Did you know
that the real cost of a “low-cost” resume can be $6,000. … or more?
Here’s why.
Before I became a resume writer, I worked for fifteen years in purchasing, financial supervision and database sales. At one point, however, I spent a summer looking for work using a good example of an average resume. What happened during those weeks, I prefer not to think about, but my silent phone taught me all I needed to know about the high costs of using an average resume in a job hunt. Ultimately, it was the events of that summer that led me into resume writing as a profession.
So when people ask me, “How much do you charge for a resume?” I usually don’t answer the question right away. Instead, I make sure that my callers are aware of a couple of key factors that dramatically impact their job hunts. So my reply to the “How much do you charge?” question is something like this:
“It depends on what you want the resume to do. Have you been hired already, and is your employer now telling you that they need a resume for their HR file on you? Or do you need the resume to make job interviews happen? If you’ve already got the job, putting together an acceptable resume is simple: just cite your contact information and record your job history. If you include a responsibility list for each job, the result will pass well enough for the secretary to tick the HR check box. Resumes like this should cost anywhere from $40-$100 at any local secretarial service. But please … don’t use this kind of resume if you’re out of a job and actively looking for work. Using a ‘job history’ resume in this situation very likely means that you will end up paying up to at least $6,000.00 in additional costs and it almost certainly guarantees you a very long and very frustrating job hunt.”
If I hear: “Why do you say that?” I know that my caller does not yet know some critical things that HR folks have been telling us about today’s job hunts. So I reply:
“Even before the current recession began, Human Resources experts told us that most people are so nervous in job interviews that they generally don’t make a good impression in their first interview. Instead, they usually land a job on their second or third attempts when they are more relaxed. Another point the HR people reiterated is that the average resume ends up in the “don’t call” pile somewhere around 95% of the time. Taken together, these points mean that if you use an average resume to apply for 10 jobs each week, the odds are that you that you won’t get an interview until your ninth week, by which point you are so anxious and nervous that talk yourself out of that job, leading to another nine week wait for your next interview, at which you are more relaxed and might impress your interviewer and win the job. So it was no surprise when one study showed that the average executive or professional should expect their job hunt to take between 18 to 27 weeks. Then, I’ll add: “I once spent a summer waiting by a silent phone. It taught me that these studies’ results were indeed accurate! Remember too, that both studies were done before the recession. Nowadays, when even janitorial openings are getting 300 or more applicants, your job hunt could well take longer.
“Today, a resume only containing only contact info, work histories and responsibility lists does not stand out from the 50-100 other candidates who have done the same jobs and have submitted an almost identical resume. In an economy where average resumes are increasingly jamming the circular file, winning job interviews requires a resume that takes less than 20 seconds reading time to convince its readers that you are an outstanding candidate. If you send in an average resume, your phone simply won’t ring.”
“So if you want to be called for job interviews, you need an entirely different kind of resume. Instead of a ‘work history’ resume that is adequate once you have a signed job offer, you must supply a sophisticated marketing document, specifically designed to get managers wanting to interview you. Crafting such resumes is no job for a typist; your writer must have the persuasive powers of a top-flight copywriter, broad business knowledge that can quickly and accurately grasp the essential skills, specialized languages and necessary achievements of a huge variety of employment situations, and the interviewing skills of a master psychiatrist to delve deep into your memory to uncover incidents that show your character and skills in action; achieving the kind of results that make prospective employers want to interview you – and there are not many people with that skill set. So it’s not surprising that competent professional resume writers charge somewhat more than the typist. In the final analysis, however, our work is worth every penny we charge. For in the long run, a professionally written interview generating resume does not cost you a cent: instead it is an investment, making far more money for you than the cost you paid up front.”
At this point, you may wonder: “How can this be?” So I reply:
“Many people never stop and think about the real costs of using an average resume (I know I didn’t), but every job hunter should ask at least this one question; how much will using an average resume cost me? I can’t tell you what your exact costs will be, but I can show you how to find out. If you divide the amount of your desired salary by 52, you will get your gross weekly salary apart from benefits. Multiply that salary by the number of weeks you must allow for the job hunt to take and you get your total out of work cost. The size of the numbers will surprise you. Consider the following examples:”
“If you want a $20,000 salary, your weekly salary is $384.61 and an 18 week job hunt will cost you $6,992.98.
If you want a $50,000 salary, your weekly salary is $961.54 and an 18 week job hunt costs you $17,307.69.
If you want a $100,000 salary, your weekly salary is $1,923.08 and an 18 week job hunt costs you $34,615.38.”
“The real cost of your average resume is not the $100 dollars you paid the typist. The real cost of that resume is the figure you get when you plug in your chosen salary and multiply it by the 18 weeks that an average job hunt takes. Once you have that real cost, ask yourself: can I really afford to risk paying that much for an average resume? Would I risk paying $6,000.00 or more for anything that didn’t do what it was supposed to do?”
“Now, consider instead what happens if your resume is one of the 5% of resumes that achieves above average results. Assume it makes interviews happen not 5% of the time, but 50% of the time (a hit rate that professional resume writers often meet or exceed). If you go job hunting with that resume and you apply for 10 jobs in your first week and your resume is only 50% effective in generating interviews, the odds are that you will have five interviews by the end of your third week (allowing a week between resume arrival and interview date), and at least one job offer from interviews 2 through 5. You might even get more than one job offer, which is a comforting piece of paper to have in your back pocket when you negotiate the final details of your compensation package with your preferred employer.”
“So instead of taking 18 weeks, which is the low end of the average, your job hunt has taken only three weeks and your resume has just enabled you to earn an additional fifteen weeks salary. Your investment in a professional interview generating resume has just made you somewhere between $5,769.15 for a $20K salary $14,423.10 for a 50K salaried job or $28,846.15 if you were hired at 100K, or more – not to mention saving you from a great deal of depression and anxiety.”
“Now ask yourself: ‘Is it worth investing between 3-5% of the additional salary a professionally written resume will earn me in order to massively increase my chances of making $5,000, $14,000 $28,000 or more, much sooner?’ Do you see why investing in an effective resume is the most significant investment you can make in your career? Or, as I sometimes say to my callers: ‘Investing in a professionally written interview generating resume doesn’t really cost you anything. Instead, it makes both dollars and sense.’”
Tim Cunningham, CPRW (tim@ffresume.com) is Vancouver’s only Certified Professional Resume Writer and the Founder and Principal Writer of Fast & Focused Resume Service (www.ffresume.com).
