From the first time that I connected with him, this colleague expressed a desire to attend a top-tier business school one day and has been navigating his career with that in mind. Here, he asks for my opinion of online services where a person/company will review a person’s resume and provide feedback/rewriting for a fee. Given that I used to do that sort of thing as a side hustle, I definitely had some thoughts about it.
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TS wrote:
Marquis,
Hope everything is good and the new year is treating you well. Just wanted to get your thoughts on these online resume’ review services that seem to be pretty popular now. I don’t know anyone personally who has used one, but it seems every MBA Prep site I come across is selling a resume’ review usually for a few hundred bucks.
Do you have any experience or know of any success stories with these, particularly when targeting top 15 MBA programs? I’m still about a year out from applying to B-School but wanted to start the process of organizing everything soon. I recently purchased your “Top 10 MBA Admissions†manual on Kobo and will probably invest in a physical copy sometime soon as well. Any thoughts you can provide on the matter, or MBA Resume’ Review services in general would be greatly appreciated. I know you’re busy so feel free to reply at your earliest convenience. Thanks so much in advance!
TS
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My response:
Hey TS,
I have a lot of thoughts on these resume review services because I actually used to provide resume review services as a side hustle a few years ago. It looks like you came to the right guy on this topic. 🙂
In short, having a resume review done and updates made to it by an outside consultant can be useful, but it isn’t a certainty. In my experience, many of the folks who offer that service have backgrounds in writing and recruiting, so they can come up with something that is very well-written, which is a plus. The possible downside is that some of those folks don’t have a business background, so they may not be able to effectively communicate the “guts†of your professional and educational experience with the right amount of punch. This risk is somewhat mitigated if you find a resume consultant who comes from more of a business background, but you might have to do some research to find the right person with that sort of foundation.
The key here is to find someone who has the kind of experience/knowledge to really understand what your resume is saying and then convert that into the kind of resume that’ll get you the most bang for your buck (in terms of format, language, areas of emphasis, etc.). A good way to test a prospective resume consultant’s effectiveness would be to ask for before-and-after examples of their work. Anyone who pushes back on that request and still wants you to pay a couple hundred bucks for their service should make alarm bells go off in your mind.
For your situation, you’ll have to consider the fact that what you do is very specific to the insurance industry and, as such, it may be difficult for someone without an understanding of the industry to be able to effectively communicate your experiences. What you’ll need to do find a balance between describing the impact that you had in your role as a Broker without doing so in such detail that non-insurance folks would be confused. Instead of hiring a resume consultant, perhaps you can ask a few people in your office if you can look at their resumes for inspiration on how to build out your own. Then, once you’ve built a version for yourself, you can have some of your non-insurance business professional contacts to give you feedback on it. It may take some time, but it’ll save you a few hundred bucks.
I hope this information is helpful as you think through how to prepare for your MBA applications. Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.
Marquis
RT @marquis930: New blog entry: A few thoughts about resume review services (esp. when targeting top MBA programs); http://t.co/3xw0rSEHxE
@marquis930 good advice ! You should do a post on admissions consultants