We’re communications professionals who specialize in resumés. We create resumés that work, resumés that stand out—quietly, but definitely and positively. They stand out for professional appearance, for structure that fits each individual’s skills, experience, and market, and for writing that speaks with crystal clarity to the widest possible audience. They give hiring managers, recruiters, and HR people the information they want, the way they want it.
We offer exceptional, highly individualized service and one-on-one work with a consultant. Our Resumé Consulting Service is based on in-depth interviewing, far beyond what other resumé services do (if they do interviewing at all). Our Executive Consulting Service goes beyond that, to add a research and marketing dimension. We know how to dig into each client’s background, to get at skills and experience that people don’t think to mention, or don’t realize that employers want to see. And we know how to dig into each client’s market, to see what skills, experience, and terminology are in demand right now.
For client testimonials about our process and our results, and to see what our work looks like, see the Testimonials and Our Work pages on this site.
We tailor your presentation to meet the needs of your situation in your job market. If you’re just starting out, we’ll give you the best start possible by making the most of your life experience, work background, and training. If you’ve got a long history in your field, we’ll make the most of your value to your next employer, and your ability to fit in as a part of a new team. And so on, for career-changers, consultants, people looking to make the next step up, and every other situation, common or uncommon.
Our process is not complete until you have reviewed and approved the resumé and any other pieces you order. We’re happy to work with you at the review stage, to make sure that your experience and qualifications are presented accurately and effectively, and in language you’re comfortable with.
Your resumé will be fully compatible with current technology. Technical issues send a surprising number of resumés to the trash before anyone at the employer’s end even sees them. A variety of electronic technologies are used in transmitting and processing resumés. Even the commonest of these are not well understood by most resumé specialists. And experts on one technology seldom know much about the others—or about the non-technological aspects of resumé production, which are just as important as they always were. We have extensive technical experience in these areas, and we stay on top of the technology with research and testing.
And we’re with you after the job is done. We’ll send you instructions on how to use your documents. And this site is designed to be an information resource for our customers. But if you need technical help any time after you’ve received your final package, give us a call—it’s part of the service. Your documents are built so you can easily make changes in them, but we’ll also do minor factual revisions free for 30 days.
Read on for information about us, and about our services and process . . .
• Executive & Management • Sales & Accounts • Finance • IT & Electronics • Nursing & Healthcare
• Engineering, Technology, & Manufacturing • Consultants • Military-to-Civilian
A professionally-written, professional-looking resumé gives everyone a boost in the hiring process.
And nothing less than a thoroughly professional resumé will do for highly qualified people.
Even in fields where unemployment rates are still low,
competition for the best jobs has gotten a lot more intense.
We’re pros
in our own field, and we can put it all together: interviewing, writing, design, and technical production.
ABOUT CRYSTAL RESUMÉS:
Kenneth Dezhnev, proprietor of Crystal Resumés, will do all the interviewing, writing, and formatting for your resumé. He’s had over 25 years of experience in business and corporate communications: writing and editorial services for leading national ad agencies, corporations, and publishers, mainly in New York City, along with top-end typographic work including technical consulting and quality control. He’s edited and written proposals and key business communications for marketing consultancies and other firms, consulted on editorial style, and edited scholarly and technical books, reference works, and doctoral theses. (One of his specialties was corporate annual reports—he’s had the complete ARs for three of the Fortune Five on his desk at once for QC.) People who knew his work asked him to do resumés for them, too. That developed into a sideline, and his resumé clients always told him he should make a specialty of it. Eventually he did, launching Crystal Resumés in 2007, a few years after moving to Minneapolis.
Ken knows how resumés are used in the real world. A veteran freelancer, his resumé and job-hunting skills (along with his professional skills and reputation), got him freelance and staff jobs at over ninety firms in a highly competitive job market, including Ogilvy & Mather, Doremus, Martin/Williams, Bozell, Gerstman & Meyers/Schechter, Time magazine’s marketing department, KPMG Peat Marwick, Estée Lauder, Crain’s New York Business, Thomson, Fodor’s, and Miramax. The unique approach he takes to cover letters for his resumé clients is based directly on the system he developed to create targeted letters for his own highly diverse range of prospects and specialties. And he’s been a hiring manager too, and knows what it’s like to screen a stack of two hundred resumés to fill a key position.
Throughout his career, clients in many fields have appreciated Ken’s ability to work closely with them to make their messages clearer and more effective while respecting their specialized knowledge. Ken applies his comprehensive experience—and his trained analytical and research skills—to ask the right questions, identify their needs, and develop detailed verbal and visual strategies. Let him do that for your resumé—you’ll be surprised at the results.
OUR STANDARD SERVICES:
Whichever service you choose, we’ll deliver your resumé in all the essential document formats: Word (.docx and .doc), plain-text for e-mail and Web forms, PDF, and RTF.
These documents are fully editable—you can make any changes you like, on your own. Instructions for when and how to use each format are included, including tips on working with your documents in Microsoft Word.
We start by reviewing your existing resumé and any other information you send us. On the basis of this, we prepare questions for an in-depth interview, to make the most of your background and skills, explore your market, and fine-tune your presentation. The interview typically takes one to three hours. Depending on our workload, we’ll typically need three to five business days to prepare the interview—it’s not a canned script. Our customers are usually quite surprised by its thoroughness, and impressed by how much they learn about their own selling points.
Then we write your resumé, and format it for the most effective visual presentation and technical construction in each resumé document format.
Prices range from $225 for entry-level to $550 for executive. For more details, including specific prices, click here.
Keyword development is included in all our consulting services, to improve the ranking given to your resumé by computerized resumé processing systems.
Please note: the interview is nothing like a job interview. (It does make a good dry run, though.) We’re working for you and with you, looking for material that will help us present you. You can take it easy, and tell us things you wouldn’t mention to an interviewer.
Of particular interest to executives, senior management, and senior people in the professions, who need a focused marketing effort to set them apart from a small but distinguished field of competitors. It includes everything in our Resumé Consulting Service, as well as a more extensive, and sometimes less structured, program of interviewing and research. Typical price for C-level or VP-level executives is $1050. For more details, including specific prices, click here.
We offer the same services for academic, professional, and scientific curricula vitae (CVs) as we do for resumés. You’ll find separate prices for CVs in the price tables for the standard service packages and in the pricing for all other options and services that apply to CVs. That’s because they are usually much longer than resumés, and so require more work. (CVs typically add $50–$100 to resumé prices.) For general information on CVs, see Curriculum Vitae in our Resumé Glossary.
Nursing resumés and CVs are a specialty of ours. In nursing, the terms “resumé” and “CV” are often used interchangeably by healthcare employers and nurses (and by resumé or career specialists). Whatever they’re called, they have this in common with academic and professional CVs: they emphasize professional qualifications to a much greater extent than do conventional resumés. In some cases, however, a distinction is made, with “CV” referring to a more extensive document that lists numerous publications, presentations, and other activities or special qualifications. Whichever you need, we’ll work with you to make sure you get an effective and professional presentation. (For an example, see the Registered Nurse CV on our Work & Testimonials page.)
For the Makeover Service, our primary source of information will be your existing resume and any other information you can e-mail to us before we start the project. This service does not include any interviewing, but we will ask questions as needed to make sure all the essential basic information is there, accurate, and clearly presented. Then we design and format it from scratch, usually with extensive rewriting and re-structuring, for the most effective visual presentation and technical construction in each resumé document format.
Prices range from $150 for entry-level to $350 for executive. For more details, including specific prices, click here.
Most of our other options (“extras”) are available only in combination with one of the standard service packages above.
OPTIONAL EXTRAS INCLUDE:
Cover Letter & Thank-You Letter package. For most job applications, a cover letter is either required or optional. If it’s optional, it’s a valuable option. And a thank-you letter as follow-up after an interview is a major plus. Most resumé services provide only generic, one-size-fits-all job letters. It takes exceptional skill, and hard work, to do anything more. But employers don’t like to see generic letters, and we don’t do them. Instead, on the basis of the consulting interview, we create a letter template designed in detail for your job search. We’ll write your letters using the tone and language appropriate for you and your market. We’ll provide specially-written alternate paragraphs, so you can tailor your presentation to a particular employer—which is what employers want to see. We provide instructions to help you use your templates, illustrated with actual letters to show you how to handle each part of the letter.
Because a good cover letter can only be written on the basis of an in-depth knowledge of your background and objectives, we strongly recommend that if you order letters, you also get our Resumé Consulting Service or our Executive Consulting Service.
Prices for the Letters package range from $90 for entry-level to $285 for executive. For more details, including specific prices, click here.
Additional Target Resumés for when you need multiple versions, targeted to distinct positions or markets.
Networking resumés—A condensed, one-page version of your resumé, to give your networking contacts a handy summary when full detail would be overdoing it.
Professional Biographies. A paragraph or a page, custom-written for your objective.
Don’t have a resumé? In most cases, our clients e-mail us their existing resumé to start from, in a Word or RTF document. We just use it for the basic history—we extract the text and use it as a framework for developing the interviews. (The final resumés we send our clients are always built from scratch. We never revise the old resume documents.) If you don’t have an existing resumé we can start from to develop the interview questions, we’ll send you a questionnaire for the information we need to get started—the basic information on your job history, education, etc. There’s no charge for the questionnaire. If you send us your existing resumé in the form of a scanned PDF or faxed paper, we can’t extract the text from those, so extra charges will apply for retyping the information.
Our extras include two resumé formats that very few resumé specialists offer. They’re standout presentation tools for executives, consultants and freelancers, people in science and technology, and in the arts and media.
• HTML Resumés (Web resumés) for use as Web pages or for e-mailing—in Windows, Mac, and Unix environments.
• True Typeset Resumés produced with professional typesetting software—not word processors—for the ultimate in visual effectiveness and professional appearance.
And just about everything else you might need:
Salary histories and Reference sheets.
A4 (international letter size) for electronic or paper documents going abroad.
Paper printouts and/or delivery on CD. Our normal delivery method is electronic files via e-mail. We can also provide CDs, and high-quality laser printouts on fine business paper, for an extra charge. (There’s virtually no call for these, but we believe in covering all the bases.)
OCR-scannable resumés. They’re obsolete. If you’re traveling back in time to apply for a job, a printout of our plain-text version of your resumé will work fine for OCR scanning. But there’s a lot of confusion about the term “scannable resumés,” so if you think you need one, see our product description for more information. For excruciatingly complete information on this messy question, see More About Scannable Resumes.
We’re also up for special projects and business writing and editing.
If you don’t see what you want, ask for it. We’ve probably done it before.
PLUS—VALUABLE INFORMATION ON THIS SITE
Be sure to bookmark this site. There’s a lot of information here you won’t find anywhere else. It will help you decide what resumé products you need (and don’t need). And there’s useful information for your job search as well.
See especially our Resumé Glossary, with definitions and in-depth information about resumé terminology, technology, and resumé document formats—including how and when to use the different formats. Our Tips & FAQ page is under construction, but is already well worth a look—especially for our “#1 Resumé Tip” and some valuable tips on shopping for resumé services. There’s also an alphabetical site index and an outline site map, keys to the wealth of information on our site.
• First, shop this Web site. Think about which of our services might interest you. You’ll find full detail on our services, including prices, on our Services page.
— Your resumé project will normally be based on one of our standard service packages: the Resumé Consulting Service, the Executive Consulting Service, or the Resumé Makeover. Other options (“extras”) are usually available only in combination with one of the standard service packages.
• We’ll be happy to discuss your project on the phone. If you’d like to discuss a project or get a price quote, or are ready to place your order, it’s a big help if you e-mail us your existing resumé in advance. We’re also glad to answer questions by e-mail.
— Call us at 763-954-1385. Outside the Twin Cities metro area, call toll-free, 1-877-244-3470.
— If you like, we can make appointments to talk at a time that’s convenient for you, including evenings or weekends. Just call, or e-mail us at info@crystalresumes.com. Give us your phone number, with a specific time or times when we can call you. Afternoons or evenings are best. We’ll reply to confirm a time, or suggest another if necessary.
• Like all resumé services, we require full payment in advance before beginning work on your project. (Partial payment options are available for the Executive Consulting Service only.)
But you don’t have to pay for everything else when you order your resumé. If you’re interested in optional services (cover letters, alternate-target resumés, etc.), you can wait until you’ve seen the approval version of your resumé. As long as you order and pay for them no later than the time you give us your final approval of the resumé, you’ll get them at the same price you would have paid if you ordered them at the beginning. (Otherwise there’s a surcharge, typically $40.)
• We accept Visa, MasterCard, Diners Club, Discover, and PayPal. We can also take checks and money orders, but we cannot begin work or commit to a schedule until the payment has cleared.
• Turnaround times:
— Scheduling depends in part on our workload, but before you place your order, we’ll always tell you in advance how long your project will take. Typical times are as follows:
— For our Resumé Consulting Service, we’ll typically need three to five business days to prepare for the interview. After the interview, we’ll need another three to five business days to get you an approval version for your review.
— Cover letters may require an additional day or two.
— For our Resumé Makeover Service, we can usually send you an approval version in three to five business days from the time we receive your existing resumé and your payment.
For more details about the stages of each service, how long things take, and some tips about working with us, see our Process page. Also look at our Business Policies page for more about payment policies and options, and for our policies on privacy and confidentiality (total!), revisions, etc.
Beware of imitations! You are not dealing with Crystal Resumés if you are dealing with anyone under that name using a Web site other than this one, or a Web or e-mail address other than crystalresumes.com.* “Crystal Resumés” is a registered trademark and registered d.b.a. of Dezhnev & Co., Inc. Dezhnev & Co., Inc. has no relationship with any other persons or firms offering resumé services. (* The domains crystalresumes.net/biz/org/us are owned by us to protect our name, but not actively used.)
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E-mail: info@crystalresumes.com Telephone: 763-954-1385
Toll-free outside Minneapolis–St. Paul metro: 1-877-244-3470
Office hours: Monday–Friday
10–6, Saturday–Sunday 10–1 Central Time
Eastern M–F 11–7, S–S 11–2 / Mountain M–F 9–5, S–S 9–12 / Pacific M–F 8–5, S–S 8–11
Evenings & weekends by appointment.
Outside office hours, leave message: we’ll respond ASAP.
All contents copyright © 2011, Dezhnev & Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Perfect speech is like a jade-worker whose tool leaves no mark.
—Lao Tze, Tao Te Ching, XXVII (tr. Arthur Waley)