job search advice.

Why not use professional resume writing services?

I took a call from a fellow just recently and he’d lost his job. As with most people who don’t have oodles of disposable cash lying around, he wanted to get another job quickly.

That made sense.

What made zero sense, was that he wanted to spend as long as it would take to write the perfect resume himself. (Assuming of course that such a thing exists!).

So here he was, concerned that he only had a finite amount of cash on which to live, and yet instead of expediting his job search, he wanted to learn how to write his own resume. He had sent a hundred emails or more to professional resume writing services across the world to receive critiques on his progress (emails that could have been sent to networking contacts or even applying for jobs). He was laboriously learning the ABCs of resume writing via internet research, and he was confused by the often contradictory advice.

Despite all this, he was undeterred.

I asked him, “Is it more important that you learn resume writing, or is it more important that you start getting interviews for jobs quickly?”

He struggled with this for quite some time, before he ultimately decided that he wanted, more than anything else, to write his own resume. He wanted to take command of every aspect of the job search starting at Step 1.

But what if Step 1 was the only step he was ever able to take?

What could possibly be the reason for his reticence? Giving away control of the way his career was represented? Possibly, but from what I saw, he wasn’t doing his career justice anyway. Was it ego? Anxiety? Fear?

I’ll never know, as after spending 30 or 40 minutes on the phone with him providing advice on how to make his resume more compelling, he reluctantly hung up—almost as if he was disappointed that I didn’t say some magic word combination that gave him his “Ah ha!” moment that allowed him to become an instant expert.

I do hope that he found that “Ah Ha” moment somewhere, but I can’t help but thinking he’s still out there, researching to find answers, and never quite getting to the point where he applies for a job.