Writing a Resume Is Like Landscaping Your Yard
Stick with me here.
In landscaping, you have three choices.
You do not do much, only mowing the grass once per week. You don’t invest in shrubs, bushes, perennials, and annuals. Going the minimal effort route is acceptable. As long as you keep your yard up, your neighbors won't likely give you much grief.
You invest time and energy into landscaping your yard. You spend your weekends keeping your yard looking beautiful, and you enjoy being outside. It’s fun for you to conduct research, watch HGTV shows, and bounce ideas off neighbors.
You hire a professional landscaping company that takes the work out of landscaping for you. Hiring the company frees your weekends, and they even devise a creative idea for a water feature that you would have never thought to add.
The same choices hold true for resumes.
You throw your resume together; it is very vanilla, a continuation of a standard Word resume template that you have used since college. Your resume contains overused words and phrases that make hiring managers cringe. Going this route is acceptable. No online portal or networking contact is going to say, "sorry, you can't use this resume."
You research trends, read books, keep track of your accomplishments, optimize keywords for company ATSs, and put in many hours to get your resume just how you want. You are a good writer and feel rewarded when you've finished.
You hire a professional resume writer who gets to know you and can highlight your unique differentiators. This writer also takes an objective eye and structures your content to represent you in the best way possible. The professional incorporates graphic elements such as color, images, charts, graphs, and call-out boxes to give special emphasis to your content.
The question is, in the landscaping scenario, if you were selling your house, which landscaping choice would be best? I vote for #2 or #3 but definitely NOT #1. Having completed the bare minimum for landscaping will likely cost you $$$ when you go to sell.
Having completed the bare minimum (#1) for resume writing could also cost you $$$. If you don’t have the time to research trends, highlight your accomplishments, optimize keywords, and put in many hours to draft your resume, hiring a professional could help you gain the advantage over another candidate.