes, Productivity tools etc
I've had many recruiters reach out to me about jobs over the years who found me via my blog. Much more than from LinkedIn I think. So yeah, a personal website which is relevant to your skills and career can help.
I might show individual pages to people, but it covers diverse topics, (music, maths, art, writing, quotes, movies etc) whatever interests me, so.. I'd need a single-focus site/blog for a particular subject to use professionally. Or just linking to that area of the site would work, I guess.
Sure do. It's a basic blog and my contact details.
> Second, does it matter to recruiters/hiring managers? (Speaking mostly for junior SWE and college students like me.)
It's not critical, but you should get your full name if possible (BobbyRaySmith.com). I track direct hits when I'm job hunting and it's pretty common to get hits from specific cities after an application.
I think it's vital to anyone who wants to do web dev, otherwise I don't think it matters so much for general software development.
And for the second question: I think the answer is YES, because recruiters can see how passionate I am about the technology/industry I work on and what I do in my spare time (side projects!)
I am not on the job market but if I was I would use it to show how I am able to makes things simple, explain them to non technical people and focus on the essential.
I interviewed many people and never once found someone's website on their CV. I didn't try to find personal websites for them, but I did type their names on ohloh.net and github.
As far as I can tell, it has not mattered for hiring managers or recruiters. But I also don't really share it with them. It's not intended to be used for promotion. I'm only planning to write one or two articles a year.
I'm using hashnode but previously tried Hugo. I like hashnode better because it has a bunch of nice features and I still own the content.
But before I get there, I want to validate that this is something that would be actually bring value.
I guess recruiting or hiring managers couldn't care less about my site.
Open source, hosted on GitHub pages
Looking for suggestion to improve
Mostly collection of my past project works.
the games up there are almost all scratched projects and I don't know if the links will work, but i still like the icons i drew for them so still haven't took them off yet. try click the flower!
here is a pre alpha, I just started so yeah its not very good
As for hiring manager, don't think it is too valuable. But it is not so difficult to build the one on Wix, Squarespace, or Tilda. So, if you are planning to have own blog and brand building it worth it.