We perform a great many free resume critiques and one of the questions we always ask before starting the critique is Is the resume working for you? By working, we mean is it generating interviews consistently. Last, we had a job seeker submit her resume for review and she noted that she was not receiving good response from it. It had only generated one interview out of about fifty submissions. She wasn't happy with it and wanted us to review it for her.
In our feedback, we noted the resume did not have much content that directly attested to the results she had gained for employers. It was well-written in that the grammar was good, the formatting was attractive, and it contained the required keywords but there was no strategy behind the content. A resume can be well-written but ineffective. Her resume was just such a document.
Yesterday, we received an email from this lady. Evidently, she had had her resume that we reviewed prepared by a different service and had forwarded our comments to the original writer. Naturally, the writer was quite upset that her client had not only sought out another service but also that her work had been criticized. The job seeker had subsequently forwarded the original writer's upset response to us and wanted us to comment.
Resume writing can be quite a subjective activity. What one writer feels is vital can be argued successfully against by another writer. Differences of opinion don't matter, though. What matters is whether the resume is achieving results. In this case, the job seeker was reporting poor results. While it would have been better if she had returned to the original writer and expressed her concerns, she didn't - she came to us for comment. We gave her honest feedback on what we viewed were some shortcomings of the resume and how it could be improved. What resulted were an upset writer and a confused job seeker.
To avoid just such problems with our own clients, we offer a guarantee. If one of our resumes doesn't produce interviews, we will rewrite for free. We want our clients to come back to us without fear of being hit with additional revision fees if their resumes aren't working. I must say, though, that in twelve years in this business, I can count on one hand the number of times we've had to rewrite a resume. We don't get upset, though. Artistic expression or creative ownership doesn't matter to us. What matters is whether our clients receive results.
We write a lot of resumes, probably more than any other service in the nation barring some of the resume mills that use templates. Because of that, we have a huge data pool to use in guiding our resume design and strategy. We are often called upon by the job boards and major publications to write articles about what we find works and doesn't work in the job search. We know our stuff and we apply that depth of knowledge and experience to our clients' benefit.