DIY Resume or Professional Resume Writer?

{Click here to read the original article on Careerrocketeer.}

If you are driven to being the best in your profession, you possess the ideal combination of experience, knowledge and training, and you’re confident in your ability to complete most projects with relative ease and achieve the desired end results.

Conversely, when you undertake a project without the proper experience, knowledge base and training, more often than not, you’ll make costly errors and the end result is prone to be flawed and will fail to yield the desired results. From personal experience I ask how many of you would attempt to clear a critical virus from your computer on your own. Need I say more!

Based on my experience, writing a branded resume and LinkedIn profile is easy for some and can be detrimental for others. If you are an experienced, skilled and confident wordsmith with a knowledge base and the training to build a Hire Profile and determine what employers really want to read in a resume, and you can select, categorize and articulate complementary skills and achievements and know how to establish a personal brand the final product will not only be outstanding it will stand out. If you don’t have this background, a DIY resume is doomed to be mediocre at best. Nonetheless when I say writing a resume is easy for someone who knows what they are doing, I do not want you to confuse the word easy with effortless, because they’re not one and the same. Most things that we term easy, even for a skilled professional, are far from effortless. Whether you‘re better off doing it yourself or having a professional do it for you comes down to how high or how low you consider the stakes to be if you fail to hit the mark.

To make this clearer for you here are a few examples you can relate to.

1: For a skilled CPA, filing a complex HNW income tax return may be easy. Still it requires an inordinate amount of effort to keep up with the changes in the tax laws, in compiling the proper data, determining which supporting forms the client is required to file and, not withstanding, the inordinate number of billable hours that go into meeting with a client, answering their questions, and time spent actually preparing and reviewing the return.

Having done it many times before, being familiar with similar cases and knowing what must be done makes the job easy for a skilled CPA. However the complexity of the project and the need for perfection requires a tremendous amount of effort on behalf of the preparer to make certain the finished return comes out perfect in every way. This is why most people who have a lot to lose or gain when filing a tax return don’t risk preparing it themselves. Instead they entrust the task to an accounting professional with a proven track record.

2: Next let’s look at an auto mechanic. How many of you feel comfortable changing your car’s oil? How many of you are equally comfortable doing a brake job or tuning up your car? Finally, how many of you feel qualified to rebuild your motor or transmission if that is what is needed to get your car back on the road?

To a truly-skilled mechanic, all these are easy. However the more complex ones require a concerted effort to get it done right. Dare say maybe 40% of us would change our oil and less than 20% would attempt a brake job or tune up on our cars; and I think very few of us would even consider working on the engine or transmission. Universally, I find when it comes to automobiles people leave the work to a professional because they have the know-how to do the job right and we don’t.

I’m not brazen enough to say a resume is the most important component in a successful job search; however, there is a positive and negative consequence attached to the final product. The more professional the resume looks and reads the better your chance is of getting the job you want and speeding up the time to find it.

If you’re trying to decide if you need a professional resume or whether a DIY resume will suffice, consider these two things:

1: What is at stake if you submit a mediocre or sub-par resume? Nothing, a little or a whole lot?

2: Can a professional do a substantially better job than you can, a slightly better job than you can or your work is equal to theirs, and does the quality of the finished product matter to you?

If you think there is little to lose having a passable resume, I suggest you go for it and write your own.

For those of you who would hire an accountant or auto mechanic because they offer better results than you would get alone, I recommend hiring a resume writer.