CV rewriting

dmm82 wrote: »

Hi can anyone advise if this is worth the money? If so, any recommendations of a good company to use?

It depends on what industry you're in, but most recruitment agencies would at least give you some pointers for free.

To be worth spending money on, you'd either want to be applying for VERY specific, very niche (and well paid) work, or basically be functionally illiterate.

It's catch 22.

Is it worth paying someone to do up your CV? ... it depends on how much and how much they know. Anyone can offer a CV service. A lot of what makes a good CV can be learned out there too for free. So you could end up paying someone 50 euro for a gloryfied typing service.

However, that said, it is a good thing to have someone else who knows what they are doing to spruce it up. I got mine spruced up last December and finally got the job I wanted a couple of months ago. For me, it was a friend's partner who worked in HR. She knew what she was doing.

As crazy as it sounds there is an art form to making a CV. It is your first point of contact with an employer and you got to sell yourself in seconds. There is also an art form to "padding" or "blowing it out".

You'd be better off asking questions on here on how to improve it first.

Jim2007 wrote: »

And passing of a ‘cookie cutter’ CV as your own work makes a good impression how exactly? A nicely formatted cookie cutter resume might get me to read the first few paragraphs before I realize what it is and toss it. I want to know the capabilities of the person I’m actually going to interview not the skills of the person at the agency who did the cookie cutting, nor a person’s abilities to fake it.

Yes I agree, but a well presented generic CV is better than a poorly prepared one. At least the person appreciated the importance of using a cookie cutter to make their CV look professional. But I take your point, there is occasionally a stark contrast between the CV and cover letter received from the same applicant.

Dav010 wrote: »

I strongly disagree with this post.

As a business owner and employer of 25 years, a good CV is the first opportunity the applicant gets to make a good impression. We receive far more CVs than we can interview so there has to be some filter applied to reduce the number to be called. Personally, I don’t bother reading badly formatted/written CVs, they go in the bin. The reason is, the applicant has the time to prepare a good CV. There have been numerous threads on this subject, most managers/recruiters on here post the same thing, a poorly presented CV is discarded.

Op, get help if you need it, you won’t get a second chance to make that first impression in a lot of work places. That applies not just to niche industries or well paid jobs.

I look at CVs myself on a daily basis. I'd consider appropriate paragraphing, correct spelling, correct titling and sub titling to be part of basic literacy.

The vast majority of CV writing services aren't bespoke services writing your CV from the ground up, they're just lobbing it into their generic template.

I agree 100% that you only get one first impression, and I've lobbed plenty of CVs in the bin for the errors you highlighted, but a simple, clean format with pertinent information on your responsibilities and results of your efforts will be better than a generic template put together by someone who has never actually hired someone, or worked in the industry in question.