TheLadders.com Resume service

Received an interesting email from the folks at TheLadders.com about one of my blog posts. One of their PR people doing searches looking for comments on their critique service came across this entry. Someone thought the blog was pretty good (flattery will get you everywhere) and in the email asked if they could use an excerpt of the blog, as well as add the blog URL for reference. I was happy to say yes, and as my cousin said this weekend jokingly, I am taking the blogosphere by storm! LOL

One of the incentives they threw out was was to offer a complimentary professional rewrite of my resume! "No strings attached" of course, but they know full well that it is a topic that no blogger could resist. So I gratefully accepted their offer, and was contacted today by one of their professional resume writers to get the process started.

If you have been reading the blog faithfully, and I know you all have ;-), you know that I have not made a great deal of progress on the re-write. While the critique was great, and pointed out some glaring issues on my resume, it has been hard to sit down and draft the resume based on what the critique said. Not that it wasn't clear what was wrong, it just is that every time I re-wrote something, somehow it always ended up sounding extremely similar! I guess your writing style is your writing style, and unless you write for a living, it is hard to not hear your "inner voice".

I have been doing research on other resume writing services, but had not decided on whether or not to persue TheLadders.com, or some other service. Some of the others were definitely less expensive then TheLadders.com, but they also didn't have the same "big company" feel. Most seemed like home businesses, that had other resume writers working for them on a freelance basis. Not that is necessarily a negative, but I felt like it would be more random to get a really good re-write of my resume, then what I felt like I could get using TheLadders.com, or other, larger resume writing services. But of course, the bigger they are, almost invariably the more expensive they were.

Also since my resume will be targeted at C-Level jobs (CIO, CTO, SVP type), I definitely needed to be sure that I was getting a professional who really could make my resume stand out. And while all of the websites of these services said they dealt with resumes at that level, you obviously never know.

I did try to talk to some folks in the recruiting world, people who own their own recruiting firms, or folks with some of the majors that I have dealt with in the past. None really had any good recommendations for me, and as a matter of fact one major firm suggested that anything smacking of "boilerplate" would be a definite negative!

So this offer from TheLadders.com for a complimentary re-write is the best of both worlds! I get to see how a large, more corporate service handles my resume, and see if the money I would have had to shell out would have been worth it.

Please stay tuned to the blog as the re-write progresses!