How to Make and Use a Website to Get a Job

The best resume in the world won't do you a lick of good if it goes unseen.

Of course, you could copy your resume onto reams of sturdy resume stock paper, then mail out the copies. But then you'd be spending upwards of $50 per ream of quality paper, up to $100 on envelopes and more than $75 in postage.

Obviously, cost is one of the reasons resumes are being sent electronic.

The main problem with sending your resume electronically, though, is the same reason it's come into vogue: the attachment. Some companies have their servers set to strip attachments from emails coming from the outside. But if you only send your resume in the body of the email, you lose the pretty formatting.

The solution, then, is to turn your resume into a simple web page. By "simple," of course, I mean "not difficult" AND "not complex."

Let's assume you have your resume in Microsoft Word. If you use a different word processor (OpenOffice.org, Works, WordPerfect, etc.), the principles are pretty much the same.

Presto! Now it's a web page! Open your resume. Go to "file," then "save as." Rename your file "index." Then click on "Save as type." Choose "web page (*.htm; *.html)." Now, instead of being saved in the default ".doc" format, it will be saved as a web page.

Get a free web site. Yahoo! offers free web space (through geocities), although their free version is ad-supported. Hey - you've got to give a little to get a little. The web builder tools are useful if you want to get fancy, but for a simple resume site, simply go to the upload manager. Upload your resume (now named "index.html"). Preview your resume. It should look very much like it does in your word processing program.

Tell the world about your resume. Copy your web address. Heck, I encourage you to bookmark it. Now that you have a simple web site, you can paste the link in your emails to employers, recruiters and networking contacts. Put it on your resumes, business cards and everything else you might give a prospective employer.

Now that you've set up a web site with a free service, you have an online home for your resume. Great! But you're not done. You should also strongly consider putting up samples of your work, as well.

Placing your portfolio online is a convenient way for employers to see your work without the problems of attaching large files. Simply send the link to your site and employers do the clicking.

What-To: Examples of your work that are free of copyright and/or intellectual property restrictions are fair game. Blacken out email addresses and chop off passages that could bring you into litigation. Favorable performance reviews? Letters of recommendation? Articles you've written or for which you were used as an expert reference? Absolutely!

How-To: If your documents are already in an electronic format (.jpg, .pdf, .doc, etc....), it's just a matter of using the upload manager to...well, upload the documents. Otherwise, scan the images into an electronic format and then upload them.

When-To: Once you have your electronic portfolio uploaded to your website, make sure you keep it updated. Keep adding to it even when you have a job, because you never know when you're going to need to hit the job search pavement again.