I’ve been told, many times, that the four biggest life changing events are the death of a family member, buying a house, birthing a child, and changing jobs. Do you hire somebody to help?  Yes. Well…most of the time…

• You hire the mortuary to help with the death of a family member
• You hire a real estate agent, movers and sometimes a home builder to get that house
• You have a doctor (or sometimes a mid-wife) to birth your child
• BUT … you find a job all by yourself, using two free resources (applying to job ads and uploading your resume to online databases) 

One of the biggest events in your life and you invest no money and hire no resources to help with your job search!  What’s the matter with you???

There are many premium services available for job seekers, but to keep this series in context here are many reasons to hire a professional resume writer. A resume writer will…

• Know how to take your experience and create content that is appealing to today’s hiring managers
• Use keywords, phrases and formats that will allow the automated screening technology to score your resume very high
• Build multiple formats (Word, PDF, ASCII, etc.) of your resume for different application systems
• Make your resume Internet ready so it can easily be found in the resume databases
• Use proper grammar and make sure everything is spelled correctly
• Allow you to choose from many design samples
• Use their experience from writing hundreds of resumes of professionals in similar job functions and understand what works (and doesn’t work too).
• Probably have some kind of guarantee to rewrite your resume
• Save you hours of time from making mistakes and the need to research writing tips

If you think you can still do it better than a professional than maybe you should start writing resumes as a new profession. It’s a growing segment of the career industry and a great way to help people. Otherwise, take action today. The longer you procrastinate, the less chance you have to make the right decision and a positive impact on your job search.

Happy job hunting!

Part 1 & Part 2 - Yes! You should hire a professional Resume Writer

There are two ways for Employers and Recruiting Firms screen resumes.  One method is done manually and the other is automated with technology.

Manual Screening process and the challenges for you: 

The manual screening process requires somebody to look at a resume. The resume is either received from a job advertisement or found by searching a job board database. Regardless this is a difficult task and usually requires hours of reading through resumes. If a resume doesn’t stand-out with good career progression, keywords, and accomplishments, it will be looked over or rejected by the screener.

It’s important to understand job ads may result in hundreds of applications from candidates. The screener will find the first 5 to 10 candidates to interview without even going through all the resumes. You can’t fault them since most HR departments are understaffed, poorly trained, and overworked. They are constantly tasked with trying to fill multiple positions with few resources and hiring managers that will not take risks decent candidates.

Job boards like Monster and CareerBuilder have hundreds of thousands (100,000+) of resumes posted on their sites everyday. You cannot effectively compete with those numbers or even have much of a chance of being found. Furthermore, these resume databases are very costly and do not guarrantee a candidate. Therefore, most companies do not have access and will never see your resume anyway. The small percent of companies that purchase database access may not find your resume if you are not using appropriate keywords and phrases.

Wow! What are you going to do? Keep reading…

Automated Screening process and the challenges for you: 

Human Resource departments and large recruiting firms are using software that seamlessly automates the recruiting process - job posting to pre-screening. This means when you apply to a job, the software receives, scans, and rates your resume in a matter of seconds. It may even tell you that you are not qualified and automatically remove you from the process. All this is done without any human interaction. To even further your frustration with this process, you may even have to register with each company you apply. 

Oh well, get used to it. That’s where the job search process is going.

In part 3 I will discuss how a professional resume writer will make your resume stand-out in the manual screening process and receive a passing grade with the automated screening technology.

Part 1 - Yes! You should hire a professional Resume Writer.

It’s time to give yourself an honest answer to the question, ”Why spend money to hire a professional resume writer to create my resume when I can do it myself?”

Don’t answer that question yet.  Read on…

Resume Spider has a large community of companies that have joined our network to be part of our resume distribution service. A recent poll, which we ran for two months, asked “What are the top three reasons a job seeker doesn’t get an interview or is screened out of the process?”  The responses were…

1. Misspellings and bad grammar in the resume.
2. The resume has little or no career progression.
3. They wrote their position description in their resume rather than accomplishments.

No mention of lacking certain skills or wrong background. The top three were about the resume - the first impression. How could this happen with spell checkers and lots of free information on how to write a resume? Obviously there is TOO MUCH information on the Internet, it is difficult to organize and few people have the expertise to use it. 

The Internet can be a great tool for finding employment, IF you use other tools that help you along the way. 

This 3 part series will cover the methods used by Employers and Recruiting Firms for screening resumes, and why you (the job seeker) should re-think your approach in creating your own resume.

Part 2 - Yes! You should hire a professional Resume Writer