Tips & Myths: Conventional wisdom that can wreck your job search.

Questions about résumé basics are answered on the Résumé Encyclopedia page—especially questions about terminology, types of résumés, document formats, and résumé technology.

TIPS

• Our #1 résumé tip is: Beware of résumé tips. (And beware of supposed conventional wisdom.) Don’t ignore them—some of the tips and conventional wisdom are pure gold. But a very large proportion of what you read or hear—on the Web, on TV, in books, from “experts” (including “certified” résumé writers) and your friends and family, has nothing to do with reality. Sadly, school and government counselors don’t seem to do any better. So you have to think critically, all the time, and make your own judgment about what sounds real and what sounds like hype.

Much of what’s written about résumés (and about job hunting) is just “recycled” from other sources—which were themselves recycled from older sources, and so on.

Some of it has been “recycled” for decades, and has become badly outdated since it was first written. The people who repeat it have no idea how old it is—let alone what the original context was. So a lot of it also gets taken badly out of context when it is picked up and dropped into the latest hype. For instance, some of the conventional résumé advice (like “keep it on one page,”) was originally aimed at junior job-seekers, and never did apply to more experienced people.

A lot of résumé tips were originally do-it-yourself advice, meant to show an untrained person how to produce a mediocre but safe résumé. Professionals can cut things a lot finer, and get better results. It’s not a question of breaking the rules. It’s a question of knowing all the rules—editorial, typographic, and technical—, knowing when they apply and when they don’t, and knowing the best tradeoffs when the rules conflict, as they sometimes do.

Many of those who recycle erroneous, outdated, or out-of-context résumé information are just writing filler articles for Web media, newspapers, or magazines that want to fill the “news hole”—the space between the ads—as cheaply, quickly and uncontroversially as possible. The cheapest, quickest, and (in many people’s eyes) the safest way to fill space with words is to copy what other people are saying. The Web makes this easier than ever. You just change the words around a bit so no-one can say you’re copying. When people who don’t understand the subject matter change wording and combine information from different sources, the information degrades further. The result is sometimes a travesty even of the outdated information they were copying.

Books and courses—or coaching, for that matter—are no better. A lot of people will buy anything that promises to help them find work, so there’s a huge and safe market for half-baked résumé advice.

And since bad information is so widespread, people you know are likely to recycle it to you when they give you advice. That includes friends, relatives, and, unfortunately, also many recruiters, counselors and teachers who’ve never explored the subject beyond the surface, and so have no idea how unreliable most of the easily available information is.

I’ve built Crystal Résumés—services, procedures, and technology standards—on independent research, and on years of experience in writing, research, typography, and technical production. You’ll see a lot of that research and expertise summarized on this site.

“Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies.
Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may
be made to utter words of wisdom;
elsewhere, they say nothing,
or talk nonsense.”

KILLER MYTHS ABOUT RÉSUMÉS

There’s a world of misinformation out there about anything that pertains to finding a job. This includes some “Killer Myths”—misinformation that can totally wreck your job search even if you do everything else right. Many related topics are covered on the Résumé Encyclopedia page.

KILLER MYTH #1: “KEEP IT ON ONE PAGE” (and how long your résumé should be)

The one-page résumé is the most pervasive and misleading myth about résumés. “Keep it on one page” is good advice for someone who’s just entering the job market, or for people who have only a few years of experience in jobs with fairly straightforward responsibilities, or many years of experience in some less-skilled jobs. In some fields, a significant number of the people who read entry-level or junior résumés will literally throw out any résumé that runs longer than one page. before I specialized in executive and senior tech résumés, I wrote one-page résumés for those clients.

But for other job seekers, few things will sink your job search faster than a one-page résumé. All of my executive, management, professional, and senior tech résumés have virtually always run onto a third page. This is not a matter of theory for me. For many years, I used my own tightly-packed three-page résumé to find freelance and staff work—and I got enthusiastic responses to it.

When you get much beyond the entry-level or semi-skilled stage, your résumé will eventually go onto a second page. Depending on your field, once you’ve had five or ten years of experience, you’ll usually need two or three pages, and in some specialties sometimes more. In most fields, once you’ve acquired some experience, you just can’t fit enough on one page to get across everything that qualifies you for a responsible job, that makes you stand out from other applicants, and that covers all the likely possibilities for what a given employer will be looking for in a résumé. You also can’t fit in enough keywords to get you past an automated screening. If it does get past the screening, a smart, experienced hiring manager or HR person, who is looking for someone to take on important responsibilities in a difficult job, and who has a large pile of other résumés that have also passed the screening, is probably going to toss a one-page résumé in the trash.

For job-seekers with substantial experience in responsible positions, an effective résumé is one that starts out with key points and a professional appearance, to give an employer incentives to keep reading, and then backs up those points and that appearance by setting forth all the concrete background an employer might want to see, fully and clearly but without wasting words or space. An effective résumé should also facilitate both scanning for main points and reading in detail—each of these is critical at different stages of the hiring process. “Too long” isn’t a function of how many pages, but of how much needs to be included and how efficiently it is expressed.

Unfortunately, since everyone has heard the “keep it on one page” line when they were starting out, and since it’s applicable to so many people even later in their careers, that advice is all over the place. It’s usually taken out of context, by people who don’t realize that it only applies to less qualified job-seekers. Many of the people who repeat it without knowing what it really means are just writing filler articles for newspapers, magazines, or Web media. In any case, they’re just copying what they saw somewhere else. Low-end résumé services also sometimes talk as if a one-page résumé is all anyone needs—because a page of obvious bullet points is all they’re capable of doing (especially at bargain-basement prices). Because it’s everywhere in print and on the Web, “keep it on one page” is also repeated out of context by career counselors trying to help adults who are farther on in their careers.

And so, “keep it on one page” has become an extremely widespread myth. This means that occasionally you may run into a hiring manager or HR person who believes it too, even when they’re hiring for highly skilled positions in fields where résumés normally run two or three pages, or even more. They may persist in that belief for a while, because few people will dare to correct them. I’ve seen this happen even with managers in specialties like I.T., where résumés normally run from two pages for junior people to five pages for managers. That shouldn’t be surprising. If you’ve been around for a while, you undoubtedly know that by no means all hiring managers are competent in their fields, and that the connection between HR and reality is not always tight. And in any case, even competent managers may have some blind spots when it comes to functionalities outside their professional skill set—functionalities such as communications, which is a professional specialty all to itself.

There are limits to résumé length, of course. Three pages is the practical maximum for most résumés. I.T. résumés may run to four or even five. (In fact, I don’t often go beyond three even for senior I.T. résumés. But I like to think I write more concisely than most, and I can certainly get more on a page than most without having it look crowded.) Professional or academic CVs, which list publications, seminars, etc., can go to six or eight pages if there’s enough material.

Your résumé doesn’t have to keep growing in length with the years. As you add recent experience relevant to your evolving goals, you’ll just condense or weed out the older information that either isn’t relevant to your current objectives, or gives more space than is needed to experience that is duplicated in your more recent job history. (You still, of course, have to show that your experience in key areas goes back a ways.)

The important thing to remember is that no competent manager or HR person ever bounced a résumé for a mid-level or senior position just because it ran to more than one page. And on the other hand, it’s the smartest and most knowledgeable managers who are impressed by a coherent and detailed presentation (with no wasted words, of course). In your job search, you’ll be running into a few incompetents, along with a much larger group who appreciate full information. Which group do you want to please?

— David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy & Mather,
on the occasion of his induction into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame

When people call me and say that they’ve sent out lots of résumés and gotten no response whatever, the usual reason is that they’re using a “functional résumé.”

“Functional résumés” (also called “skills-centered” résumés) don’t show skills and experience in connection with your job history—what you did for each employer. Instead, they give only a list of employers, job titles, and dates, and put everything else—skills, experience, projects, etc.—in a separate skills section, with no chronological framework or links to when or where the skills were exercised.

HR people and hiring managers HATE these résumés, since they don’t back up your claims with a concrete, verifiable history, don’t allow readers to form a picture of what you did at each job, and give no idea of how recent is your experience in any particular skill or subspecialty. There’s not even any assurance that the skills listed were ever exercised in a professional context at all. Functional résumés go straight into the trash—there are always many more résumés in the pile.

Talk about “functional” versus “chronological” résumés is an example of the terminology hype that is very common in the résumé business. The distinction between functional presentation and chronological presentation is a mildly interesting theoretical distinction, and can help you learn about how to approach the treatment of certain elements within a résumé. But in practice, virtually all good résumés will use a combination of the two approaches—with chronology very much dominant.

Professionals in healthcare and some other fields may use purely chronological résumés. On the other hand, hands-on IT and tech people often benefit from a longer functional section, but that’s in addition to a full chronological section, not instead of it—these résumés can run to five or six pages. And in IT résumés, the functional section consists mainly of lists of software and hardware names—not soft skills. The art is finding the right balance for each job-seeker, and using each in the right place in the résumé. This will mean, as I’ve said, that the chronological side is very much dominant, because only that will give employers the history need to back up the claims of competence.

In fact, leaving out the history and just listing skills is well known, among employers and among résumé writers, as a way to cover up a lack of experience, or, even worse, a problem background. If you look around, you’ll see a fair number of résumé services that make a selling point of this in their websites.

You’ll also see a good number of résumé professionals who will tell you, as I am, that functional résumés are no good at all. But this is recent. When I started out (in 2008, with an earlier version of this article), there weren’t a lot of people in the résumé business pointing out the problem.

And others, such as career counselors, freelance writers, your friends, and your relatives, are even slower to get the word.

Even now, you’ll find nationally known and highly certified résumé consultants who tout résumés that are almost purely “functional”—that is, they list most or all major skills and achievements separately from your job history. Somehow, it doesn’t seem to occur to them that employers may be aware of this obvious trick.

They don’t seem to have gotten the word that their résumés are being tossed into the trash. That’s probably because these are people who, though they may have started out writing résumés professionally, now make their real money from lecturing, coaching, and selling books. (That’s one of the economic realities of the résumé business.) They clearly have no serious professional writing or editing background, and don’t do research to see if their practices actually work.

In fact, “functional résumé” is an old, old buzzword, a concept that keeps getting repeated in books and articles by people who just copy from older sources and don’t check their facts.

Functional résumés never worked, and they’re even more disastrous in today’s age of automated résumé processing. Résumé-processing systems are focused largely on identifying the history, by detecting dates and company names followed by bullet points. They also look for sections with common titles like “Education”. What they don’t look for, and don’t prioritize or perhaps even process, is assertions with no traceable connection to history.

Try doing a Web search for the following phrase: functional resumes don’t work. You’ll see many discussions of that topic, and if you read the comment threads you find, you’ll see many comments from HR people to the effect that functional résumés get thrown immediately in the trash.

Quite a few résumé services feature résumé with non-standard fonts, and with colors, images, and other devices that are supposed to make them more attractive. Attractive, maybe. Effective, no. Because that’s not how résumés work.

For technical reasons, graphics and non-standard fonts, and also the tables that nearly all résumé services use to control their layouts, either don’t get though electronic résumé transmission and processing at all, or come out so messy no-one will bother to read them. Even Word’s automatic bulleted lists are a minor problem. Virtually everyone uses them, but there are safer ways to do this job, that also look a lot better. (There are, after all, a few hundred other résumés in the pile.)

The technical reasons are inescapable—résumés have to be pretty much plain vanilla. Résumés are subject to all sorts of electronic handling by programs other than Word. The many Word features that don’t work with such programs can make a résumé unreadable and unprocessable.

And Word is a pretty clunky tool for visual refinement—especially if you have less-than-profound knowledge of the program, and no knowledge at all of real-world typography. Tarted-up Word documents look tacky compared to a lot of other documents people see. Quality typographic work is done with programs much more powerful and better-designed than Word. (For twenty years, Adobe InDesign was essentially the only player in this field. Today, Affinity Publisher may be an up-and-coming competitor.)

Fonts are another issue. Only a very small number of fonts—three or four, at the most—are both typographically suitable for resumés and present on all computers. Fonts—fontware—is separate from the documents that use the fonts. Fontware doesn’t get transmitted along with Word documents (or most other documents that use them). If computer used by the person receiving your résumé doesn’t have the fonts you used to compose it, another font will be substituted. Lines will rerun, page breaks will change, and the appearance and readability of your resumé will be seriously degraded. (For more about this, see the section on fonts for résumés in the article on Word in our Résumé Encyclopedia.)

However, there are some expert formatting features in Word that allow you to use almost all the visual formatting techniques you could want (except tables and columns), give you finer control than the clunky features usually used, and actually don’t have technical compatibility issues in résumé processing.

And if you have a production professional’s knowledge of typography, fonts, and font technology, you’ll know the best fonts to use, and how to use them most effectively.

With résumé formatting, the art is to make plain vanilla look good. I can apply years of professional experience with typography, production technology, and editing, for demanding corporate and media clients, to make plain-vanilla stand out for appearance and functionality.

KILLER MYTH #4: OUTLOOK.COM, HOTMAIL, MSN.COM, LIVE.COM (why you shouldn’t use them)

Do you tell prospective employers to contact you at an Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN.com, or Live.com e-mail address? If you do, there’s a small but real chance that Microsoft will block a given employer’s e-mail if they respond to yours. You’ll never know they answered your e-mail. The employer may never know that you didn’t receive their e-mail. Even if they find out, they’re not likely to make any further effort to contact you.

This is a problem only with Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN.com, and Live.com—all of which are owned by Microsoft. This can affect all e-mails sent to Outlook, Hotmail, MSN, and Live e-mail addresses—not just responses to job applications. No other e-mail services arbitrarily block e-mails from other reputable e-mail services or ISPs like this. This has been going on with Microsoft e-mail services since at least 2003. It seems to have gotten worse since about 2012. Microsoft’s changeover to Outlook.com (in 2013/2014) didn’t have any effect on this problem.

The e-mails that are blocked are legitimate e-mails. They’re not spam, they don’t come from suspicious sources, and they aren’t being transmitted through suspicious e-mail services or ISPs (Internet Service Providers). The sources and ISPs are not on any of the blacklists used by IT security firms to identify spam sources. Only Microsoft is blocking these e-mails.

A large number of reputable, long-established ISPs and their customers have been affected. These include major ISPs such as Comcast and GoDaddy.

All of a sudden, an entire company (in one case, an entire university) finds that e-mails sent to people with Outlook, Hotmail, MSN.com, or Live.com addresses aren’t getting through. Sometimes the sender gets a bounceback message. Sometimes they don’t even get that, so they don’t know the e-mail was lost.

What this means for you is that if you contact a prospective employer using your Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN.com, or Live.com address, it’s possible that the mail they send back to you will be blocked. This is an especially serious problem for job inquiries. That’s because if an employer who sees that e-mails sent to you are bouncing, they will probably make no effort to re-contact you. Sometimes the employer may not even be notified that the e-mail bounced. Even if they do re-contact you, the same problem will recur at every stage of the hiring process, with every person from that company who e-mails you.

This isn’t happening to everyone with an Outlook.com, Hotmail, MSN.com, or Live.com address. But it’s happened to a lot of people, it’s been going on for a long time, and there’s no reason to expect it to change soon. With all the trouble you take over a job inquiry, with all you’ve got riding on it, why take a chance with something like this?

The problem is definitely at Microsoft’s end. There is nothing you can do about it, except to use another address for e-mails, an address that isn’t managed by Microsoft. There is nothing that the employer can do about it, and if there were, there’s no chance that they’d take the trouble. There is little or nothing that the ISPs and non-Microsoft e-mail services can do about it. ISPs are constantly contacting Microsoft about this. Each occurrence of the problem is eventually fixed, but Microsoft is very uncooperative, they can take a very long time to fix it (weeks, often months), and the problem constantly recurs. Microsoft has claimed that there is a simple technical solution that ISPs can use. But it obviously never worked very well in practice.

Microsoft says that the blocking is caused by false alarms from their spam-detection systems, which automatically block certain servers used by various ISPs. Microsoft acknowledges that they’re false alarms. Nobody else’s spam-detection systems have this problem. Since the same problem has persisted since at least 2003, it obviously reflects either a deliberate policy of Microsoft, or an astonishing degree of technical and organizational incompetence over a long period of time.

SOLUTION: I strongly recommend that, if you use a Hotmail, MSN.com, or Live.com e-mail address, you switch to using a Google Gmail address, at least for your job search, and for other critical e-mails to total strangers who won’t take any trouble to deal with communications problems.

It’s also handy to have a backup address in case there are problems with your main e-mail address.

I don’t trust Google very far at all, but to the best of my knowledge, Microsoft has never blocked mail sent from Gmail addresses. Others who have looked into this problem say the same thing. Apparently even Microsoft doesn’t dare mess with that large a user base.

I recommend Google’s g-mail for employment e-mails because independent ISPs, who offer mail services as well as website hosting, have the same problems with being blocked by Microsoft. As for the many non-independent ISPs out there, may of them actually are notorious spam hosts, and get blacklisted (blocked) accordingly, and not just by Microsoft. (See “Choosing an ISP”, below, for more on this.)

I don’t recommend Yahoo (remember Yahoo?) because they have occasional problems of their own. But if you’re already using a Yahoo address, there may be no urgent reason to change. If you have an AOL address, keep in mind that this dates you—AOL e-mail hasn’t been a popular thing for a long, long time. (And I wrote that last sentence in 2008. Remember AOL from the days of floppy disks? They’ve been part of Yahoo for a long time now.)

(Another thing: When choosing your new e-mail address, pick something that is appropriate for use in e-mails to potential employers.)

“Reasons for rejection may be related to content with spam-like characteristics”

(This wording is from Microsoft’s standard bounceback message.) You’ll see many postings by IT people discussing this problem. It was still going on as of 2018, and it’s still going on in 2023.

In 2007, Dan Goodin, an internationally-recognized IT security expert, wrote an article about this in The Register: “Hotmail’s antispam measures snuff out legit emails, too.” It’s exactly the same thing that is occurring now.

CHOOSING AN ISP (not relevant to résumés, but useful info, and perhaps hard to find): If you’re looking for an ISP (or hosting service) to host your website or for private e-mail service, do your homework and make sure it’s a reputable one. ISPs that host a lot of spam-generators are likely to be blacklisted. And cheap e-mail hosts (see below, on EIG/Newfold) might make their real money by spamming you, pushing ads at you, selling the information you provide, and wasting your time with efforts to hook you onto signing up for features that cost money. In the hosting market, the better-known names are not always the best.

Crystal Résumés has used MDD Hosting for web hosting and e-mail since 2016, and we recommend them highly. They seem to be one of the best-known and best-regarded independent hosting services.

A tip for weeding out the usual suspects: For a long time, a surprisingly large number of hosting firms—big, medium-sized, and medium-small, including many well-known names—were owned by a company called Endurance International Group (EIG). EIG did not have a good reputation, and the quality of service at the firms they acquired was said to fall off badly post-acquisition. EIG merged with Web.com in 2021 to form Newfold Digital, one of the world’s largest web-hosting providers. Newfold seems to have the same reputation that EIG had. (See, for example, thishosting.rocks, List of All EIG (Newfold Digital) Hosting Providers and Why You Should Avoid Them, which I checked in March of 2024.)

THE RÉSUMÉ BUSINESS IN GENERAL:

Cheap Résumés, Small Practices, and Résumé Mills;
Price/Value and Size Realities in the Résumé Business;
And Why Résumé Services Are Not All Even Approximately The Same

Résumé-service prices are all over the place. Résumé-service capabilities are all over the place, too. The connection between price and capabilities is not always close. However, while you don’t always get what you pay for with résumé services, you’ll never get anything you don’t pay for.

That’s why you have to shop for much more than price—but price, and size, can give you some important clues, especially in combination with certain other cues.

Before AI, the low end of the résumé price range was from $50 to $100 or $200. For this, you got just the information that you yourself provided, with minimal modification, slapped fast and carelessly into a one-size-fits-all, one-page résumé template, with no quality control. These were often smaller operations. However, there were, and are, nationally-known résumé mills that charge $900 for the same thing, with perhaps a generic scripted interview added, and maybe a second page.

With AI, the low end is now zero dollars, for the same product. Of course, there are catches. The free ones aren’t actually free. And/or they’ll spam you forever. And/or they do hard-sell upselling for more expensive services. There are a lot of job-seekers out there to whom a hard-sell expert can sell anything once the seeker has been hooked, as long as it promises to get them the job they want. See, for example, the article on The Ladders, above. Many of these low-end businesses are résumé mills relying on hard-sell expertise. There also seem to be large numbers of small operators in the under-$50 range, doubtless all using ChatGPT AI, and scraping up whatever they can from whoever calls them—the same business model that spammers have always used.

At the low end, résumé services will charge you the same price whether you’ve had zero years of experience or thirty. This is a big red flag. You should expect a résumé service’s prices to vary depending on your level of experience. The longer you’ve been working, the more information has to be presented in your résumé. The more information, the more time the job takes, and the higher the fee must be. Also, as job-seekers climb higher in the ranks, there’s a bigger payoff for carefully tailoring their presentation to their market and their specialty. That takes time, too (Not coincidentally, many one-price résumé services also tout the “one-page résumé” myth. That’s discussed in the Killer Myths section, above.)

There used to be a large and diverse group of résumé services that fell in the mid-range as far as price was concerned. Quality was another matter. Prices might range from about $200 into the high three digits. Some were big résumé mills, some were small operations.

Some of them delivered low-end quality, plus a few frills that still left the résumé a low-grade product. Some of them adhered to the one-price-fits-all, one-page model of the low-enders, some charged more for people with more and more-specialized experience. Some were small, some were big résumé mills; they usually had better-looking websites than the under-$100 bunch.

At the next step up towards useful quality, most mid-rangers were well-meaning mediocrities who just did what they saw everyone else doing. These might be small operations, or they might be the people who founded and staffed the big résumé mills. A lot of people think that preparing résumés professionally, for others, is something that anyone at all, regardless of experience, can learn to do in a short time. Quite a few people have gone into the résumé business in that belief. Eventually, they formed associations, and certified each other. Their résumés would look inferior next to a résumé written by a caring, knowledgeable professional, and often had some serious flaws.

Other résumé services delivered, and still deliver, value for money. These were, and are, usually small operations. They wrote résumés that could help you get a job. Quality and service varied, but it more or less corresponded with price, because they were professionals who understood that good work—and learning how to do good work—took time, and time had to be paid for if you wanted to stay in business. Since they had a satisfied customer base, and could attract new customers by displaying professionalism that can’t be faked, most of them saw no need to get “certified,” though some have since done so. It seems to me that a number of these quality-oriented professionals are still around, and that they have survived AI and other changes better than the small mediocrities and low-enders.

AI, and perhaps other changes, have, it seems to me, knocked out a lot of the small low-grade and mediocre résumé services. The quality professionals, most or all of them small operations, have survived better. But there are more big, low-grade or mediocre, résumé mills in the middle price range than ever before. They dominate the résumé business now. They alone have the budgets to get national exposure through Google, and the volume needed to establish partnerships with large organizations and get endorsements and top-ten ratings from major media—who get a fee for every connection, just like Amazon, or perhaps some other sort of kickback.

By all means, do a Web search for phrases like “#1 resume service”, “top ten resume services”, etc., and see what the picture looks like to you. You’ll see who gets the ratings from big-name business media. Notice that the only operations mentioned are big national ones—the résumé mills, and their prices are all over the place, but mostly from low-end to mid-range. Some of them do one-size-fits-all résumés.

The high end (say, mid-to-high three-digits to well over $1000, varying with the customer’s level of experience and job type) was, and is, a mixed bag as well as far as quality is concerned. There are some résumé mills that charge high-end prices for little better than low-end products. There are, I presume, other résumé mills that offer mid-level quality for high-end prices, and I suppose there may be some that deliver high-end quality for high-end prices—but I’ve never seen the evidence.

At the high end, as in the mid-range, the most likely-looking—and least-known—résumé services are the small operations. They may be one-person shops (like Crystal Résumés), or the one person may have hired some staff. (Becoming an employer is a BIG step, and not everyone wants to take it.) They’re the ones who can devote more of their income to expenses that provide value to customers.

Even if the service menu is the same, the best résumé services will put A LOT more time and knowledge into the job than others. (For instance, I put in more clock time on the formal quality-control stages than some operations spend on the entire job.) That investment has to be reflected in the price, and people with exceptional skills command a high price for their time. Those who deliver top quality résumés have learned the hard way to charge accordingly. In a business crowded with low-ballers, quality can’t compete on price.

On the other hand, in large résumé companies, a large proportion of the price may represent the costs of scaling up, which are a much larger percentage of the gross than they are for small shops. Salaries and administrative costs add up quickly—even the low salaries (or more likely, piecework payments) that are given to most résumé writers employed by the résumé mills.

To support the additional costs, you need volume. And volume means advertising budgets in the high 5-digit or 6-digit range. There are no bargains when you start advertising outside your local area. Google and LinkedIn don’t make much money from small businesses.

In fact, even the Google LOCAL listings are apt to include big nationwide résumé mills with no actual local presence, which spend time and money to create the appearance of a local presence in multiple metro areas. If you don’t see anything local except the area code, they’re not local.

Another way the big nationally-known résumé companies gain volume and publicity is through partnerships with big media firms or big job sites, or perhaps recruiting firms. This may involve giving a percentage of revenue to the partner, in return for getting on the partner’s “Best Résumé Writers” list. When these firms look for résumé services to “partner” with, high volume is an essential criterion—they’re getting a cut of the fees, so they want a “partner” who does a large volume of business.

Those extra costs have to be reflected in the prices you pay, but they don’t reflect any extra value for you. In fact, they’re likely to mean less value for you, because no company can fill a large stable with competent writers, let alone top-end interviewers/writers/formatters, for the money that the résumé mills pay their writers.

In fact, small is often better, for a simple economic reason. On the one hand, it doesn’t take much money to get into the résumé business. On the other hand, given quality work and competitive prices, the profit margin isn’t high enough to make a profit while paying competitive salaries to skilled employees—unless you can charge high-end prices, and use the money to pay skilled staff, rather than spending it on the expensive publicity needed for a high-volume operation.

So combining high quality with high volume isn’t an option, because people with professional-level skills (and even a lot of mediocre people) can do better on their own, if they have any head for business, and keeping the whole fee. In addition, there just aren’t that many people with high-end skills. That’s why so many résumé services are small local shops, even one-person operations. (Of course, that’s what Crystal Résumés is.)

OTHER RÉSUMÉ MYTHS

ON-LINE JOB SITES—INCLUDING LINKEDIN (what they’re good for and what they’re not)

The Web can offer some nice tools, but there’s an awful lot of hype and snake oil out there. Two of the biggest fields for con games in today’s world are 1) anything to do with the Web, and 2) anything to do with finding a job. Combine the two, and you've got a perfect storm of sucker bait. Beware of anything that poses as in any degree a substitute for a good reputation and diligent personal digging. (And a good résumé.) A lot of the time people spend on Web job-search tools might often be better spent taking care of other things—or just taking a break, to keep you relaxed, alert to opportunities, and ready to respond effectively to an opportunity when it comes.

The proportion of jobs filled through online job sites other than LinkedIn is on the order of one or two percent. The percentage that are filled by employers who find résumés posted on these sites by job seekers, rather than through job-seekers’ responses to postings, is probably a lot smaller. LinkedIn may well do better, but the percentage is still quite small, judging by what I’ve read and by what I hear from my clients about how they get jobs and about how they recruit. There are knowledgeable people in employment-related businesses who regard LinkedIn as basically just another job board. There are people who have applied for hundreds of jobs on LinkedIn or other sites and gotten nothing but runarounds.

The employers who do search for candidates on LinkedIn and other job sites are not always the most desirable employers. Most real employers are surprisingly slack about actually searching for good employees. They’re likely to leaving the work of searching to clerical staff. In most companies, for all but the highest-level jobs, the usual attitude in HR is to make the job seeker do all the work.

Like every other means of job hunting, job sites work best for people with scarce, sought-after skills. Most or all of the people I know who have actually gotten jobs through these sites are experienced IT people or engineers. But on the whole, job boards are like many other things that are popularly seen as cure-alls: they only work well for people who would do alright without them.

You’re better off sticking with the free sites and free services, and staying away from any paid on-line job search tools (including LinkedIn’s). And be very skeptical of any online job-hunting tools, paid or free. Even if you don’t spend a lot of money on them, you could find yourself blowing a lot of time for which you have a better use. Even if a service isn’t worthless, it may well not be worth the time it takes to use. Many such sites are designed to keep you on-line and involved for as long as possible to increase the chance of your signing up for something that costs money—or just to rack up user time and page views that make the site look like an effective advertising medium. Advertising is always a major source of revenue for the site’s owners. LinkedIn may be an exception to some extent: they make about 39% of their revenue from paid premium accounts (including both recruiter accounts and job-seeker accounts); the rest comes from advertising (36%) and other sources (24%).

LinkedIn has other uses than as a job site, but as a job site, it’s just another job site. Remember that on LinkedIn you’re in a very large crowd. As of 2024, LinkedIn claims more than ONE BILLION members worldwide, with 214 million members in the U.S. (Interestingly, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimates the working-age (15−64) population of the United States as 209 million.) Membership spiked during the COVID epidemic and continues to grow rapidly.

How much could you improve your exposure by paying for a LinkedIn Premium subscription? LinkedIn doesn’t seem to give actual numbers of paid premium subscribers, but I’ve seen estimates ranging from 176 to over 200 million premium users worldwide. Proportionately, that suggests about 40 million premium subscribers in the U.S. A Reuters story quotes LinkedIn’s COO as saying that the number of premium subscribers increased 25% in 2023, “though the company did not give an absolute figure.” So the premium subscriber bracket still looks like a very large crowd.

You’ve doubtless thought about the level of competition you face in the job market. Pretty much everyone has a LinkedIn profile these days. How many of those millions of members (including those outside the U.S.) are looking for the same jobs you are? Anyone searching for talent on LinkedIn is going to find all of them. So you’re back where you were—in a stack of hundreds or even thousands of resumes. The only advantage of LinkedIn—and it’s a real one—is that it can be easier for people to find you who wouldn’t find you otherwise. But it’s easier for them to find your competition, too.

There’s another problem with thinking of a LinkedIn profile as a job-hunting tool the way a résumé is. Your profile is public, and your name is on it. (The same is true of a résumé posted on a job site.) You can’t put anything on it that you don’t want your current employer to see. Especially for key people, their employers may be checking. A résumé can look like a tool designed to sell your value to a prospective employer. Your LinkedIn profile had better not look like that.

Indeed.com can pick up a few postings from the career pages on corporate websites that the other big job sites miss. (But again, it seems to work mainly for experienced IT people and engineers.) CareerBuilder.com is worth checking, but they aren’t as good as they were when they established their reputation—there are a lot more “spam” listings for bogus opportunities like work-at-home schemes. Simplyhired.com looks interesting, and is well spoken of, though I haven’t explored them in detail. Monster is still around. After you’ve been to two or three big job sites, you’ll see that (except for a few on Indeed.com), they all have pretty much the same postings. LinkedIn may perhaps do better, because it’s more fashionable.

There are also lots of industry-specific job sites. Some of these are major resources, but many others may have so few job postings they’re not worth bothering with. The same is true of government-sponsored sites.

One thing you should never do, except as an absolute last resort, is to apply for a job through a third-party job site. The people who run these sites have their own agenda for any data you send through them, which adds a lot of complications to the way they process your application. This increases the chances that some glitch will leave you in doubt as to whether or not your application even went through—and wondering whether to risk making yourself look silly or desperate by re-submitting. This can happen fairly often on third-party job sites. If you see a job you want to apply for, you’re much better off going to the employer’s company site and applying there—or perhaps in some cases, doing some digging to get a direct line to someone in the company. (Employer job sites aren’t always fully functional either. Neither is HR.) If you don’t see any information in the posting that enables you to find the employer, try Googling some distinctive key phrases from the posting, along with the job title. There’s a good chance you’ll find the same posting elsewhere, either on the employer’s site or on a third-party site with information about the employer. If you don’t, wait a few days and try again.

Employers and recruiters with real job openings won’t necessarily go looking on the Web for résumés. Very often employers don’t even look for résumés in their own files. HR’s normal procedure for most job openings is to just post a half-baked ad and wait for job seekers to do the rest. They may take several rounds of trial and error before the ads start drawing a least some of the people they want. They’ll never know how many good people they’re missing, or if they’re finding the best. HR won’t get “proactive” unless people with the desired skills are painfully hard to find—and, increasingly often, not even then. When this approach doesn’t work, they blame the “talent shortage.”

When employers and recruiters actively search for people whom they are then going to have to pay well and treat well, it’s for highly-experienced people with very specialized skills in high-visibility specialties. These are already the most sought-after people on the job market, who may be accustomed to getting unsolicited job offers and calls from serious headhunters. (Not the kind of headhunters who, like HR, wait for people to send them résumés.) Even in these fields (in fact, especially in these fields), hiring and job-searching are normally through personal acquaintance or word of mouth, or direct applications that result from research by the job-seeker. It is not always the best employers or recruiters who search out candidates on the Web.

A LinkedIn profile is a good thing for anyone whom an employer, or potential business connections, might be particularly interested in. But, unless you’re in one of the sought-after specialties, think twice before posting your résumé on other job boards (except an employer’s own site, and perhaps on thoroughly respectable industry-specialized sites). If you do post your résumé, don’t put your address or phone number on it. (Unless it’s a employer site.) Any résumé posted on the Web will generate a lot of spam. Anything at all posted on the Web will be in the databanks of criminals and sleazebags within days or even hours.

So third-party online job sites—including LinkedIn—are probably not going to produce a job for most people. Or if they do, it probably won’t be the best job they’re qualified for

One thing job boards are very good for is general market research—getting an idea of what sort of jobs are out there, finding out what skills and qualifications employers are looking for at the moment—and also about the latest industry-specific buzzwords. (But not the generic fluff buzzwords—they won’t get you anywhere.) All of this can be very handy, especially if you’ve been out of the job market for a few years.

Even though little hiring is done through third-party sites (except perhaps LinkedIn in some fields), HR people like to post jobs there. It makes them look like they’re covering all the bases, and doing something cutting-edge. It helps with affirmative-action compliance, since it shows that they publicized the opening. In any case, their bosses probably wouldn’t understand if they stopped using these sites.

It can, in fact, be worth posting a résumé on an employer’s career site. (The résumé can often be conveniently attached to applications made through the site.) But even there, don’t expect too much. HR people may not look through posted résumés on the company site even when there’s an opening to fill. Again, the usual attitude in HR is to make the job seeker do all the work. Also, the employer’s career site may be less than functional. And features on company career sites that alert job-seekers to relevant openings may not work very well—especially if the position you’re looking for is not directly involved in producing the employer’s characteristic products. (In other words, job-seekers with non–industry-specific skills, such as finance, marketing, or IT, may not be well served.) So if you’re really interested in a particular employer, keep an eye on their career sites even if your résumé is on file there.

If you don’t do so already, schedule twice-weekly searches of third-party sites and of the career sites of employers you’re particularly interested in. You don’t have to post your résumé to do this. Learn to use the search keywords that give the best matches for you, and write them down in a computer file to help you make the search a quick and routine chore.

Keywords are common terms for job titles, skills, key technology, sub-specialties, types of experience, key industry players, and other factors that indicate the experience and ability needed for a particular job. Obviously, they are very important. But they’re still vastly overhyped, and the hype gets mixed up with hype about several different technologies that are only incidentally related to the use of keywords: ATS, SEO, LinkedIn searches, and, back in the Stone Age, “scannable résumés.”

The latest buzzword is ATS (which stands for “applicant tracking system”). ATS involves more than just keywords—it also involves the technical formatting of résumé documents, which must be compatible with résumé processing systems. (I’ve been making a point of this technical compatibility since Crystal Résumés started in 2008, and my technical document production experience goes back a lot farther than that.)

ATS systems search résumés for keywords that are supposed to indicate an applicant’s suitability. Decisions about who gets interviewed are then made on the basis of keyword scores.

Before ATS, the buzzword was SEO (“search-engine optimization”), because search engines are known to be used to search for résumés, and also for LinkedIn profiles. (People generally forget that a LinkedIn profile is not the same thing as a résumé. A résumé is a selling document to be presented to prospective employers. A LinkedIn profile is a public document that your present employer can, and often will, see—and you don’t want your employer to know that you’re out trying to sell your skills and experience.)

There are a few technical differences between LinkedIn searches and employer résumé-processing systems. To a technologically knowledgeable person, these differences are very minor and easily accommodated. But some people make a big deal of them.

Many résumé services, and counselors, coaches, and writers on job-hunting, seem to think that “keywords” refers to some magical, unchanging list of words that will get you considered for a particular job. The idea is that the experts know those lists and you don’t. As with many common misconceptions, if it were that simple, everybody would be doing it and it would no longer be effective. If all these experts had the magical lists, the words on those lists would eventually appear on most résumés, and employers could no longer use them to distinguish between candidates.

As to the keywords programmed into the automated screening for a given job opening, they may be so specific to the job and the employer that few outside the specialty would anticipate them. In some cases, they might perhaps be so specific to the employer’s plans (such as the name of a potential candidate company for merger or acquisition) that no one outside the employer company could anticipate them. Or, on the other hand, the keywords used for a given job by a given employer may be whatever words the HR people put on the lists for that job. In the latter case, IT people will recognize a GIGO (“garbage in, garbage out”) situation. There’s no telling what’s on that list, or how well it will correspond to the actual key qualifications as recognized by people qualified to fill the job.

However, as Damon Runyon once wrote, “The race is not always to the swift, or the battle to the strong, but that’s how you bet.” Your best bet is to include as many industry-related terms and names as possible for real-world key qualifications (that you actually possess). This increases the odds of scoring well at the ATS stage. Given the largely irrational nature of the process, it’s about the only thing you can do to increase those odds—that, and avoiding the fluff that many résumé writers use for their “keywords.”

Because a lot of résumé “experts” believe that the many fluff words associated with job descriptions and job postings, and which are so commonly employed by résumé writers, can function as keywords. Part of the problem is that a lot of people don’t know the difference between “keywords” and “buzzwords.” The fluff, the buzzwords, are, almost by definition, terms that are being used by everyone, or everyone in a given field. That means they are useless for ranking job candidates who have real experience in the field. It also means that when the résumé is read by a human being, that human being’s eyes will roll every time he or she sees the buzzword.

In fact, many employers deliberately write job postings without the keywords they are looking for. This is to prevent people from copying keywords from the postings. This is one reason (among others) why job postings often look so fluffy and unreal. Résumé writers and job-seekers who use this fluff in resumés, in the belief that these are keywords, are barking up the wrong tree.

Real keywords are also important for human reading. They’re important when, as is often the case, the person is making a quick scan of the résumé to decide if it’s worth a closer look. But that’s not the only time when they’ll be important.

A résumé with plenty of real-world keywords also increases the odds that something will ring a bell in a hiring manager’s mind, for some very specific reason that you couldn’t have anticipated. (For example, at the early stage of a company’s plans to expand into a certain market, or explore a certain technology, or explore working with a certain vendor.) Because keywords aren’t there just to get you past the initial screening. Like everything else about your résumé, keywords can and should work at every stage of the hiring process. They are the keywords that will make impacts on the minds of every person who reads the résumé. And these will often be different keywords for different people on the hiring team.

Real keywords should be a part of every résumé in every format, not a special feature of certain formats or a special additional service. Here’s my hype: Providing the best selection of real keywords requires an in-depth, fact-based approach to information-gathering and writing, individualized for each job-seeker. I write your résumé (and cover letters, if you order them) to include the richest possible range of keywords, based on the information you give me in interviews, on my experience with clients in similar fields, and on some individualized research on possibilities suggested by your information.

———
* Even earlier, in the days of paper résumés, the buzzword for the same thing was “scannable résumé,” because paper résumés had to be optically scanned before the text could be searched. There was a lot of hype and misconception about it then too—and a lot of that hype was copied blindly by people writing about later technologies. If you’ve got time to waste, you can read about it here.

“The man who sees two or three
generations is like someone who
sits in a conjurer’s booth at a fair and
sees the tricks two or three times.
They are meant to be seen only once.”

When I was freelancing in New York City, I did a fair amount of work on branding projects for branding agencies and big ad agencies that offered branding services. I was at Gerstman & Myers for a year and a half or so, as their resident word mechanic and typographic QC person. (G&M was one of the nation’s best-known packaging and branding consultancies, later merged with Interbrand.)

Branding is for businesses, and especially for big businesses that have to set themselves apart from only a small field of competitors—businesses whose products are well known to the general public. Think Coke and Pepsi.

Most typically, the customers of these branded businesses are buyers of consumer goods. Consumers don’t search out and “interview” manufacturers every time they make a purchase. The names of the manufacturers are already known, their names and logos may be kept in constant public view even outside of the stores, and their products are already on the shelves for immediate purchase.

The function of a brand is less to point out differences between the competing companies and their products—there may not be any decisive differences—as it is to keep the company names in the minds of consumers, with positive associations. Sometimes, a branding program can emphasize some competitive advantage—real or imaginary—that one company’s product may have. But it has to be a very simple point. Branding—logos, slogans, product names, portrayed attitudes, associations with things outside the company, etc.—is too crude a tool to make a distinction that depends on a number of details.

However subtle may be the thinking that goes into creating the concept behind a brand, and the brand’s verbal presentation (if any), the actual delivery of the branding message is a matter of brute force employed on a large scale. Branding, by the companies that rely heavily on it, is carried out through ongoing, often intensive, advertising and publicity campaigns. Branding is conducted for its large-scale effects, not for the sake of a single sale.

Businesses with many competitors, or whose specialized products are not well understood by the public—or sometimes even by the people who buy them—do not invest much in branding, beyond a nice logo and graphic and typographic standards that make for good-looking communications. Instead, they rely on skilled, knowledgeable, and active sales forces, often backed up by technical sales specialists.

Job seekers have many, many competitors, and they may have complex skill sets and backgrounds. They are focused on making a single sale. They are not concerned with creating a climate of public opinion. They do not have brute-force image-delivery methods at their disposal.

On the employer’s side, the decision is one that can have serious consequences, and thus one that gets a good deal of attention—much more important and laborious than deciding whether to buy a Coke or a Pepsi. The employer has to consider the whole set of skills, experience, and personal qualities belonging to each applicant. One applicant might be the best fit for one employer, another the best fit for another. Therefore, the employer needs the fullest possible information about each applicant. The more information the decision-makers on the employer side have, the surer they will feel about their judgments.

What could “branding” mean to a job-seeker? A single image or fact or concept that would make that one job-seeker stand out from all others in the applicant pool? But why would an employer base a hiring decision on one single image, fact, or concept? And what if all the applicants have a brand? How will the employer make a decision then? The decision will be made based on the particular facts of the applicant’s background, as shown in the résumé and in interviews.

“Okay,” says the branding advocate, “in the case of a job-seeker, branding should be defined as the sum total of that person’s skills, experience, and personal attributes.” But there’s already a word for the approach and technique and skills that seek to get the sum total across. It’s “sales.” Sales deals in bodies of information that can vary from fairly simple to highly complex, that can’t be packed into a brand but instead have to combine to make a general impression. Sales has requirements very different from, and a lot more concrete and specific, than those of “branding.” What’s the point of giving it the name of something different, and thus confusing the issue of what goes into it?

A job-seeker has to do sales, not branding. (It’s always felt like sales, hasn’t it?)

The real key to an effective résumé—a résumé that is a sales tool—is concrete information that answers the employer’s questions, in enough detail to make you stand out from similarly qualified people—often a large number of them, especially at earlier stages of screening.

It also creates a positive general impression of you in the minds of those who read it. And hopefully, they will remember you. They may not even remember your name at this stage, let alone some personal “brand” other than what they’ve seen on your résumé and heard from you in interviews and other contacts. It may not even be possible to predict just what they will remember.

But, if you’re reasonably well qualified, a résumé that has shown them lots of relevant information, in a form that they can read easily and later scan at any desired level to refresh their memory, is your best means of giving them something that they will remember. They’ll remember you as “The woman who worked for [insert name of leading competitor, vendor, or customer],” or “The guy who did the [such-and-such] project for [so-and-so],” or “The one who was out in [location] when they had the troubles there.” But they’ll remember something that serves as a tag for the general impression made by your skills and experience.

Putting that information in a résumé also takes care of much of the requirements for keywords (SEO, searchability, etc.). This includes keywords that nobody could have anticipated that the employer would be looking for.

Such a résumé also serves as a resource for the salesperson—you. You review it before an interview to refresh your memory of the sales points and the stories they tell. After I’ve spent two or three hours interviewing you to dig out information you might never have thought to mention, you’ll probably be glad of the chance to review it.

All résumé services require payment in advance, with no refunds. If you see what looks like an exception, look closer, and you’ll see the catch.

No experienced professional, and no sound business, does first-rate work unless they’re certain they’re going to be paid for it.

(Crystal Résumés takes payment in two stages, but both are up front: half in advance, half after the in-depth interview is completed, and before I start writing the résumé.)

Occasionally, you’ll see something like this: “$300 in advance, and $300 on delivery.” From what I’ve seen, this means you’re getting a $300 résumé (at best), and if they collect the other $300, it’s gravy.

Perhaps there are some that offer a real guarantee—but add a large premium to all fees to cover the risk of non-payment.

But almost always, the “guarantee” takes this form: “Guaranteed interviews in 30 days or we re-write your résumé for free!”

If you call them on the free rewrite guarantee, you’ll have to submit a lot of documentation in support of your claim. And then you’ll have to put up with a bureaucratic runaround designed to make you give up.

And the free rewrite doesn’t mean much in any case, if you think about it. If their quality was poor in the first place, it’s not likely that the same people are going to make much improvement on the second go-round. They might just quickly rephrase things, differently but not better, so they can say they’ve rewritten. That’s just part of the runaround.

If your résumé was written by a résumé mill with a revolving door stable of cheap writers, and one of their writers did an exceptionally bad job, it will give them a chance to give it to another writer—who may or may not do much better.

Résumés are just not a product for which meaningful guarantees of results are possible.

Job searches are too variable, and there are many factors other than the résumé. A lot depends on the particular field, the overall job market at the time, the market for someone’s particular specialty at that time and in their location, and sometimes on the time of year. In many fields, it could easily be more than 30 days before you get an interview, or even before you find someone with an opening you’re interested in. And in the end, your own experience is a big factor, too. And the hiring process itself is too uncertain and often quite irrational.

If you send in your résumé and don’t get a response from one particular employer, it’s quite possible that the reasons had nothing to do with your résumé. That employer may have been looking for someone with different experience, or more experience—or less. Many employers won’t consider applications from people who aren’t currently employed. (That’s stupid, but that’s the way it is.) Or they may have had someone else in mind for the job all along, but had to post the opening to check off a procedural or regulatory check box.

Nothing in the résumé business varies more than the level of service. One of the clearest and most important indications of service level is how much time they spend digging for individualized information.

The real key to an effective résumé is concrete information—with enough detail to make you stand out from similarly qualified people. Generic questions don’t provide that. Further, the types of information needed, and the emphasis given to each, will vary from one specialty to another.

For mid- to upper-level job seekers, a résumé service that can make a big difference in your job search will spend two or three hours just on interviewing. And they’ll spend almost as much time reviewing your information and then developing questions, checking background information, and developing possible lines of inquiry for information that might not surface without some digging. (At least, that’s what I do. I don’t know about anybody else. But if a résumé service doesn’t need at least a few days’ lead time before the interview, that’s a red flag.)

Even for people just entering the job market, a really thorough writer will usually find about forty-five minutes worth of questions—the less experience you have, the harder they have to dig for things that will make employers take you seriously.

Low-end résumé services really don’t do much more than Word formatting for people who can’t do it themselves. And today, there’s an even lower end, even more numerous—operations that just let ChatGPT’s AI do the whole job.

Some résumé services that want to charge more will try to add some glamor to the process, but may not do much more that is of any value. They’ll often talk as if there are some magic phrases and formatting techniques, known only to résumé writers, that they can add to your basic information to make a killer résumé. Many of them may actually believe this, and in any case they will give you something that has obviously been worked on beyond slapping your information into a template.

Only a smaller number will even make a stab at active information-gathering. Often, though, that amounts to no more than the “free initial consultation”—whatever questions they ask during your brief initial phone conversation. Or they may send you a questionnaire.

Scripted interviews don’t add much, either. They’re typically done from a list of generic questions, and the same list is used for everyone (”two major achievements in this job, two examples of how you used your ____ skills to solve problems,” etc.), with no consideration for conditions in different industries, or for the client’s unique background, objectives, and situation, or the unique aspects of the client’s industry, or the unique aspects the organizations they worked for. Often, they may just be aimed at getting a little more detail on what you did in each job.

For my approach to in-depth interviewing, see The In-Depth Interview on the Process and Policies page.

A good professionally written cover letter has to be carefully individualized, and capable of being tailored for each job application. Generic cover letters don’t cut it—the say nothing at all about the fit between a particular applicant and a particular job, and employers see thousands of them, all essentially alike. Any cover letter that is meant to be used for any job you might apply for will have to be so generic it will be a joke. The people who read the cover letters are very, very tired of that joke.

But many résumé services produce generic cover letters. Many even throw them in for free, which is hint about how much they’re worth.

I develop individualized templates for you to use with cover letters and thank-you letters. Like the résumé, they’re designed to cover the various possibilities you might be faced with when inquiring about different possibilities, at different employers, given your own background, objectives, and priorities. I provide detailed, individualized instructions for using the template, and sample letters based on them to show you how each section can be handled. It’s a lot of work, and I charge accordingly. Here’s what several of my clients said about the results.

Recently a few other résumé services have started to offer something similar. When I started out in 2008, no-one else had anything like it.

If you bring your car in for an oil change, and they tell you that you need hundreds of dollars worth of additional work, you’d be suspicious, wouldn’t you? They might be right, of course. Cars, like résumés, often do need a lot of work, especially when they haven’t had skilled attention for a while. But if you’ve owned a car for a long time, you know that this sort of thing is a common scam. And knowing that, you’d be particularly suspicious of a mechanic who offered free oil changes to all comers.

It’s the same with “free résumé critiques.” These are usually just a sales tool—the people who offer them give you an awful review of whatever you send—spouting lots of buzzwords and bogus “rules”—hoping you will then hire them to fix it up. (TheLadders.com is notorious for this.)

If you let someone sell you résumé writing on the basis of a free critique, try an experiment. Wait a few months and send them the résumé they did for you and ask for a free critique. They will tell you it’s terrible (and it probably will be) and offer to fix it up for a fee.

Free résumé critiques have exploded in visibility since AI came on the scene. You can have your résumé critiqued by ChatGPT. Go ahead—by all means try it with your existing résumé. But if you do it with a résumé I've written for you, don’t come to me with the results. I won’t pay any attention.

There are some résumé services that offer free résumé critiques in good faith. But those critiques can’t be anything but superficial—anything more would take more time than a serious business can afford to give away. At best, they’re just small free samples of what the résumé service can do for you. In fact, the practice of offering free résumé critiques was never well regarded among better résumé writers, even before AI came on the scene. Most résumé services don’t offer critiques even as a paid service, because providing a really useful, thorough, professional critique is more work than just re-doing the résumé, and they’d have to charge more for it. Even then, it wouldn’t cover all the points on a given résumé: nothing less than a book-length critique could possibly cover the hundreds of little details that go into creating an effective résumé.

The worst way to shop for résumé services is the way an awful lot of people do it. They spend a few minutes on the Web collecting some phone numbers, and then call around and decide which one sounds best.

These people are assuming that all résumé services are pretty much alike. These shoppers may be more or less aware that some résumé services may be better than others, but it’s assumed that they all perform the same operations, and generally do it well enough—because they wouldn’t stay in business if they didn’t.

It could easily happen that none of those you called is any good, especially if you are looking at the lowest end of the price range—say, under about $200 to $300 for a résumé for an entry-level job seeker.

Then use what you’ve learned. Go on the Web and pick out some likely-looking résumé services, say, at least half a dozen. Don’t pick up the phone until you’ve studied their websites. You’ll learn a lot that way. You may be surprised at how much they differ from one another—unless you’ve chosen a bunch of big, national résumé mills. You’ll find a lot on their sites that you wouldn’t have thought to explore on the phone. You might decide to look at another half dozen or so. If you find one or more that look like they might be right for you, then call them up and see what they sound like.

But if you do the job right, you might not make more than one phone call. It may not be to us. Crystal Résumés, after all, specializes in executive and senior tech résumés. But you will probably have found some clear winners, you will almost certainly have found some clear losers, and there’s a good chance you will have found the one that will best meet your needs.

Some cautionary information on TheLadders.com: their claims that their listings are 1) exclusive and 2) limited to $100K+ jobs are, shall we say, widely disputed. Some job hunters recognize this but still think them a worthwhile job search tool. Others who have tried them emphatically condemn them. There have been a lot of complaints about TheLadders.com spamming their users, and continuing to charge people’s credit cards after they’ve unsubscribed. Anything they offer for free is likely to be used pretty crudely to get users to sign up for paid services.

So if you’re thinking of using The Ladders for your job search, do your homework first. And if you do use them, be very skeptical. Above all, I don’t think you should ever sign up for any paid services with them—or with any other sites, for that matter (including LinkedIn).

The Ladders used to offer résumé-writing services. Since 2020, they’ve had a sister company, Leet Resumes, which offers to write you a résumé FOR FREE. But users report that they don’t get to review the résumé until they’ve either left a “tip” in cash (claimed average tip: $40), or explicitly affirmed that they can’t afford to leave the “tip”, which leads to a runaround. Leet’s résumés are written using AI. The résumés that The Ladders once wrote weren’t much better. Leet also offers free résumé critiques, and maybe The Ladders still does, too.

If you’re working with Crystal Résumés, hopefully you will agree that you’re already well taken care of as far as résumé services go. But if you’re thinking of sending the résumé I wrote for you to them for a “free critique”—from The Ladders, Leet, or anyone else—as a means of checking my work, then you really should check out the links below, to find out why I won’t pay any attention to what they say. (Free résumé critiques themselves are a notable myth, which is discussed below.)

Try doing a Web search for the phrases “theladders.com complaints” and “leet resume writing reviews.” To get the full story, read the comments in the discussion threads you’ll find, as well as the articles. You may have to do a bit of digging to get a balanced picture, because The Ladders and Leet are very “proactive” about publicizing their perspective.

A good place to start, and a good example of the difficulty of getting a clear perspective on The Ladders, is the review of The Ladders on Trustpilot. Filter the reviews from latest to oldest. The numerous reviews back to about 2022 are largely positive—and the positive reviews are remarkably similar to one another. (And closely similar reviews can also be found on other review sites.) Farther back than that, the reviews give a very different picture. But the total result is a 4.5/5 rating.

For an earlier view of the situation, from 2009, here’s a link to a LinkedIn post on The Ladders résumé writing service:

E-mail: info[at-sign]crystalresumes.com

Notary Sojac.

Propaganda: “That branch of the
art of lying which consists in very
nearly deceiving your friends without
quite deceiving your enemies.”

— F.M. Cornford, classical scholar and
historian of philosophy
(Microcosmographia Academica,
preface to the 1922 ed.)