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Tips for Those Using a Resume Service?
hireMePlease asks: 'I am getting ready to re-enter the job market because I work in the 15 hours a day company that was mentioned in an earlier Ask Slashdot. I realize that the job market for us techies is not very good right now(especially where I live in the southeast), so I am trying to find any edge that I may be able to get in order to land another job. My question to the slashdot community is have any of you used one of the many resume services (where you tell them about yourself and they write a resume for you) and were they at all helpful?"
The company I was recently "fired" from (sorry I feel a "lay off" implies you _might_ get to come back) paid this service to help with my "transition". So far they have been worthless. Maybe if they spent some of that money on CURRENT employees they wouldn't need this service.
Ok enough with the rant. I have found the best results so far have been from going to individual company websites and doing job searches / applying directly. My resume is on all the usual "head hunter sites" -- www.monster.com www.careerbuilder.com etc...etc. But no luck so far.
If you are looking for help acctually BUILDING your resume I know Monster has a service you can pay.
Anyway -- that is my $.05 worth with the experience I have had so far.
Good luck!
-- http://anonet.org -- The internet the way it was meant to be. Check it out, you may be surprised.
http://thebigchoice.com
hehe typical that the first time a story about my company's line of work comes along I've got the server out of the co-lo so it's down until 9am BST when I go and fit the replacement one. I've got a nice Compaq Proliant to replace the 15 reboots in a day hand built.
We offer advice on CVs as well as a CV writing service and, although I say it myself, we do a good job. We have placed plenty of graduates and by Christmas we'll have well over 100,000 members.
Our money really comes from providing recruiters with good graduates so going over the top on a CV just makes us look ridiculous.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I went to a resume service a few years ago and it was a decent experience. She had me sit there and give all the details, while she formatted and reworded things to make it more impressive. I've ended up making significant changes since then, and you can look at the current version if you like. It's linked on my user page.
Really the service she provided was to get the thing started. Once that's done, it's easy to make changes to suit a particular situation or your changing experience and skillset.
As I said, I made significant changes to mine, mostly based on conversations with a guy I knew who had worked in HR doing hiring for a major company. Here are his pointers:
Your resume should be one page. It should be highlights, essentially; sort of like a movie trailer; a teaser to get you an interview. The main reason for this is that your resume will be copied and faxed, and in the process additional pages will probably be lost, and it's annoying to have to deal with staples. If you look at mine you will notice that I have seperate documents for contacts and work history, These cover all the stuff that doesn't need to be in your resume, and can be provided to the interviewer if they want it. You might also notice that I put a fair amount of time into making sure the online version of my resume would print as one page (I'm not sure if the current online version will, but it should be close enough that whatever ends up on the second page is unimportant).
Forget fancy colored paper. Again, your resume is going to be copied and faxed, and in the process the color of the paper will either be lost or will interfere with readability. The only person who will see the fancy colored paper is the receptionist you hand it to, and she's probably an after-school temp.
Use at least a 12 point font. Some of these HR folks have to go through hundreds of resumes, and the ones that stand out best are the ones they can read. Again, faxing and copying plays a factor here, especially faxing since it introduces heavy aliasing.
The final thing I have to say is don't beleive all the hype about the tech job market being in the tank. I've been layed off a little more frequently than I would have been in better times, but it's never taken me more than a couple weeks to find a new job, and so far each has been better than the last. There's nothing particularly special about me. I have only a few years of tech experience and no degrees or certifications. I've come to the conclusion that all the people complaining about there being no jobs are a bunch of lazy whiners.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I've had the same resume' for years. I copied it from somebody when I was in the service (my first "real" job) because I thought it looked good. (I think he'd had it done professionally). Ever since then I've just updated it and in 15 years (and 5 jobs) never had a problem getting lots of good offers and basically being able to pick where I wanted to work.
Until this time!
Fortunately I wasn't laid off, but I did want to move on to more interesting work and it took me a freakin' year to land a good job!! (Lots of offers, all of them complete crap positions).
I used FlipDog as the best job source I could find next to my local newspaper. (Monster/Dice/etc used to be good, now the good stuff is buried a mile deep in crap that nobody wants).
But I also, finally, sent my resume' to these guys, er gals.
I paid the initial couple bucks for feedback only and decided that they at least knew what they were talking about so I gave them some more money (I think the final total was around $70) to just go ahead and do what they were talking about.
And when I got it I said Egads! That's horrible looking! Until I sat down and really read it. It wasn't a layout I would have chosen by any means, but the more I looked at it the more I realised that it was really a much more effective presentation of my skills as a recruiter or hr person would scan for them.
Any computer geek I'd ever shown my old one to said "Wow, awesome resume', come work for us!" and prior to this slowdown that was good enough - HR saw the key words, passed it on and the IT guys did the rest.
But these days it won't get past HR without that added edge.
So yeah, get it done. I really did pick these guys at random originally but they did a good job so I'm passing 'em along!