How Much Time Would You Spend?

Interesting experience this week with a client who signed up for a new resume. We’ll call him Eric.

Eric is a high-level financial services executive who’s currently employed, but looking to make a move. A week after receiving our proprietary questionnaire, Eric called to say he didn’t have the time to complete it and would have to cancel the contract and request a refund.

Now I’m a big advocate of our questionnaire – I think that a successful job search requires some real self-knowledge and that you can only get that by spending some time reflecting on where you’ve been and where you want to go. I don’t believe that a new resume should be the product of a quick phone call with all the work done by someone else. But that said, I can understand that sometimes life circumstances simply get in the way and that you just can’t get up an hour or two early, or give up those weekend plans.

So I offered to skip the worksheets and have one of my writers conduct a phone interview instead. I said we would need about an hour initially and then maybe some follow-ups. Eric thought about it and then said no. He really didn’t know when he could find an hour to talk to someone. Couldn’t I just use his old resume?

Now bear in mind that I would never do this anyway. You don’t pay hundreds of dollars to a service like ours just to have us regurgitate what was on your old resume. But even if I wanted to do it, I couldn’t have. His old resume contained almost no information! Although he runs a major business division within a premier financial institution, his resume looks like it was written by a junior trader.

So I’ve refunded Eric’s money and right now he’s looking for a resume writer who can literally do all the work for him. (If you’re a clairvoyant resume writer who wants to do this, let me know).

Bt seriously folks – how much time have you spent on writing your resume?

Photo by laffy4k.