Does a personal website actually help?
A short answer with its sources attached, including the parts that do not favour us.
The honest version
No controlled study has tested whether a personal website gets you more interviews. We looked. The research on job applications covers CV length, employment gaps, LinkedIn profiles and hiring discrimination — not personal sites. Anyone telling you a website raises your callback rate by some specific percentage is quoting something that was never measured.
What the evidence does support is narrower, and it is the reason this product exists: employers look you up, and being hard to find costs you.
What has actually been measured
A substantial online profile roughly doubled callbacks
In a field experiment run between October 2018 and March 2019, ResumeGo sent 24,570 fictitious CVs to real job openings on Indeed, ZipRecruiter and Glassdoor. Applicants whose CV linked to a comprehensive LinkedIn profile were called back 13.5% of the time. Applicants with no profile at all: 7.9%.
That is a randomised experiment with a published method and a large sample, which makes it the strongest evidence in this area. Note what it measured: a LinkedIn profile, not a personal website. We are not going to pretend otherwise. What it shows is that having something substantial for an employer to find changes their behaviour.
Nearly half of employers hesitate when they cannot find you
In a survey conducted by The Harris Poll for CareerBuilder between 4 April and 1 May 2018, 47% of employers said they were less likely to call a candidate in for an interview if they could not find them online. In the same programme of research, 70% said they research candidates online before hiring.
These are surveys of stated behaviour rather than experiments, and they are several years old. We give you the dates so you can weigh them yourself.
The statistic we refuse to use
Almost every company selling something like this quotes the same line: "56% of hiring managers are more impressed by a personal website than any other personal branding tool, and only 7% of job seekers have one."
It comes from Workfolio — a company that was selling personal website software — quoted in Forbes in April 2013. A vendor's own number, thirteen years old, with no published sample size or method.
We are in exactly the same business, which is precisely why we will not quote it. You are buying a page that will be read by people deciding whether to trust you. It would be a poor start if the page selling it to you repeated a number it had not checked.
So what is the actual argument
Not that a website is magic. It is this: an employer who has your CV will search your name, and what they find is either something you control or something you do not. A site at your own name is the version you wrote. That is a modest claim, and it is one we can stand behind.
Whether it is worth 35.00 EUR a year is your call, and what it costs sets out exactly what that buys.