How to collaborate with a professional resume / LinkedIn profile writer with Mir Garvy

Mir talks about how to work with a resume and LinkedIn profile writer. This is really important because these are your job search tools! Your resume and your LinkedIn profile represent you, they are your face to potential employers. And you can easily get thrown out of the consideration pool for a job if your resume stinks or your LinkedIn profile is lame. Also, Mir pointed out to me earlier that your resume may not even be seen by a human being if it's not optimized to get past applicant tracking system filters.

Working with a resume writer is a great way to ensure that your resume reflects current thinking and trends in hiring. A good resume writer will be a wordsmith, great with language, able to suggest ideas, formatting, action verbs that you might not have thought of.

If you’re going to invest in a professional to help you with these tools, you want to make the most of your investment by working productively with them. And Mir is going to tell us exactly how to do that.

Career transitions can be so incredibly stressful because they often coincide with other life transitions--job loss, a layoff, a relocation, a divorce, your last child heading off to kindergarten, and so on.

Sometimes your confidence isn’t as strong as it could be, and I’ve seen that working with my team to write, revise, and finalize that resume leaves people feeling more prepared to speak about their skills and experiences at the interview, more energized about their prospects, and more confident in general.

I’m a firm believer that every job we ever have leaves us with lessons learned and transferable skills. In college, I waited tables at an Italian restaurant and had one of my best managers ever teach me about the importance of ensuring positive customer experience.

99% of the time, the job seekers who hire my team trust the process and our guidance, and understand how important their input is. In order to create a document that is accurate, persuasive, tailored for the intended audience, and is something that the client is not only excited about, but the client also has to rely on us and we have to rely on the client. It really must be collaborative.

Every now and then, though, we have clients who fall into either one of two camps, and they are on the two extremes of the same spectrum.

Sometimes we have a client who does not want to be involved at all in the process of writing, revising, and finalizing their documents. Of course, we need to pick your brain, ask you questions, incorporate your answers, and make sure that everything we’ve included in your resume is 100% accurate--from your various jobs’ start and end dates all the way down to how many direct reports you have, what size budgets you manage, and what kinds of outcomes you’ve achieved.

We can’t write a resume in a vacuum, so I would say one pitfall to look out for when deciding to hire a writer is thinking that this is something you can simply outsource without having to provide any input along the way.

On the other end of the spectrum, we sometimes have a client that doesn’t trust the process and, therefore, doesn’t benefit from all that we can bring to their project. In these instances, the “quote-unquote” “finished resume” often looks a lot like the resume that the client had to start with. That’s because any ideas or suggestions we offered weren’t embraced--or were only adopted in part. In my mind, in these instances, I always wonder, “why did you even hire a writer if you just wanted to write your resume yourself?” So that’s another pitfall to look out for.

What could potentially happen if a job-seeker doesn’t do this the right way?

Well, you’re just not getting the full benefit of the service you’re paying for. Personally, if I’m going to spend money on something, I want to know that I’m getting a great value for the money I’ve spent.

If you can, as a client, come to the table with a truly collaborative spirit, the finished resume and LinkedIn profile will be stronger. After all, you are the subject matter expert in your career, in your industry, in the tools you use, and regarding your career goals. You have to bring that background to the project.

The expertise that my team and I bring to the project is in knowing the current trends in resume design, understanding how applicant tracking systems work, knowing what hiring managers look for in a resume, experience writing resumes for other professionals in your field, and strong writing, editing, and proofreading skills.

How-To:

Let’s dig in. What would you say is the first step to working...