“I think it’s time to get my resume professionally prepared” is a phrase we hear fairly often. It is usually uttered by someone who has been in the job search for about six weeks or more and has had few interviews. I cringe when I think of the time the job seeker has wasted while trying to “do the resume” himself. Job search itself is a lengthy process, especially at the executive level of our clients so doing ANYTHING to actually make it take longer puzzles me.

So what makes people delay? Several things:

Budget – Time – Astuteness

The job seeker has a $100K education and twenty years experience in business; he’s embarrassed to admit that he, who knows himself better than anyone, has trouble writing his own resume. Reality is that smart executives know when to outsource something. You outsource when it’s cheaper, smarter, or when you just don’t have time to do it.

Let’s start with cheaper. If you are making $100,000 a year, you are averaging around $50 an hour. I’ve had clients tell me they’ve worked every night for a week on their resume and it still doesn’t work. Let’s say the job seeker spent 21 hours working on the resume (3 hours a night for a week). That would be $1050 of his time spent on something that doesn’t gain interviews for him. You can do the math – we’re cheaper, especially if you consider that “evening work” the job seeker did as “overtime” or “family time”. Lawyers hire other lawyers to represent them. Doctors hire other doctors to treat them. Smart execs hire Get Interviews for a new resume.

Next comes smarter. How often do you job search? Every three years is the national average so sometimes it’s more often and sometimes it’s less often. If you do something (write a resume) once every three or more years, are you going to be very good at it? No! Imagine if a computer programmer only wrote code for software once every three years! That software would be out-of-date, buggy, and not very professional. We write resumes every day so we know the market, know the trends, and know what employers are seeking.

Finally, time comes in – that precious commodity that you can’t purchase and you can’t retrieve. I recently saw a study that noted Americans spend more hours working than even the Japanese. Our home-time and family-time is extremely precious. Why waste it struggling to capture your professional value in a document? Rather than spending 21 hours, how about spending about 2 hours instead on your resume? That’s about the maximum time it takes for you on your side when you are working with our firm to develop the resume.