How Long Does a Professional Resume Writer Take to Write a Resume?
March 27th, 2014Julie Walraven of Design Resumes has a great post titled The Chief Cause Of Many Poor Hiring Decisions. She starts off with CareerBuilder’s new stat about how long hiring managers spend reviewing resumes…as we know, it’s pathetically low.
But then Julie takes her post in an unexpected direction: how long SHE, as a professional resume writer (she is certified and has been doing this, afaik, for over two decades): she will easily spend six hours creating a resume. Usually that is for an entry-level person. It’s not unusual for her to spend ten or more hours designing a resume.
Julie is a resume expert, having investing more than 10,000 hours in her trade to claim expertise. When I lost my job I spent a couple of weeks fumbling around trying to piece together my own resume. I had no expertise, experience or training… just an attitude that if I could put myself through two degrees, I could certainly write a one or two page document!
Right??
I didn’t understand that a resume was not simply a list with work history, dates and some “cool” action verbs. I thought I could easily put that document together… but what I didn’t realize was what a great resume really is.
A great, even an excellent resume, is a marketing document. Coincidentally, a sucky resume is also a marketing document – it just screams: don’t hire me!
A resume is not a standard business document for filing away in a three ring binder, simply to be forgotten. Your resume has a very specific purpose. What’s more, the “judge” of your resume is going to take your days, weeks, and for some of you, months of work and give it a cursory 30 or 120 seconds… it’s almost an atrocity!
But really, spending less than two minutes really is NOT an atrocity.
You see, it’s not about YOU. It’s not about the amount of work you put in. It’s not about how amazing you are, how clever you are, or how dumb the viewer is for not “getting” how brilliant you are.
This is all about THEM. Pursuing you will reflect on them and could have an impact on their career. Are they capable of hiring the RIGHT person? Can they hire the BEST person? Or will they hire a dud, or a lemon? This could cost them their job! Hiring the wrong person could sink the entire company!
If an expert, like Julie Walraven, spends six hours to develop the most basic of resumes, which she can only do because she has over ten thousand+ hours of writing resumes, what makes you think that you, or I, without this expertise, can “throw something together” in a few hours, and have it be good enough (much less great!)?
The mistakes I would make would undoubtedly cause my resume to be in the “under-ten-seconds-and-then-throw-away” pile. Whether that is a typo or a grammar mistake, or not using the best word(s) to put us in the right light, it will cost me.
I know there are people out there, including one of my favorite recruiters (Steve Levy… read his blog!) who say that we must write our own resumes, and hiring a resume writer is as good as hiring a charlatan (those are my words, but that’s the message I hear from him). I agree that we should do a lot of work to help get the resume done. We should put our hearts into it. We should spend time going through our past, listing our accomplishments, and doing the very hard work of self- and career-evaluation.
But I still think we should run it past a real resume writer who will polish our final marketing document so that it gets more time, and more respect, from the person evaluating whether they should bring you in for an interview or not. (professional resume writers are not merely polishers. They are experts in creating perhaps the most important marketing document at this point in your career)
Convinced you need resume help? I suggest considering either of these two options:
We’re working on creating an list of specialized resume writers that you can reach out to on your own… stay tuned
The point is, make sure that you are putting enough time and resources into getting this marketing document put together the right way.