My Website Gets More Job Offers Than My LinkedIn Ever Did

A few months ago, a recruiter reached out to me about a role. Before she even mentioned the job description, she said, "I spent about twenty minutes on your site last night." Twenty minutes. On a personal website. That's when it hit me: nobody has ever spent twenty minutes reading my LinkedIn.

And honestly, why would they? My LinkedIn is a museum of job titles, bullet points, and buzzwords that every single one of my competitors also uses. "Results-driven." "Passionate about innovation." Sure, Jan.

My website, on the other hand, is a mess in the best possible way. It has half-documented experiments, essays nobody asked for, and projects that range from "genuinely useful" to "why did I build this." And it works harder for my career than any résumé ever has.

The Résumé Is a Claim. The Portfolio Is Proof.

Here's the core problem with résumés and LinkedIn profiles: they're unverifiable. Anyone can write "led cross-functional initiatives to drive growth." What does that even mean? Did you ship anything? Can I look at it? Did it work?

A portfolio answers those questions before they're asked. When someone can click through to the thing you built — the actual thing, warts and all — the credibility conversation is over. You're not asking them to trust your self-assessment. You're showing your work like a math teacher always demanded.

This matters even more in the US job market right now, where hiring managers are drowning in applications and AI-generated cover letters all sound identical. The differentiator isn't a better adjective. It's evidence.

Imperfect and Shipped Beats Perfect and Hidden

I used to think everything on my site needed to be portfolio-ready. Polished case studies. Perfect screenshots. A little "view project" button that led to something impressive.

That mindset kept my site nearly empty for years, because "polished" is a moving target and perfection is a great excuse for never publishing.

What changed everything was giving myself permission to ship unfinished work. The half-built tools. The essays with rough edges. The project post-mortems where I openly admit what flopped. Counterintuitively, those imperfect pieces generate the most responses — because they prove I actually make things, not just curate them.

How to Turn Your Site Into a Career Asset

If you're starting from zero, here's the playbook that worked for me:

1. Claim your name before someone else does. A domain like albertusvembrianto.com costs about the same as two coffees a year. It's the only professional profile you'll ever fully own — no algorithm decides who sees it.

2. Write one page per project, not one paragraph. What you built, why, what broke, what you learned. Even a weekend project deserves a post-mortem.

3. Publish the process, not just the results. A short note about what you're figuring out right now does more for credibility than a retrospective written six months later.

4. Let the essays show your thinking. Hiring managers aren't just buying your skills; they're buying your judgment. Writing is how judgment becomes visible.

5. Update it monthly, even minimally. A living site signals a living career. A site untouched since 2022 signals the opposite.

The Compounding Effect Nobody Warns Me About

Here's what surprised me most: the opportunities don't come from any single piece. They come from the accumulation. A recruiter finds one essay, reads three more, clicks through two projects, and suddenly you're not a nameless applicant — you're a person with a track record they can see.

Your résumé gets you filtered. Your portfolio gets you remembered. And in a market where everyone is optimizing for the same keywords, being memorable is the whole game.

So build in public. Ship the rough drafts. Let your website do the bragging that your LinkedIn is too embarrassed to do honestly.