If you’re a student embarking on a career, a mid-career professional looking for a new job, an entrepreneur in the market for funding, or a salesperson representing a company, you need a personal website.
Let’s look at just one example, somebody looking for a new job. These days it’s so darned easy to use an AI chatbot to customize a resume for every job posting and to easily apply. Many recruiters say that thousands of people apply for each job and because they know that most candidates are using AI to match their application to the job listing, they can’t reliably figure out the best candidates.
So, of course, recruiters also use AI. They are parsing resumes, ranking candidates, and even doing initial interviews via AI.
With AI agents in the mix, it’s even easier. Candidates deploy agents to look for openings, automatically customize a resume, and send it off. You can apply for hundreds of jobs a day with no effort.
Good luck standing out in a crowd when potential employees deploy AI to connect with the AI inside of companies.
LinkedIn, once the go-to place for a job search is equally inundated.
However, if you have a personal website and you point a potential recruiter there instead of applying in the same way as everyone else, you have an advantage. If you get on a shortlist and a recruiter or their AI does some research on you, your website means you have an advantage.
Today, when somebody is interested in you for whatever reason, they will Google you. What do they find? That’s your personal brand.
In the future, people will go to an AI chatbot to learn about you. What do they find? That’s your personal brand.
The LLMs were typically created with a fixed cutoff for the data used to train the models. For example, ChatGPT was trained on publicly available data with a July 2023 knowledge cutoff.
However, the models are also integrating with real time sources, a kind of hybrid model. You can see this in action with search engines like Perplexity.
We’ve been here before. I recall when Google initially launched, it crawled the web slowly so that an update to a website took weeks or months to be indexed. Then, about 15 years ago, Google went real time. That was an amazing moment, and I pioneered the idea of Newsjacking because of it.
I see a world where there is more real-time content indexed by the models. Content like your personal website.
Ben Goulet-Scott is a young naturalist and he created his personal website while still a student. It has helped him to get a job right out of his PhD. program in a very competitive field, secure a book deal from a major publisher, build his nonprofit, and showcase his social networks like Instagram where he has over 100,000 subscribers.
My friend David Supple is the CEO of a Boston area design-build company. Yes, the company has a site. He uses his personal site to showcase his expertise to the media, as a speaker and podcast guest, and so on.
Another friend, Signi Goldman, runs a successful ketamine clinic and psychedelic medicine practice in Asheville, NC. Signi uses her personal site to focus on mentoring individuals and practices.
If you don’t have one already, now is a good time to create a personal website.