5 Signs Your Resume Needs Professional Help

A strong resume is a crucial asset to your career that is not easy to build. Hiring resume professional writers to write or rework your resume is a great option but it can be a significant financial investment. Depending on your career level and the writer’s experience, it can cost between $100 and $2000. Here are five signs that professional help will be money well spent.

1. You’re Not Getting Results

Are you actively applying to jobs but not landing interviews? That’s a clear sign that your resume is not working. Your resume is your first impression with a potential employer, and you might have metaphorical spinach in your teeth.

Today’s online job marketplaces create incredible competition with corporate job posting receives around 250 resumes. To handle the load, many companies use applicant tracking systems (ATS). An ATS automatically scans resumes for skills, experience, and even keywords.

Technology is efficient, but it often can’t pick up on the nuances a human can. An ATS might automatically reject your resume if its format is incompatible or if it lacks exact keyword matches. Yes, search term optimization is essential for your resume! Outsourcing the technical work to a resume professional ensures you can impress an ATS as well as a human.

2. Your Creating an Infographic Resume

Creating an infographic resume is arguably even harder than creating a standard one. Getting help from infographics companies like Venngage can be the go-to move to make depending on your specific resume needs. These infographic makers can really ease the process while providing options for you to enhance your resume design in ways that otherwise wouldn’t be available to you.

3. Your Resume Lacks Focus

Hiring managers are busy people. Research shows that your resume has under ten seconds to convey its message before it goes back into the pile. If you have no clear focus, you won’t make it to the interview round.

Writing a succinct and robust resume is much harder than listing all of your accomplishments. Difficulty increases if you have made career changes or don’t know your most marketable skills. A talented writer can make your resume into a focused visual soundbite.

4. You Have Employment Gaps or Other “Issues”

Employment gaps or lack of formal education can be red flags to potential employers. You risk not getting the chance to explain them in an interview if you don’t address it on your resume the right way.

The same way a professional photographer knows how to capture its subject in the best light, a professional resume writer can convey your strengths while addressing any concerns. Think of it as personal PR. Understanding how your resume writer works with these realities can also help you address these questions during the interview process.

5. Your Resume is Full of Clichés and Vague Information

You are not going to stand out to a potential employer if your resume overuses generic terms like “hard worker” and “team player.” While these descriptors might be accurate, they don’t convey your talent in a meaningful way.

Your resume should provide concrete and, if possible, quantitative evidence of your value. Calling out that you successfully managed 20 marketing campaigns at one time is a more convincing tribute to your work ethic than the term “hard-worker.” This requires self-bragging which not everyone is comfortable with. If you’re not, get someone else to be your promoter. They will ask you the right questions about your work experience to pull these, sometimes unrecognized, accomplishments out of you.

6. You’re Changing Careers

Likely, the bulk of your resume is work history and credentials. So, what if you’re pivoting and that experience isn’t relevant to your new industry? Updating a resume through career changes is challenging and often requires an outsider’s perspective to find marketable qualities. A career expert can refit your resume to highlight these strengths or rewrite your work experience to focus on transferrable skills.

Even if you see how your skills apply to a new career, it’s still worth investing in a professional. Different industries value different things, and if you use the same resume practices from your old industry, you might miss the mark. Hire someone who understands these nuances and can tailor your resume to stand out in your new field.

Enhancing your resume is commonly considered the most crucial step in your job search. Without an excellent first impression, you can miss opportunities, even if you are qualified. If you are actively combing the job market and have a resume with any of these five concerns, investing a professional could pay significant dividends.