Professional Resume Help

[sammysensei]

Hi All,

Not sure if this is the place to ask, but I've just transitioned out of a marketing job based in Beijing.  Relocated back to my home town in the States after eleven years in Asia (seven in Japan, four in China), so in the need to do a serious rewrite of my resume.  Pricing for these services seem all over the place; can anyone suggest a cost-effective (reputable) service I can utilize?

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

[brewer12345]

There are resume-specific services that just do resumes and they are of varying quality (with quality sometimes very loosely related to price). There are other services that want to do it all and will not split out just the resume part.  Then there are people who will do resume and more, or just resume.  DW does this for a living and she gets $120/hour.  I would suggest taking your best crack at it and then bringing your best effort to a pro for fine tuning and formatting.

[Sonorous Epithet]

I wrote mine and my favorite resource was http://www.blueskyresumes.com/. They rise above the lowest-common-denominator drek you usually see online.

Also, I encourage you to get a very complete resume on LinkedIn -- with more detail than your resume has. Recruiters will find you. Having recruiters going after you can be useful to help gauge what are the most marketable skills to emphasize in your current market.

[sammysensei]

Thanks guys!  I'll look into both options. The biggest challenge for me is being able to toot my own horn, so I'll definitely need to bring in some professional eyes eventually.  Thanks again for the feedback!

[Weedy Acres]

When I was downsized a few years back, part of my exit package included services from an outplacement firm called Right Management consultants.  They did a good job with my resume, using an approach where they determined what my personal marketing message was, and crafted all my work experience bullets to reflect that message.  Don't know what they cost, but I'd recommend them.

[Sonorous Epithet]

When I helped my girlfriend write her resume, I sat down with her and just asked her about her work history. I was able to get her to talk about her accomplishments and could see what aspects of her jobs she was genuinely interested in, and those became a lot of the bullet points. They were things where if she sat down and tried to think of them herself, she would enter into Humility Mode and would be staring at a blank sheet. I wanted something where if an interviewer asked her about a bullet point, it would lead to a good story. Eventually we found a couple common threads (customer service expertise and library systems expertise) and tailored two resumes to fit each thread, depending on who she was applying to.

If you can sit down with a friend who is a good interviewer, that could help you recount some good details.