Personal website and interviews

Question

First of all, I'm sorry if it's not the good SE site for asking this but I think it's relevant.

So I'm a young post graduate and I'm going to start my PhD soon. I have that blog/site on WordPress where I like to post stuff. It's a lot of technical stuff, some about my travels and other just about my opinion/health/life experience stuff. It's very broad but I have more "technical stuff" than anything else.

I like to use this to "advertise" myself. It doesn't have a lot of views per months (and that's not the point) but the technical content is sometime very relevant to the kind of work I want to. I mostly use it as a journal to remember what I did and how I did it but I think it can be a great "vitrine". I never asked myself this question before but, since I went through hiring process recently and I gave a link on my CV to this site, I was wondering :

Is it better to have two separate sites ? One for "work related/non personal stuff" and another for the rest ? From a HR point of view, is it an good/neutral thing or am I taking a risk, knowing that the personal opinion stuff is completely irrelevant to my future work ?

It seems hard for me to know where is the limit between what is acceptable or not. As much as talking about travels seems good, talking about X event happening at X location might be a "bad" idea as I think I could get judged by the future interviewer, not being of the same opinion.

So what would be the pro and cons of having a professional website and a personal one as opposed to having a "all in one" site ?

Thanks, Best

Answer 1

First Point: If your views affect your chances of landing a job in the company, then that company has a poor system in Human Resources.

What you view and how you critique a food or place should not have an effect on your chances of being hired. They hire you for your skills and experiences on the job field, not your opinion on whether the Korean Kim-chi was too hot or too sweet. If they take this into consideration, then you won't have people there that the company likes, you have people there that the HR likes. I doubt professional HR Personnel won't mind your preferences, as long as they are not too extreme or too obscene.

But...

Second Point: People want to see your skills straight-forward.

So don't rely too much on your site to show the HR on your accomplishments. These would work better when you have landed an interview with your "would-be" boss or supervisor. If your "Non_work" stuff floods the site instead of "Work" Stuff, then you should create a separate site.

That is, of course, your main use of the site is to show your prospects what you are capable of.

Answer 2

As with all things, it depends.

If you want your site to show off your technical skills, having a dedicated technology site is probably the best case if only because it makes it easier for interviewers and potential colleagues to browse through the posts you want them looking at without needing to look at the posts that don't have any technical information. What you probably need to look at, though, is how much better separate sites are to you vs. how much of a pain it is to keep two sites separate. That's likely a much closer call.

What fraction of the posts are technical content? If "more 'technical stuff' than anything" means that 99% of the posts are technical with 1% other, that would lean toward keeping a single site. The other content isn't likely to get in the way of someone that wants to browse just the technical bits. On the other hand, if it's more like a 60% technical content/ 40% other split, that probably leans toward keeping a separate site since it's likely that someone may end up looking at quite a few posts that don't do anything to show your technology skills particularly if they're browsing over a date range.

What sort of "opinion/ health/ life experience" content are you posting? No one is likely to bat an eye if you have the occasional post about a trip you took while on vacation accompanied by some photographs of the local landmarks. On the other hand, if a significant fraction of your opinion posts are dealing with controversial political questions or personal religious thoughts, giving potential interviewers a link to your site may come across as much more aggressive than you probably intend. If you're making occasional health-related posts about training for a 10k, that's very different than posting about struggling with a chronic disease-- one is likely to humanize you for a potential interviewer, the other is likely to make an interviewer a bit uncomfortable about knowing too much about your personal life before you've even met.

How big a deal is it to you to maintain two separate sites? Presumably, there would be a fair amount of effort initially to separate the technical and non-technical posts. As an ongoing effort, though, are you likely to find it annoying to switch back and forth constantly? Are you going to have posts that could go on either site? If the benefits are minimal, these costs probably outweigh the benefits. If the benefits are larger, the effort is probably worthwhile.