Your resume, LinkedIn, and personal website each have a different purpose. But having all 3 is quickly becoming the industry standard, especially for those with research backgrounds.
Resume
Make a 1-page resume. Yes, it’s annoying to translate your 5-page CV into a 1-page resume, but if you don’t, you are telling others that you do not understand what is industry standard and are an outsider or rebel.
But also, admittedly when I am reviewing resumes in prep for interviewing candidates, I don’t have time to read more than 1 page. Remember that we are also reviewing your: LinkedIn, personal website, and (potentially) other application materials like prototyped tools. It’s a lot to review, especially for multiple candidates.
There are plenty of online advice how-to’s about how to convert a CV into a resume. And there are also plenty of resume formatting tools (e.g., Latex templates) that are pretty good. But remember that your resume is—or at least the goal is—to be read by real human eyes, so your resume should be human-readable1.
As always, a resume should be highly tailored to the role and team that you are applying to or networking with.
Make it. It’s very weird if you don’t have one by the time that you are reaching out to network with others—and it’s actually very, very weird if you apply to a job without a LinkedIn. It’s the first thing that people look for when searching for you on Google and/or after reviewing your resume. Think of it as a discoverability problem.
Your LinkedIn shows your history. This can also include other diverse job experiences, grants, volunteering, sabbaticals, etc. But the primary reason to have a LinkedIn is (1) not to be weird; and (2) to network with others.
Tip: Change your LinkedIn url to be readable. The default url looks something like this: “https://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname-238912748921748915/”. Change it to something like “https://www.linkedin.com/in/yourname” so that your url is easier to find and copy-paste into your email signature line.
Personal website
It used to be a bonus thing, but is becoming an industry standard for (1) showcasing your research background; and (2) translating your research into what is relevant to your target industry.
Also, consider using your personal website to showcase:
- Your personality, which you can show through your website aesthetic and example images. Ultimately, your target team will be hiring you based on the person they want to spend the next few or many years working with. Personality often matters more than technical skills.
- Your industry expertise. “Show, don’t tell” should be directly applied here
- If you’re a designer, create a well-designed website
- If you’re a front-end developer, create a slick, interactive website and include demos of your other projects. (Please don’t just include a link to your github for viewing demos. I will likely not make it that far if I need to dig around a repo to look for something. If you have a cool github, include a link but add some easily accessible demos to your website, too.)
- If you’re an academic researcher, translate your publications into domain expertise sections and include
demos for online experiments or, minimally, images of stimuli and results.
- This is where you can also include all your publications to showcase your ability to “ship products into the world”. LinkedIn and your resume are less suitable for listing all of your publications.
- Your mental framework for how you think about something.
- How do you think about your research application to your target industry?
- What do you think is your best skillset?
- What are you most excited about? (e.g., learning new AI tools or perhaps data integrity that is often not guaranteed by current AI tools)
It goes without saying that your resume (and you can also include a version of your CV as a separate link, if you’d like) should be easily discoverable on your personal website.
How to make your personal website the first hit on Google
The goal is to get Google to “index” your website and index it highly, which comes with more pointers to your url and high traffic (i.e., clicks) when someone searches for you. To do this, you can add your url to your:
- Google scholar
- Personal bio on your lab and/or department website
- Professional social media, e.g., Bluesky
AI was not used to write, edit, or brainstorm this post. All mistakes and em dashes are my own.