Deciding whether or not to purchase a professional resume writing service can be a tricky decision. Most professionals have always written their own resumes and have never used a professional service. However, hiring a professional resume writer really isn’t any different from all of the other professionals that you hire to make your life easier and more successful.
Such as hiring a contractor to build your house or a mechanic to fix your car, in the modern job market, it simply makes sense to hire a professional resume writer to assist with your resume project. These days, the art of crafting a successful resume often requires more time than the average person is willing to spend. To write a successful resume, you likely need to spend at least several hours building your resume. By hiring a professional, you can better use that time elsewhere in your life – whether it be job searching, preparing for interviews, or simply spending some much needed time with your friends and family.
How much is your DIY resume costing you?
Deciding whether to purchase a professional resume service really boils down to value. To better understand the value of a professional service, you first must be aware of what your current resume is costing you – and no, it’s not free. Every resume (DIY or professional) has a hidden cost. The cost is how much time it takes you to get hired and how many job offers you receive.
For example, the US Department of Labor reports the average length of unemployment in 2023 was 20.6 weeks. The other piece of the puzzle is your earnings. In a recent article, Forbes stated that the average annual salary in the United States is $59,428. Therefore, the average lost wages is approximately $11,800. Resume Writing Group averages a 98.4% success rate for getting clients hired in 45 days. This means that the average DIY resume costs approximately $10,000 dollars in lost value compared to a professional resume.
What if I’m not unemployed?
Even if you’re employed, your DIY resume is likely still costing you more than you think. Numerous studies have shown that people are less likely to ask for a raise if they don’t have a resume. Furthermore, people are also less likely to seek a better job if they don’t already have a resume. Additionally, teams like The Resume Writing Expert are able to increase the number of job offers an applicant receives by 300% over a DIY resume. That’s a lot of additional opportunity that you likely don’t even realize you’re missing out on. For instance, most people consider their resume to be successful if they just get hired. If you apply to 50 employers and only receive one job offer, that means you missed out on 49 opportunities. That’s not a very good success rate!
Even worse, studies show that applicants are less likely to negotiate a salary if they have received multiple prior rejections. Those applicants are also less likely to negotiate if they don’t have a second opportunity they can take. Failing to negotiate your salary can result in leaving thousands of dollars in lost wages on the table. For example, even a 5% increase in compensation on average salary of $59,428 is approximately $3,000 per year. Over the course of a 30-year career, that’s nearly $100,000 in lost wages.
What makes a professional resume so much more successful?
There are many factors that make a professional resume more successful than a DIY resume. These include everything from objectiveness to reader engagement, ATS (Applicant Tracking Software) compliance, and the quality of the writing.
Objectiveness
The biggest difference between you writing your own resume and a professional writing it for you is that the professional can be objective. Because you’re intimately connected with your career, it’s difficult to know what will actually interest an employer. The most common mistake the writers at Resume Writing Group report when reviewing client resumes is a lack of emphasis on the right topics. Rather than focusing on the most valuable aspects of their experience, DIY resumes often bury important skills and showcase irrelevant factors. To try to avoid this, people often turn to generic advice such as only covering 10 years of experience on a resume. This advice is often wrong because one-size fits-all approaches rarely work with something as unique as a resume. Instead, professional writers take an objective look at who you are and make strategic decisions based on what interests employers.
Reader Engagement
In addition to taking a more objective approach, professional writers are also able to improve other factors of your resume that you may not even realize are holding you back. These elements can include data points like reader engagement, which is the measure of how many employers who start reading your resume continue reading from top to bottom. Other elements include cohesiveness between your bullet points, grammatical correctness, and the density of key phrases. If your resume feels disjointed, is difficult to read, or is not 100% grammatically correct, this can cause major problems. In our article, The Do’s and Don’ts of Resume Writing, we discuss how even a single grammatical error can substantially reduce response rates.
ATS Compliance
ATS compliance is a major factor of resume writing these days. According to Go Hire, 98% of F500 companies are using at least some form of ATS to pre-screen applications. With that statistic in mind, it’s no wonder that so many applicants are left feeling like they submitted their resume into a gaping void rather than a real company. If your resume is not properly optimized for ATS, you’re likely to receive an automatic rejection before your resume is even considered by a real person. This means significantly higher rejection rates. Furthermore, because the employers who use ATS tend to be the ones with the most lucrative openings, you’re likely missing out on some of your best opportunities. To combat this, professional resume writing companies like Resume Writing Group craft resumes that are compliant with ATS guidelines.
ATS guidelines can be tricky. Professional writers often spend many years training and honing their ability to increase keyword density. This is because optimizing your resume for ATS isn’t just about adding keywords, it’s about ensuring those keywords appear frequently enough to increase your prospect of appearing as a top candidate. To learn more about ATS compliance, read our full article on how ATS works.
Showcasing Value
The best professional resumes do more than just describe your responsibilities – they showcase the value you can bring to a potential employers. These resumes build confidence by describing how you’ve been successful throughout your career. Often, that means digging into the nuance of your responsibilities to ensure that they’re being presented the right way. Take this sentence for example:
- Met with customers to answer their questions and help them learn more about company products.
This is a perfectly serviceable description of someone’s responsibilities. It’s the kind of generic description that ChatGPT could generate in 5 seconds. It’s also what hiring decision makers read all day long as they review resumes. If your resume is filled with these sorts of statements, chances are you’re being overlooked for positions that you’re perfectly qualified for.
Instead, consider this rewrite of the same sentence:
- Maximized sales revenue by leveraging outstanding interpersonal skills to build relationships with customers and increase their trust in company products.
This is the same sentence rewritten – and – to the untrained eye, it might not look that much different from the original. However, the difference with hiring decision makers is substantial. This second sentence includes two clear value statements: “Increasing sales revenue” and “Improving customer trust”. Both of these statements tell an employer that you’re going to be able to step into a new role and start earning the higher salary you just negotiated for yourself due to your awesome resume. Both statements are calling cards that tell an employer you understand your purpose is to help make their organization more successful. The original sentence just told an employer you can do what the job description says. The second sentence tells them you’re going to get results.
Increase Your Potential
Showcasing skills and results is the bedrock of every successful resume. That’s why millions of people choose to hire professional resume writers every year to help them get a leg up on their competition. At the end of the day, your resume is the most important aspect of your career. Rather than trying to go it alone, consider working with a professional team that specializes in helping clients get hired. To learn more about how your resume stacks up, visit Professional Resume Writing Services | Resume Writing Group and ask for a free critique of your current resume.