HoweyahPutting a professional page online means, by definition, making it public — that's the entire point. But "public" and "everything on it is public by default" aren't the same thing, and it's worth being deliberate about which is which before you share the link widely.
The trade-off nobody explains clearly
A resume that recruiters can actually reach you through needs some contact information on it — that's not optional. The part that is optional is whether your phone number and personal email sit in plain text on a page that's indexed by search engines and visible to anyone who has the link, forever, versus being available only to the people you actually intend to reach.
This isn't a hypothetical concern. A public phone number on a page that ranks in search results is exactly the kind of thing scraped by spam callers and marketing lists — a cost you pay for years after the job search that prompted you to publish it is long over.
What "hidden by default" actually means
The more sensible default is the reverse of what most people assume: contact details stay hidden unless you deliberately choose to show them. In practice that usually looks like:
- A contact action instead of a raw number. A visitor can reach you without your phone number being sitting in plain text for anyone, or anything, that visits the page.
- You control what's exposed, and to whom, rather than a template deciding it for you.
- The rest of the page stays fully public — your experience, your projects, your skills — since none of that carries the same downside as a phone number does.
Discoverable and private aren't opposites
It's easy to assume more visible automatically means less private, but for a career page that's not really true. Being easy to find in a search, or easy to send as a link, doesn't require your personal phone number to be sitting in plain text — it just requires the page to exist and be well-organized. The two goals — "recruiters can find and reach me" and "my phone number isn't harvested by everything that crawls the web" — aren't actually in tension once contact details are hidden by default instead of exposed by default.
A quick checklist before you share your page widely
- Confirm what's visible on your page versus what's hidden, rather than assuming.
- Only turn on visibility for a phone number or personal email if you specifically want cold outreach through that channel.
- Remember that anything public on a page indexed by search engines is effectively public forever, not just while you're actively job hunting.
Why this is a default, not an afterthought
This is why contact details are hidden by default on Howeyah rather than something you have to remember to turn off after publishing. The assumption is that most people want to be reachable, not that most people want their number publicly listed — and the default should match the more common intention, not the more permissive one.
The short version
A public career page and an exposed phone number are two separate decisions that often get bundled together by default on other platforms. They don't have to be. Stay as visible as you want for the content that helps you, and as private as you want for the details that don't need to be public at all.