If you’ve been considering paying for a professional resume writer to rewrite your resume, there are a few things to keep in mind.
First off, you need to figure out what you’re trying to accomplish. If you are getting interviews but not getting beyond the interview stage, it’s most likely not your resume that is the problem. The purpose of a resume is to get an interview so if you’re getting interviews, there is something else going on that could be preventing you from getting a new job other than your resume.
Secondly, with professional resume writers as with probably most other things in life, some of them are more professional than others. I recall earlier in my career when I signed up for a career counseling service with a well-established company – a complete waste of time and money incidentally in this instance – and part of their “service” was to rewrite my resume. At first I figured this was like a bonus and was happy that they were going to do this.
Basically what they did was rewrite parts of the resume and for the most part, redo the style of the resume by using a cookie cutter approach that they used for every other client that they had. It was an old style resume that looked like it could have been written in the 1970s. Very boring, very similar to every other one that they wrote.
It was so obvious that when I became a recruiter, I could always tell when a job candidate was working with this same career counseling company because the moment I opened their resume, I recognized the style of the resume as being the exact same as the one they’d created for me. Not good.
Resumes are a personal document and the truth is that there is no such thing as a perfect one. How could there ever be? If you send your resume to 10 different hiring managers, all 10 of them might have different views on what they like/dislike about it. The point is that there are generally accepted rules or guidelines regarding resumes that you should follow and a good, professional resume writer should be aware of that.
Among other things, a good professional resume writer probably has:
1. A certification(s) from a recognized resume writing organization. Don’t get impressed by a bunch of acronyms or pictures of all certificates they hold but it’s probably a good start if they have one or more.
2. A decent looking website with examples of resumes that they’ve written for other people. As in Point #1, don’t get impressed by a fancy website but at the same time, if the website looks like it was designed in the 1990s, you might consider whether or not this person is living in the past in terms of their resume style too just like I mentioned above in my personal example.
3. A good description of their background, skills, experience and a convincing job of showing you what expertise they have that would lead you to believe that giving them money to rewrite your resume for you is a good idea.
What about a resume critique instead of a full rewrite? Is this a good idea?
People will give you different opinions but perhaps your resume just needs some tweaking here and there rather than a full rewrite. In other cases, a full rewrite might be the way to go especially if you are getting no interviews after having applied to many jobs that you qualify for.
If you’re unsure, ask a few friends, maybe a recruiter or two and perhaps a hiring manager if you know any in your personal life since they’ve probably seen hundreds of resumes in their time and might offer some quality and free advice.
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