Average Resumes Usually Cost Thousands More Than Their Fee!
Fast & Focused's Founder, Tim Cunningham explains why.

Before I became a resume writer, I worked for fifteen years in purchasing operations, financial supervision and database sales. At one point, however, I spent a summer looking for work using a good example of an average resume. What happened during those weeks, I prefer not to think about, but my silent phone taught me all I needed to know about the high costs of using an average resume in a job hunt. Ultimately, it was the events of that summer that led me into resume writing as a profession.  

What is an average resume? Wikipedia says it best when it defines a resume as "a document that contains a summary of relevant job experience and education. It is typically the first item that a potential employer encounters regarding the job seeker and is typically used to screen applicants, often followed by an interview, when seeking employment."

For some situations this kind of resume is great. If you have been hired already, and your new employer is saying that you need to submit a resume to complete their HR file on you, an average resume is all you need. If this is your situation, just list your contact information, your work history and a responsibility list for each job, hand it in, and the receptionist will tick off the HR check box. A secretarial service should charge from $40 to $100 to type up this kind of resume from your notes.

But if you're out of a job, actively looking for work and need your resume to make job interviews happen, don't follow the crowd and use an average resume for to find your next job. Using an average resume almost always leads to a very long and frustrating job hunt, and hidden additional costs of at least $6,000.00. 

You may be thinking: "Why do you say that?" Mostly, because of some observations that Human Resources experts have reported in the last few years. Even before the recession began, the HR folks were telling us that that average resumes consisting of contact information, job history and responsibility lists were ending up in the "don't call" pile somewhere around 95% of the time. Another point they emphasized was that most people are so nervous in job interviews that they generally don't make a good impression in their first interview. Instead, candidates usually land a job on their second or third attempts when they are more relaxed. Taken together, these points mean that if you use an average resume to apply for 10 jobs each week, the odds are that you won't get an interview until your ninth week, by which point you are so anxious and nervous that talk yourself out of consideration, leading to another nine week wait for your next interview. At the second interview, you are usually more relaxed and you might impress your interviewer and win the job. So not many career professionals were surprised when one pre-recession study showed that the average executive or professional job hunt was lasting anywhere between 18 to 27 weeks. Nowadays, when even janitorial openings are getting 300 or more applicants, your job hunt will likely last longer; one recent study added 6 weeks to time taken for the average job hunt.

Today, a resume only containing only contact info, work histories and responsibility lists does not stand out from the 50-100 other candidates who have done the same jobs and have submitted an almost identical resume. So if you want to be called in for job interviews, you can't afford to bet your career by relying on an average resume. Instead, your resume must be "a self-marketing document, prepared for potential employers or organizations, that effectively communicates your ability to produce significant results and meet specific performance goals and objectives better than other qualified candidates."   

This definition makes five key points. Let's look at them more closely.

1) Communicate Your Market Value
The process of creating a resume must result in job seekers being able to effectively identify and communicate their VALUE to prospective employers. In other words, resumes must clearly communicate bottom line results and organizational contributions that you can produce and deliver as well, or better, than other qualified candidates.

2) Establish Your Differential Factor
When you strategically develop your resume, you must also define the differential factor. The differential factor represents highly valuable skills, qualifications and other "employment assets" that set you apart from other well-qualified candidates; that make you STAND OUT. Often, the differential factor tips the hiring scale in your favor! For instance, if you have an industry-wide reputation, that reputation might be the differential factor. If you are a Black Belt in Six Sigma; that may constitute the differential factor. When you identify your differential factors, you'll have a distinct advantage in landing a job quickly in the toughest of job markets.

3) Build Your Confidence
When you understand and communicate the value and attributes that set you apart from their competition, you gain a whole new level of confidence in the midst of the job hunt for you will be proud of what you are marketing ... namely yourself!

4) Open the Right Doors
Exciting, well-presented resumes open doors of opportunity that otherwise would not open for job seekers with look-alike, blend-in-with-all-the-other resumes. Indeed, you resume will race to the top of the pile because it bellows out to employers, "This is what I can do for you, why I am a good fit for your company, and the best candidate for the job."

5) Become Stronger, More Effective In Your Interviews
As your resume is prepared, you begin developing the key messages you'll eventually want to communicate in an interview to win the job. In other words, when you take the time to properly prepare your resume thinking about the key messages that will win job offers; doesn't it make sense that you will then be able to SHOWCASE those messages on their resume to win interviews! (I owe a big thank you to my colleague Jay Block for these definitions and observations.)

Crafting such interview-generating resumes is no job for a typical secretarial bureau; especially since your resume will only have 15 seconds to make an impression. To craft a an effective self-marketing resume, a writer needs broad business knowledge that can quickly and accurately grasp the essential skills, specialized languages and necessary achievements of a huge variety of employment situations, the interviewing skills of a master psychiatrist to delve deep into your memory to uncover almost forgotten incidents that show your skills in action, and the persuasive powers of a top-flight copywriter.

So it's not surprising that competent professional resume writers charge somewhat more than the typist. Yet in the final analysis, our work is more than worth every penny you invest. For in the long run, a professionally written interview generating resume doesn't cost you a cent: instead it makes far more money for you than the cost you paid up front.  

At this point, I can hear you asking: "How can this be?"   

I know I didn't stop and think about the real costs of using an average resume before I started my job hunt. But instead of following my example, every job hunter should ask, and answer, this one question: "How much will using an average resume cost me?"

I can't tell you what your exact costs will be, but I can show you how to find out. If you divide the amount of the salary of your desired job by 50, you will get your gross weekly salary apart from benefits. Multiply that salary by the number of weeks you must allow for the job hunt to take and you get your total loss of salary cost. The size of the numbers will surprise you. Consider the following examples:  

If you want a $20,000 salary, your weekly salary is $384.61 and an 18 week job hunt will cost you $6,992.98.
If you want a $50,000 salary, your weekly salary is $961.54 and an 18 week job hunt costs you $17,307.69.
If you want a $100,000 salary, your weekly salary is $1,923.08 and an 18 week job hunt costs you $34,615.38.  

The real cost of your average resume is not the $100 dollars you paid the typist. The real cost of that resume is the figure you get when you plug in your chosen salary and multiply it by the 18 - 24 weeks that the average job hunt now takes. Once you have that real cost, ask yourself this. "Can I really afford to risk paying that much for an average resume? Would I risk paying $6,000.00 or more for anything that didn't do what it was supposed to do?"

Now, consider instead what happens if your resume is one of the 5% of resumes that achieves above average results. Assume it makes interviews happen not 5% of the time, but 50% of the time (a hit rate that professional resume writers routinely meet or exceed). If you go job hunting with that resume and you apply for 10 jobs in your first week and your resume is only 50% effective in generating interviews, the odds are that you will have five interviews by the end of your third week (allowing a week between resume arrival and interview date), and at least one job offer from interviews 2 through 5. You might even get more than one job offer, which is a comforting piece of paper to have in your back pocket when you negotiate the final details of your compensation package with your preferred employer.

So instead of taking 18 weeks, which is the low end of the job hunt average, your job hunt has taken only three weeks and your resume has just enabled you to earn an additional fifteen weeks salary. Your investment in a professional interview generating resume has just made you somewhere between $5,769.15 (for a $20K paycheque), $14,423.10 (for a 50K salary) or $28,846.15 if you were hired at $100K, or more - not to mention saving you from a great deal of depression and anxiety.

Now, you can finally ask yourself the real question: "Is it worth investing between 3-5% of the additional salary that a professionally written resume will earn me in order to massively increase my chances of making $5,000, $14,000 $28,000 or more, much sooner?"

Do you see why investing in an effective resume is the most significant investment you can make in your career? Or to put it another way, investing in a professionally written interview generating resume doesn't really cost anything. Instead, it makes both dollars and sense.