Resume Writing: Should you pay for help?
Key Takeaways
Come to the table ready to work
Find job descriptions for your dream role
Be critical of buzzwords
Jobscan.co is AMAZING!!
Who Should Read this
Job Seekers getting no responses
Job Seekers getting the wrong responses
Anyone needing an unbiased (differently biased) review
Career Changers
Not Like Hiring a Cleaning Service
While you should hire a professional when your resume needs cleaning up, it is not like hiring a cleaning service for your home. While you can make a mess, leave your home for a few hours and come back to find it clean without any effort on your part, the same is not true for your resume. When you hire a resume service, you must help the writer help you.
A resume writer who is doing work from some documentation and a basic questionnaire can’t work miracles. If you expect a perfect outcome without participation, no service is going to work for you.
Resume Writing Services Are Worth the Money
A resume writer is a disinterested party who will re-write your resume without emotion. This will get you pointed in the right direction. And if you have ever struggled to write your resume, the price of $150 to $350 is completely fair for what you get.
If you are willing to get involved, resume writing services are worth the money. I saw a 75% increase in responses, after using a professional resume writer that only cost about $250.
Little Surprises
The disconnect from friends and family helped me see my weaknesses detached from emotion. I was floored by how many things they saw in my experiences that I had not properly explained, or flaws that my friends and family had not been polite enough to point out. The resume writer will take what seems a simple sentence to you and say the same thing differently.
Action Verbs
How many times have you used ‘Managed’ or ‘Drove’ as the first word in your resume lines? The resume writer will catch those overused verbs and select ones that add greater value while also being relevant to your industry and position. If you want to get a headstart on action verbs, the Muse has a really great list of 185.
Where to Get Started
When you sign up for Glassdoor, or any number of job search websites, they will offer a ‘free resume evaluation.’ It is clearly a sales tool for resume writing services. Do it. I promise, if they don’t think they can help, they will tell you the resume is good. A friend got a top score according to the algorithm and they stopped trying to sell him. So if they are trying to sell you services after scanning your resume, you might consider re-evaluating your resume.
For me, that process led me to the company Top Resume. But if you Google resume writing services, you can find a wider selection.
Documentation You Need
You will be asked to submit your resume and at least one sample job description. Some companies/writers will ask for samples of your last few resumes. You will also be asked to answer a few long-form questions to learn more about your skills and goals.
The First Round Results
What comes back from the first round will not be perfect. Depending on your budget, you may only have one edit/polish round remaining. So take your time to read through it. Have a friend you trust, but who is willing to be critical, also review it.
Caution: Buzzwords
Watch for overembellishments! What comes back will sound like someone swallowed a dictionary of your industry’s buzzwords. Warning: You should read it and try to make edits to bring things back to earth.
They will help you find a jewel you missed but in the process, they will overshoot the mark. They will accidentally overinflate your experience as they try to work with what little they have and what they know works for the industry in question.
Remember they do this for a living
It is not a bad thing that your resume writer cranks these out for a living. The fact that your resume writer doesn’t care and is just trying to be honest about someone they don’t know using words they know the industry values is part of what you are paying for. But it does mean, some nuances might be lost. You probably need to take a few days with it before submitting for the final edit.
Building a life skill
Learn and be curious about what comes back to you. Even if you veto language, phrasing or formatting, take a second and try to understand how this item was intended to improve your resume so that it survived the initial screening that most companies use. This will help you update your resume on your own next time around.
No shame in going back again
As you move up your career ladder, you may need to get outside help again. There is no shame in that.
Check before and after
Before you submit your resume for re-write, and as you edit their work, run it against your dream job description in jobscan.co as the resume service will not do that for you. They will use their own preferred service but will not be transparent about how much they improved your score. If your resume was low before, you should see a significant uptick in jobscan.co. If it was high and you went for polish, this will help you rate the work done. It will also help you figure out what you might want to veto in your edit round.
LinkedIn Profile & Cover Letters
I found it wasn’t worth paying for the add-ons. For the LinkedIn profile, all they did was copy paste my resume into that format. If you want to specifically get a better LinkedIn profile, look for resume writing services that specialize in making that different from your resume, otherwise, don’t pay for that add-on.
And the cover letter format didn’t work for me. So few people read cover letters these days that if you need one, it needs to be unique and only a coach who really knows you can help with that.
Ongoing practice
As a matter of practice, if anyone seeks my advice on the state of their resume, I will always ask for a sample of the job description they are seeking. I then go to jobscan.co and run a comparison of their current resume and the job description they seek. I send those results back as part of my review.
I do not encourage trying to get a 100% score, to do so would require resume stuffing. And we know that no job description is a full description of what the employer is seeking. But if you can get to a healthy range (70 to 80% — jobscan.co claims 80% is good), you stand a much better chance. At the very least, it will point out keywords the posting is seeking that you have failed to highlight. It can help you better tailor your resume, your elevator pitch or your goals for next quarter.
It is not realistic for the average person to re-write their resume for every job they seek, but I find that identifying a dream job or two and working to get one’s resume to meet those standards will go a long way. I have seen serious upticks in response rates to applications after using jobscan.co to identify areas in need of improvement.
Resume Reviewer vs Resume Writer
If you are focused on a highly-technical career, it might help to pay a little extra after the re-write and get a professional resume review of the new version from someone in your industry. This can be someone who specializes in coaching people in your particular profession or someone who has recently hired people into the role you covet.
But don’t confuse resume review with a resume re-write. A reviewer will give you concrete advice, suggestions, and maybe provide samples of ones that resonate for them, but they will not completely re-write your resume.
Why consider both? That resume writer working for the resume re-writing services will not have worked in your profession or hired in that profession. For feedback closer to the actually hiring process for your profession, seek out a profession-specific resume review from a coach or former recruiter or sourcer.
In Conclusion
If you are willing to put in as much as the writer does, you will get what you need. If you expect the writer to deliver a perfect resume without meeting half-way, you will be disappointed, but you are also expecting a miracle, and that is not fair.
