The Case Against Résumé Writers

The Case Against Rsum WritersThe Case Against Rsum WritersIt seems that ever more people are hiring a rsum writer. But if you think about it, thats no more ethical than hiring someone to write your college application essay.In fact, hiring a rsum writer is worse because the effects are worse. For most professional-level jobs, employers use rsums leid just to see applicants work history but to assess their ability to organize their thoughts, write well and produce an error-free document. An applicant who chooses to do his or her own work for ethical reasons or because he or she cant afford to hire a rsum writer is unfairly penalized. And if that candidate ends up getting hired, not only is that unfair to the superior applicants, its unfair to the employer and the co-workers who are thus saddled with an inferior employee. And inferior employees result in worse products and services and so, indirectly, its unfair to society. True, the effect of a single bad hire is rarely enormous, but collectively, across all the rsums and deckblatt letters written or heavily edited by hired guns, it is.If appeals to ethics are insufficient, perhaps it might help to realize that if you get a job under false pretenses, youre more likely to fail at that job and soon be back on the street, pounding the pavement and your keyboard. If, instead, you reveal your true self, including weaknesses, in writing your rsum and deckblatt letter and in interviews, youll more likely be rejected from ill-suited jobs and more likely hired for better-suited ones.There are other benefits of writing your own rsum and cover letter When you land a job, youll feel you earned it. Your application will be more credible because the writing level will be consistent with your competency level. If when you interview, your verbal and thinking skills are lower than are demonstrated in your rsum, many employers will realize you had someone do your work for you. If you write your own rsum, it will more likely creat e that all-important connection with the reader than does the typical rsum writers effort. The latter is too likely to be filled with rsum-speak, such as self-starting team player who delights in exceeding customer expectations and specializes in spearheading profit-maximizing initiatives, seeks leadership position with PL responsibility in dynamic, high-velocity organization. True, some employers expect applicants to play that game, but wiser employers will appreciate the credibility of a more human, less robotically created document.Rsum writers try to defend their profession by saying speechwriters and ghostwriters also write for other people. Thats a weak argument. Just because a practice exists doesnt make it justifiable. For example, theft is common but certainly not ethical. With regard to speechwriters, citizens would be in a better position to choose which politicians to vote for if candidates wrote their own speeches. We should be voting for the best candidate, not the bes t speechwriter or teleprompter reader.And its far from ethical to say you wrote a book when someone else did. Thats why ethical putative authors credit ghostwriters on the books cover with such phrases as with or as told to, on, for example, The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley. Besides, the impact of an unacknowledged ghostwriter is much smaller than of hiring someone to write your rsum. Readers rarely use the fact of a book having been ghostwritten to decide something as important as whom to hire.If it was ethical to hire someone to write your rsum, why, at the bottom of each rsum, dont rsum writers write, written by Jane Jones, professional rsum writer? If you hired a rsum writer, would you want that written on your rsum? If hiring a rsum writer was ethical, you wouldnt mind.Most people like to think of themselves as ethical. If you do, might you want to reflect on whether hiring a rsum writer is consistent with your values?And if you are a professional rsum write r, might it be worth considering that, as has been argued here, the rsum-writing profession makes things worse, not better? With thousands of societally beneficial professions available, might you want to consider a career change?The San Francisco Bay Guardian called Dr. Nemko The Bay Areas Best Career Coach and he was Contributing Editor for Careers at U.S. News. His sixth and seventh books were published in 2012 How to Do Life What They Didnt Teach You in School and Whats the Big Idea? 39 Disruptive Proposals for a Better America. More than 1,000 of his published writings are free on www.martynemko.com. He posts here every Monday.