Smart Money asks if a $1,000 resume can boost your career. What they're getting at is the fact that an ever-growing, expensive array of professional job-hunting services seems to be exploding these days. They'll give you all sorts of advice (for a fee, of course.) The "industry" is now up to $400 million in fees annually -- and showing no sign of declining soon.
On the other hand, maybe this is a money making opportunity for some of us. Just how much can be made? Check this out:
Fees range from just a few dollars for group seminars to $500-an-hour coaching or even—you guessed it—a cut of your salary.
Kinda like "agents" for executives, huh? :-)
Anyway, before I get to my comments, here are a few other facts I found interesting in this Smart Money piece:
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According to career coach Paul Bernard, people should plan for at least a month of searching for every $12,000 to $15,000 they want to earn.
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Some [job seekers] need help rehearsing for the rigorous, multistage interviews now standard in many screenings. Others aren’t sure how to leverage online resources like networking Web site LinkedIn.
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Liz Sumner, the group’s director, recommends that job seekers not just accept the alphabet soup of credentials but also check references and ask for samples of their coach’s work.
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Nothing provokes quite as much angst as creating the perfect résumé—Amazon.com lists over 268,000 titles on the subject—it’s not surprising that a résumé writer is many job seekers’ first hire. When it comes to qualifications, they often tout backgrounds in human resources or recruiting and, of course, those industry certifications. Some focus on senior executives and charge between $800 and $1,500 per résumé, but according to the Directory of Professional Résumé Writers, the majority work with a range of clients, charging an average of $350.
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ExecuNet found that 86 percent of job recruiters said they use search engines to find out more about prospects, while a whopping 44 percent said they’d actually eliminated a candidate based on information they turned up online.
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Like too many CVs, she explains, this [resume] reads like a laundry list of responsibilities rather than a bouquet of specific accomplishments. The document has no “headline” and is woefully short on style—no catchy graphics, shading or boxes setting off the key information. Even the font isn’t right. “Boring,” she says. First, she suggests, we should kick off with a summary of our profession and skills. To play up our accomplishments, we should add the number of “hits” tallied by our online articles, to show measurable results and play up our Web savviness.
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Our presenter is causing eyes to widen as she describes one job seeker who sends Monopoly money with his résumé, along with a cover letter describing how he’d make a company boatloads of the real stuff.
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Role playing. Videotaped practice sessions. Flash cards. All are part of the fun of interview coaching (typical range: $75 to $200 an hour), a key part of many career gurus’ bag of tricks.
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The ideal interview, he says, should be about 80 percent rehearsed responses and 20 percent ad-lib. “You can’t memorize all your lines or you’ll sound like a robot,” says Bernard.
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[How to handle the dreaded-but-popular “tell me about yourself” question]: [The answer] should run about 90 seconds. Start broad, with a quick summary of your professional experience, then drill down to three specific skills, then briefly highlight a few accomplishments.
My take on all of this:
1. If you're skilled, you could make a bundle handing out this sort of advice.
2. If you're not skilled, it may be worth it for you to pay for some of this. After all, if it costs you $1,000 to get a $50,000 a year job you wouldn't have gotten otherwise, it's certainly worth it. Even if it only helps you get hired sooner, it's worth it (if you get hired a month sooner than what you would by yourself, you’ve more than recouped your fees.) Then again, I dish out this sort of advice for free here, so why pay for it? ;-)
3. "Plan at least a month of searching for every $12,000 to $15,000 they want to earn." This means if you earn $50k per year, count on looking four months for a new job. At $100k per year, it's over seven months. I wonder if these stats are based on the past and if the expected times to be hired are longer now given the state of the economy. Then again, these are averages. If you market yourself correctly, you should do much better than average.
4. Rehearse for interviews? Who would have ever thought of that? ;-)
5. Just like you should when you hire any professional, ALWAYS check references. Better yet is getting the inside scoop from someone you know and trust who has used a specific professional.
6. "44 percent said they’d actually eliminated a candidate based on information they turned up online." Yikes! Says a lot about how you need to manage your online "brand."
7. I'm 100% there with the suggestions that your resume needs to be full of quantifiable accomplishments. I'm not so big on creative resumes or over-the-top ways to stand out when applying for a job.
8. "The ideal interview, he says, should be about 80 percent rehearsed responses and 20 percent ad-lib." Yep. I think this is pretty accurate. That said, there's no need to completely ad-lib. You should have at least a general sense of what you'll be saying.
9. Here's my personal take on the "tell me about yourself" question.
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