Links in your CV and portfolio — how to include them so they work and make an impression

It is said that a recruiter looks at one CV for seven seconds. I don't know if this number is exact, but the spirit is true: no one reads it. People scan. The eye jumps across the page, catches shapes, pauses for a moment, and flies on. And in all this rush, it lands on something like this:

https://github.com/twojnick/portfolio-final-v3/tree/main/public?tab=readme

A second has passed. And if someone happens to be holding a printout, it's lost twice, because no one will manually rewrite this address from a piece of paper. Seriously, who manually types portfolio-final-v3?

After all, a link in a CV is not decoration at the end of a section. It is a door. This is how the person on the other side enters your world: GitHub, portfolio, LinkedIn profile, a working demo of the project you are boasting about. If these doors are taped shut with an ugly, long, suspicious-looking address, most people will simply not approach them.

Where links die (and they die in three places)

Before we start dressing them up nicely, it is worth knowing where they fail.

First: A PDF with an active link, but ugly text. It's clickable, which is nice. Only that if someone reads a printout or a scan, all the clickability goes to waste because you're left with just a bare, unreadable string of characters.

Second: A URL cluttered with parameters. ?utm_source=...&ref=...&fbclid=... eats up half a line and looks like something that arrived via spam in an application document. Professional? Rather the opposite.

Third, the most treacherous: a link that leads nowhere. You sent your CV in March. In June, you moved your portfolio to a new domain because you finally bought your own. And suddenly all March applications point to a 404. The recruiter clicks, sees emptiness, and forms an opinion. Unjust, but that's the opinion they'll have.

What a non-intrusive link looks like

The entire rule fits into one sentence: the link must be readable and memorable. Ideally, in such a way that it can be said aloud over the phone.

See the difference:

❌ https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aZ9...xQ/view?usp=sharing
✅ cutty.dev/jan-portfolio

You can dictate this second one to a friend in three seconds. You won't even be able to spell the first one to yourself, let alone to a recruiter during an interview. And there is a second thing: that branded suffix after the slash reveals where it leads before anyone even clicks. A person knows that it is a portfolio, and not some random trap.

In practice, a simple, consistent set works well:

• Portfolio → cutty.dev/jan-portfolio
• GitHub → cutty.dev/jan-github
• LinkedIn → cutty.dev/jan-in
• Best project or demo → cutty.dev/projekt-x

The naming convention itself already says something about you. That you have order in your head. That you don't just throw everything in blindly. It is a small detail, but recruiters live on reading small details.

And if your CV is a webpage or a PDF in the cloud, add one short address to the whole thing and paste it everywhere: in your email footer, in your LinkedIn bio, on your business card. One address, the same easy ending, zero confusion.

This one feature you won't appreciate until you need it

This is where we arrive at something most people miss. The replaceable goal.

Sounds technical, so let's use an example. You send out forty applications, each with the link cutty.dev/jan-portfolio leading to your portfolio. A month passes. And life happens:

• you move your portfolio to your own domain,
• you do a redesign, and the entire address structure changes,
• or you want to substitute a version tailored specifically for one particular recruitment process.

Normally, each of these changes would kill forty sent links. Here, you enter the panel, change the destination under the same suffix, and all forty CVs still work. The address hasn't moved, yet it already points somewhere else. A bare Google Drive link can't do this: there, a URL is a URL, once sent, it lives its own life. In a shortener like cutty, the suffix remains constant, and what sits underneath it, you change whenever you want.

A small digression, because it is the same mechanism: this is exactly how links work on conference slides and in live presentations. A speaker inserts one short address, but replaces what lies beneath it depending on the event. A CV is simply your presentation on a single sheet of paper. The same logic.

QR on paper

Are you going to a job fair or a meetup with a printed CV? Next to your portfolio link, insert a QR code. A recruiter lifts their phone, scans, and they are already on your page, instead of typing out the address letter by letter (which, let's be honest, they won't do). Every short link has a ready-made QR code at your fingertips: download the image, paste it into your CV, and you're done. The same trick works on a business card. One QR, one portfolio.

Does anyone even open this

And now the part that can change your entire approach to job hunting. Because usually you apply blindly. You send it and you know nothing.

And it is enough to see if anyone opened the link at all.

You sent twenty applications, and there were only three clicks? This is important information: your CV probably doesn't even reach the reading stage; the problem lies earlier, perhaps in the delivery itself. There is no point in improving your portfolio if no one is looking at it. On the other hand, if you see a sudden spike in views after a specific recruitment, it is a sign that someone is looking, and it is worth perfecting your projects to perfection.

You do this without tracking the person on the other side. Statistics show numbers, they do not build anyone's profile, and IP addresses are shortened to an anonymous form anyway. You are checking the effectiveness of your own applications, not spying on a recruiter. This is a fundamental difference and, to be honest, it should be an obvious fact, not a feature that needs to be separately advertised.

Before you click send

• every link can be read aloud,
• endings are named consistently (/yourname-portfolio, /yourname-github),
• the purpose of each link can be replaced later,
• the printed CV has a QR code to the portfolio,
• you clicked every link yourself to check if it actually opens.

This last point sounds trivial, but I once sent a document with a link that led to a private repo visible only to me. On the other side, emptiness. I didn't find out, because who would tell me. Only later, clicking by accident from a friend's phone, did I see what the recruiter saw. Since then, I always test every address from a device where I am not logged in. And honestly, it is a habit worth more than half of the advice on writing a CV. The link is your first technical proof that you handle the details. Make it so that it survives every move and every click on someone else's phone.