If you’ve recently inquired about hiring a professional resume writing service for a job search, you’ll know what I’m talking about: Resumes these days are routinely $500-$2000 each. For people who have been writing resumes from left to right for years for jobs they wish they could get, this is an eye opener. Before long, they wonder if it would be a bad idea if they could branch out and write resumes themselves. When you realize that a service or product you knew about all along can end up costing so much, it makes you wonder.

What do they put on it? Does it really give you an advantage to have a professional resume writing service review your case? Or are these services just taking us for a ride, aware of how desperate one can be when out of work? Sure, they might suggest some changes you should make, claim that using one word over another would give you an incomparable advantage, etc. But who is it really to say that they know what they are talking about? Any popular business receives hundreds of resumes every day. Will they pay attention to the subtlety in the choice of the word that the writer of your resume chose?

If you think about it, for anyone out of a job, this whole belief system that there’s some magic ingredient that can be put on your resume that could win you a nod, could be dangerous. People just sit endlessly tweaking what they’ve written, not realizing that a resume isn’t really the main part of getting a job. It’s the interview that does it. So what do professional resume writing services have to say about the nerve they have to charge so much?

For starters, there are professional associations for resume writers. A professional resume writer has to be certified by the National Association of Resume Writers or the Career Management Alliance or any of the other writing bodies. Clearly there is professional skill involved here if you need certification. Some may worry about how honest it is to post a resume that you don’t write yourself. But setting aside the moral issues involved for now and concentrating on the very usefulness of it, writing services say that now that computers kill resumes long before any humans get to them, it’s vital to use the resume equivalent. of search engine optimization. Without your help, they claim, your resume will be deleted before you can have a chance.

Writing services don’t just do resumes: there are services for college admissions essays and even dating site profiles. There is a point at which all this begins to fail. Regardless of what people writing on your resume say about you, if it’s really not something you could have said yourself, the other party will realize that in the first ten minutes they said they wanted to talk to you.