[tortoise]

TBHPians,

Any of you have personal experiences with many choices of resume writing services ( individual or organizations )? I am planning a switch and would like to hear about personal experiences. There are plenty that comes up with a google search, but not sure how to choose the optimal one ( cost vs quality ).

Any pointers will be appreeciated

[speedmiester]

Originally Posted by tortoise

Any of you have personal experiences with many choices of resume writing services ( individual or organizations )? I am planning a switch and would like to hear about personal experiences. There are plenty that comes up with a google search, but not sure how to choose the optimal one ( cost vs quality ).

As someone closely associated with recruitment at senior levels, please do not use any resume writing services. These resumes are clearly identifiable by recruiters and not in a good way.
A resume is a document to present your accomplishments, skills and experience, no one can do it better than yourself.
Do spend some time in researching on a suitable template and prepare a resume not more than 3 pages. No one has the patience to go through a resume with more than 5 pages.

Also create a LinkedIn profile and build a network a professionals within your area of interest. Do post on topics relevant in your field, this will attract the attention of recruiters. A passive candidate is always valued more than an active one.

[am1m]

Originally Posted by speedmiester

A resume is a document to present your accomplishments, skills and experience, no one can do it better than yourself.

Completely agree. Do it yourself. Get someone you know to proof-read, but compose your resume yourself.

Some more tips:

Keep it short, don't go into details of each and every project you did at each and every job. For freshers, since there is probably not much work-ex (apart from an internship probably) to write about, the temptation is there to write in detail about the college project. Avoid. No one will read it anyway.

Use short sentences. There should be just enough for the interviewer to ask follow-up questions during the interview if they need more details. Instead, use key words. I don't mean to offend recruiters, but usually the people doing the first pass of any resume at any company are not too keen on the task and they are shifting through literally dozens of resumes. So they're just scanning through. In several big companies, this process is automated. So use key words that match the job description. 'Java', 'CRM domain', 'Technical lead', 'Groovy Grails', etc.

Above all, please DON'T lie on your resume. It's ridiculously easy to spot a mismatch between what's on a resume and what a candidate really knows during an interview. If that happens most interviewers simply disregard everything that candidate will say and reject the application.

[Chetan_Rao]

Your resume should be a conversation starter, the whole idea is to give an interviewer a glimpse of your pedigree and accomplishments, get them keen to talk to you, not overwhelm them with a word salad. A resume written by a professional (most sound/look like a marketing media release, 1000 words to say nothing) are often a huge turn-off.

Attention spans are short, resumes often arrive in a flood, the first parse is usually just to check if people meet the must-haves of the job description. Keep the eloquence for the actual interview.

[Spinnerr]

A question to the HR group, in large firms or where large volumes of resumes are handled , isn't that done by a software, something like an ATS (Applicant Tracking System)?

In that scenario, is it helpful to have a professional resume writer work on your resume, present the keywords in the best way, so that the software allots a higher score for your resume? Won't that improve the likelihood to actually get shortlisted?

[am1m]

Originally Posted by Spinnerr

A question to the HR group, in large firms or where large volumes of resumes are handled , isn't that done by a software, something like an ATS (Applicant Tracking System)?

Yes, that is true and some of those systems are pretty good at extracting information from resumes. (Am not in HR, but my wife is, and I've been involved in hiring for teams at my company for quite some time now.)

Originally Posted by Spinnerr

In that scenario, is it helpful to have a professional resume writer work on your resume, present the keywords in the best way, so that the software allots a higher score for your resume? Won't that improve the likelihood to actually get shortlisted?

The issue is that the majority of these resume services do a shoddy job. They have a set of standard templates and 'tricks' they assume will work and they try to force-fit every resume into those formats. So you end up paying for something that actually reduces your chances. For example, when I see 3-4 very similar resumes, I know instantly that they are from the same consultancy and inevitably I stop looking into them seriously because they all seem the same.

Adding keywords is not a tough job or rocket science. Just write a concise, clear, and accurate summary of your work and most candidate management systems will extract the information as expected. Simple stuff like separating the telephone number and address into separate lines so the system can identify them as separate. Separate lines for each job description. A bullet-point list of skills. Stuff like that.