Your CV as a URL, not an attachment

There is a specific small failure that happens after you send an application by email. The recipient opens it on a phone, between two meetings, and gets a two-page A4 document rendered at about a third of legible size. They pinch, they scroll sideways, they give up and decide to look at it properly later. Later is a queue, and the queue is where applications go to be forgotten.

That is the strongest case for putting your CV at an address instead of in an attachment, and it is worth being clear that it is a case about reading conditions, not about design. A web page reflows. A PDF is a fixed rectangle of paper that happens to be travelling by email, and every property people like about it — that it looks the same everywhere, that it prints, that it cannot be edited — is a consequence of that rectangle being fixed.

The argument you will usually hear from here is that the PDF is dead and you should send a link. That argument is written by people who have not applied for a job through a portal recently. The document is still mandatory in most of the places an application actually gets processed, and a candidate who arrives with only a URL looks less modern than unprepared. The real question is not which format wins. It is which one is doing the work in a given moment, and how you stop the two of them from drifting into contradiction.

The link wins on phones, forwarding and everything after you press send

Three advantages, and they are not the ones usually listed.

The first is the one above: it reads on a phone without effort, and a meaningful share of first contact with your application happens on a phone. This is a low bar that PDFs structurally cannot clear.

The second is forwarding. A link survives being passed along; an attachment mostly does not. When someone in a company decides to pass your name to a colleague, they write two sentences and paste something. A URL sits inside that message and opens in one tap. Re-attaching a file means finding it, downloading it, attaching it again, and it means the colleague receives a download rather than a page. The referral is the single most valuable way anyone arrives at your material, which is the argument made at length in the piece on the job search you can be found in, and it is the case where the format difference is most lopsided.

The third is the one people underrate: a link stays current after it is sent. Every PDF you have ever emailed is a frozen copy sitting in an inbox you cannot reach. If you notice a typo, change roles, or want to reorder what you lead with, the twelve copies already out there keep the old version forever. A page you can fix at four in the afternoon is fixed for everyone who opens it at five, including the people who received the link three months ago. That is not a small property when a search runs for half a year.

What the link does not do is create interest. It is a second document that opens after the first one has already done its job, and a URL printed on a CV is opened far less often than its owner assumes — the mechanics of that are worth reading properly in the piece on the link on your CV nobody clicks.

The PDF is not a format preference, it is a filing system

Here is where the enthusiasts lose the argument.

Application portals do not accept a link, and if they do, nothing reads it. The portal exists to turn your document into structured fields — employer, title, dates, location — that a recruiter can filter and a requisition can score against. There is no step in that pipeline where a web page is fetched and parsed. Uploading a one-page PDF that says "see my website" is a way of submitting an empty application.

Recruitment agencies are worse, in a way that is easy to miss. Agencies commonly reformat your CV onto their own template before sending it to a client, sometimes with your contact details removed so the client cannot go around them. They need the text, and they need it in something they can copy out of. A page makes that harder, and an agency that finds you hard to process processes someone else.

Formal processes want a file for the same reason bureaucracies always want a file: it can be attached to a record. Public sector applications, regulated industries, academic positions, visa and immigration paperwork, procurement for a contract role — all of these end with a document going into a folder, dated. Some of them still want it signed.

And people print. Not many, and not often, but interview panels do, and a printed page from a website is a lottery of clipped columns and missing images while a PDF is exactly what it was meant to be.

Where it goes	What to send
Application portal or ATS upload	PDF, with the URL as one line under your name
Cold email to a named person	PDF attached, link in the signature
Introduction or referral forward	Link only
Recruitment agency	PDF, editable text, no design that resists copying
Interview panel, formal filing	PDF

Two versions drift apart the moment you stop treating one as the source

The failure mode is not that you have both. It is that they disagree, and the disagreement is found by the one reader who was paying attention. A hiring manager who notices that your page says you led a team of six and your CV says four is not going to conclude that one of them is out of date. They are going to conclude something about you.

Drift starts in a predictable way. You tailor the document for a specific application — sharpen a title, move an achievement up, trim a role that is not relevant — and you never carry that back. Do it eight times over a search and the file on your desktop and the page at your domain describe two different careers.

The fix is boring and it works: decide which one is the source, and it should be the document. The document is the thing you edit under time pressure, the thing an agency reformats, the thing that has to be complete. The page is a derivative — shorter, ordered for a human rather than a filter, and regenerated or corrected from the file whenever the file changes materially. Keep one master version of the CV rather than a folder of eleven tailored ones, and treat the tailored copies as disposable exports rather than as edits.

Then pick a cadence. Twice a year, plus whenever your role changes, open both and read them against each other. Dates, titles, team sizes, the one-line description of what you do. It takes ten minutes and it is the only maintenance a one-page site actually needs.

The page can come out of the file you already have

The reason most people never get to the second version is not disagreement about formats. It is that turning a CV into a page means starting from an empty screen, and the empty screen is where personal sites go to die.

That step can now be skipped. reach is built for exactly this job: you upload the résumé file you already have, add a photo, answer a short form and choose a look, and it composes a one-page site from the document — generated in about twenty seconds, and live on a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes if you want it to be. What comes back is a draft to correct rather than a canvas to fill, which is the whole of the difference.

The limits are worth knowing before you start rather than after. It makes exactly one page — one index.html, no sub-pages and no navigation — so if you wanted a page per project, this is the wrong tool. There is no version history: saving overwrites the page, and there is no way back to what it said yesterday. And the editor needs a desktop. Below 820 pixels wide it becomes a read-only preview with a share bar, with a PIN hand-off to move from phone to laptop; generating and viewing work fine on a phone, editing does not. A custom domain needs Premium, at $4.99 per month or $49 per year, and you cannot connect a domain you already own — the only route is buying one through reach. Prices checked August 2026.

For anyone with a short career and a CV that looks thin on paper, the calculation is a little different, and we have taken it apart in the piece on a personal website for recent graduates.

What comes off the public version

A CV is a private document sent to a named recipient. A page is readable by anyone who finds the address, including people who are not hiring anyone. Three things do not survive that change.

Your home address comes off. It exists on a CV for reasons that mostly stopped applying when post stopped being how anyone contacted you; on a public page it is an invitation. A city and country is all a reader needs, and it is all the reader wanted.

Your date of birth comes off, along with anything that stands in for it, and in most cases so does the year you finished school. It is not required in the countries where it is customary, it is illegal to ask for in several where it is not, and on a public page it is the single most useful field for anyone assembling an identity from scraps.

Referee names and phone numbers come off entirely. Publishing a colleague's mobile number on the open web because you are job hunting is a thing you should not do to someone who agreed to help you. "References on request" is the whole of what belongs there, and it belongs on the document, not the page.

Keep the page as the version a stranger may read and the document as the version a specific person receives, and the question of what to include mostly answers itself.

Anyone who tells you the document is finished business has confused what hiring looks like on the open internet with what it looks like inside a company, where a folder with your name on it is still the unit that decisions get attached to — and that folder was never going to accept a URL in the first place.